Florida Marine Construction Bid Prices, 2020–2026
Every bidder's unit price on floating docks, gangways, fixed platforms, boat ramps, steel sheet pile, bulkheads and fender systems, extracted from FDOT's itemized bid tabulations. Public record, machine-readable, cited to the PDF.
Key findings
- In FDOT letting E4Y47 (Broward County, opened July 10, 2026), six bidders priced 4,000 square feet of aluminum floating dock between $110 and $300 per square foot; the gangway line ran $75 to $300 per square foot.
- Across 79 FDOT lettings from 2020 to 2026, 459 bidder prices for steel sheet pile have a median of $50 per square foot (range $0.01 to $483; the bottom of the range is penny bids on temporary sheet pile, which bidders use to shift money between items).
- Bulkhead work appears in 9 lettings at 42 bidder prices per linear foot, $48 to $1,219, median $248.
- Fender system items appear in 9 lettings (58 bidder prices).
- Floating dock, gangway and fixed platform pay items (FDOT 751-series) appear in exactly one letting in the entire harvest. Dock work bids through counties, cities, ports and FWC boat-ramp programs, not the DOT.
What is in the dataset
One row per letting, pay item and bidder: 962 rows covering 214 pay items across 95 FDOT lettings between 2020-01-16 and 2026-07-16. Each row carries the bidder's unit price and extended amount, the bidder's rank and total bid on the contract, the item code and description exactly as FDOT printed them, the plan quantity and unit, our category label, and the URL of the tabulation PDF the row was read from. Nothing is modelled: if a number is here, a bidder wrote it on a bid form and FDOT published it.
| Category | Unit | Lettings | Items | Bidder prices | Min | Median | Max | Years |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Floating dock | SF | 1 | 1 | 6 | $110 | $240 | $300 | 2026–2026 |
| Gangway | SF | 1 | 1 | 6 | $75 | $166 | $300 | 2026–2026 |
| Fixed platform | SF | 1 | 1 | 6 | $78.17 | $140 | $275 | 2026–2026 |
| Steel sheet pile | LF | 5 | 5 | 25 | $172 | $450 | $880 | 2021–2022 |
| Steel sheet pile | SF | 79 | 103 | 459 | $0.01 | $50 | $483 | 2020–2026 |
| Bulkhead | CY | 32 | 34 | 145 | $0.01 | $1,680 | $16,975 | 2020–2025 |
| Bulkhead | LB | 29 | 30 | 143 | $0.01 | $2 | $41 | 2020–2025 |
| Bulkhead | LF | 9 | 9 | 42 | $48 | $248 | $1,219 | 2020–2025 |
| Bulkhead | SF | 4 | 4 | 17 | $28 | $85 | $280 | 2020–2025 |
| Fender system | LF | 5 | 5 | 10 | $710 | $924 | $3,200 | 2021–2026 |
| Fender system | MB | 6 | 11 | 48 | $12,000 | $34,914 | $97,000 | 2020–2026 |
| Seawall | CY | 1 | 1 | 5 | $1,823 | $3,395 | $4,825 | 2025–2025 |
| Other marine (751-series, mooring, dolphins) | LF | 1 | 1 | 4 | $59.53 | $115 | $200 | 2021–2021 |
Medians are across bidder prices, not across lettings, so a six-bidder letting weighs six times a one-bidder letting. Lump-sum items are excluded from the statistics and flagged in the file. Prices are as bid, unadjusted for date; aluminum and steel moved a long way between 2020 and 2026, so compare within a year before comparing across years.
The floating dock letting, line by line
FDOT contract E4Y47, District 4, Broward County, opened July 10, 2026: boat-ramp improvements along Alligator Alley including 4,000 SF of floating dock, 1,370 SF of gangway and 800 SF of fixed platform. Six pre-qualified contractors bid. This is the table behind our floating dock cost analysis.
| Item | Quantity | Bidder (rank on total bid) | Unit price | Extension |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FLOATING DOCK | 4,000 SF | 1. West Construction, Inc. | $110 | $440,000 |
| FLOATING DOCK | 4,000 SF | 2. Jones Benitez Corporation | $230 | $920,000 |
| FLOATING DOCK | 4,000 SF | 3. Florida Engineering & Development Corp | $251 | $1,002,160 |
| FLOATING DOCK | 4,000 SF | 4. General Asphalt Company, Llc | $204 | $816,960 |
| FLOATING DOCK | 4,000 SF | 5. Lambert Bros., Inc. | $300 | $1,200,000 |
| FLOATING DOCK | 4,000 SF | 6. Southern Road & Bridge, Llc | $300 | $1,200,000 |
| GANGWAY | 1,370 SF | 1. West Construction, Inc. | $75 | $102,750 |
| GANGWAY | 1,370 SF | 2. Jones Benitez Corporation | $180 | $246,600 |
| GANGWAY | 1,370 SF | 3. Florida Engineering & Development Corp | $151 | $207,391 |
| GANGWAY | 1,370 SF | 4. General Asphalt Company, Llc | $204 | $279,809 |
| GANGWAY | 1,370 SF | 5. Lambert Bros., Inc. | $150 | $205,500 |
| GANGWAY | 1,370 SF | 6. Southern Road & Bridge, Llc | $300 | $411,000 |
| FIXED PLATFORM | 800 SF | 1. West Construction, Inc. | $80 | $64,000 |
| FIXED PLATFORM | 800 SF | 2. Jones Benitez Corporation | $140 | $112,000 |
| FIXED PLATFORM | 800 SF | 3. Florida Engineering & Development Corp | $78.17 | $62,536 |
| FIXED PLATFORM | 800 SF | 4. General Asphalt Company, Llc | $204 | $163,392 |
| FIXED PLATFORM | 800 SF | 5. Lambert Bros., Inc. | $140 | $112,000 |
| FIXED PLATFORM | 800 SF | 6. Southern Road & Bridge, Llc | $275 | $220,000 |
Method and provenance
FDOT publishes an itemized bid tabulation for every letting: a Vendor Ranking page listing each bidder's total, then the tabulation proper with each bidder's unit price and extension on every pay item. We harvested the central-office tabulations for 2020–2025 from FDOT's Cerberus file share and the district tabulations from FDOT's district letting pages, 1,759 PDFs in all, then parsed every tabulation that contains a marine or marine-adjacent pay item. The parser reads the Vendor Ranking page for bidder names and totals, reads each tabulation block for line number, item code, quantity, unit and every bidder's unit price and extension, merges the blocks (FDOT prints three bidders per page block), and classifies items by description. The scripts are in the GitHub repository; the harvest and parse were re-run on 2026-09-06.
Validation: the E4Y47 rows were checked by hand against the PDF before publication, including the winning bidder's position on each of the three marine items. Vendor names are as printed by FDOT. Categories are ours; the rules are in the data dictionary.
Known limitations
- Prices are as bid, not as awarded or as built, and not adjusted for date or material-price era.
- The 751-series dock, gangway and platform items appear in exactly one letting; treat the floating dock band as an exhibit with n=6, not a market survey.
- Sheet pile prices mix temporary and permanent items and roadway, bridge and marine contexts; the item description distinguishes them.
- Rows can carry fewer bidders than the Vendor Ranking page when a bidder was non-responsive and omitted from the tabulation.
How to cite
The DOI above is this release. To cite the dataset in general, so the reference always resolves to the newest version, use https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22636308.
License: CC BY 4.0. Attribute Mavlon as the compiler and FDOT as the source. Corrections and additions: atishay@mavlon.co. Also available on GitHub and Kaggle.
Related
- FDOT Bid Tabulations Index: every tabulation these prices were read from, with links
- Floating Dock Cost Per Square Foot: What Six Real Bids Reveal
- Marine Construction Bids: How to Find Dock and Ramp Work
- Quoting Custom Gangways and Docks: The Hard Part
- Dock Float Calculator and ADA Gangway Slope Calculator
Changelog
v1.0.0, 2026-09-06. First release: 962 price rows from 95 FDOT lettings, 2020-01-16 to 2026-07-16; index of 1,759 tabulations.