The first public benchmark for construction schedule performance is out. The industry average: 48%.

Every GC running an OAC meeting knows the feeling: the schedule says you're 12 days behind, the owner wants to know if that's bad, and you have nothing to compare it to except your own last three jobs.

Yesterday, Buildots released the first answer to that question that draws on something larger than one firm's project history.

Buildots launched its Intelligence Lab on June 25 — a freely available benchmark platform publishing schedule adherence data aggregated and anonymized from more than 200 global construction projects. The platform compares actual site progress against BIM-planned milestones, tracked through cameras installed at each floor and area of the monitored projects. The result is a schedule adherence index: the share of planned milestones completed on time.

The industry average across those 200+ projects: 48%.

What the sector breakdown shows

The aggregate number masks meaningful variation. The initial release breaks out adherence by building type:

• Healthcare: 65% — the best-performing sector in the dataset. Infection-control requirements and the discipline of working in or adjacent to occupied facilities force tighter trade sequencing and earlier coordination.
• Data centers: ~57% — reflecting the fast-track delivery pressure and tech-sector owner oversight that are standard in hyperscale construction.
• Commercial and industrial: low-to-mid 40s — a wide category, with significant variance within it.
• Education: 39% — lowest in the initial dataset. Projects often have hard school-year deadlines that create front-loaded optimism; when early phases slip, the slippage compounds.

Two ways a PM uses this

The benchmark is useful for different reasons depending on your role in a meeting.

The first use is internal: run your own project's schedule adherence against the sector number and see where you land. If you're running a data-center job and your adherence is tracking at 40%, you're 17 points below comparable projects in the Buildots dataset. That doesn't tell you why, but it tells you you're not at the bad end of "normal" — you're below the pack. Worth a look-ahead review.

The second use is in owner conversations. PMs fielding pressure to cut float or compress a schedule now have something beyond experience to point to. "Healthcare projects at this scale average 65% adherence against BIM milestones — here's where ours is concentrated and where the misses are" is a more grounded conversation than "things always slip in construction." It doesn't guarantee the owner accepts it, but it reframes the discussion as data-supported rather than defensive.

The Intelligence Lab is available free at buildots.com/lab/. Buildots says academics, analysts, and industry professionals can also submit hypotheses for data-driven analysis — meaning you can request whether specific variables (project size, trade mix, phasing approach) correlate with better adherence across the dataset.

What the benchmark can't tell you

Schedule adherence is an output metric. A 48% average tells you milestones are being missed — it says nothing about why.

The underlying causes vary by project and by trade: RFI queues holding up finishes, design changes dropping late, supply-chain delays on long-lead equipment, labor shortages on specific disciplines, coordination failures between mechanical and electrical on shared floors. Buildots' project-level monitoring can identify where slippage concentrates on a given site. The aggregated benchmark cannot.

The sample also has selection bias worth acknowledging. Buildots' customers are projects large enough to warrant the cost of installing a building-wide camera monitoring system — mid-rise and above, hospitals, data centers, major commercial buildings. Small commercial, tenant improvement, and residential work are not represented. If your typical project is a 12,000 SF medical office fitout, the healthcare 65% figure may not be your reference class.

And the index measures time, not cost. A project clearing 48% of BIM milestones can still be 10% under or over budget. Schedule adherence is one input to project health.

Why the absence of this data mattered

For most of construction history, schedule performance data lived in individual PMs' heads or in project management software that never aggregated across firms. Industry "averages" were surveys and estimates. The result: every schedule conversation happened without a shared external reference.

The Intelligence Lab is early — 200+ projects is a starting point, not a census — but it's the first publicly available attempt to build that reference. As the dataset grows across more project types and geographies, sector averages will get more precise. For now, 48% is the number your project compares against. That's more than you had before.

We covered the Shepherd-Brickeye partnership that's starting to move builders' risk pricing based on live project monitoring data in this piece on behavior-based insurance pricing. The common thread: project performance data is starting to matter outside the project.

Forward this to the PM on your team who's still arguing there's no way to benchmark construction performance objectively.

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