Other growth sectors appearing frequently in the ranking include K-12 and higher education campus expansions and facility upgrades as well as new health care centers.

"There's a tremendous amount of work for interiors and fit-outs," Di Filippo says. Turner is doing the $200-million fit-out for Condé Nast in World Trade Center Tower 1. "We're also busy at the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Plaza, Marriott Marquis in Times Square and Brookfield Place in Battery Park City."

Alterations and renovations of existing office space remain the dominant source of office construction spending, according to another recent Building Congress study. It says that such upgrades have made up 70% of office construction spending during the nearly six years that the group has tracked this data.

Also, the study shows, new office construction is on the rise with projects including a 47-story, 1.8-million-sq-ft office tower in the Hudson Yards complex on Manhattan's West Side. As general contractor, Tutor Perini Building Corp. (ranked No. 49) broke ground last year on the concrete superstructure also known as Tower C.

That tower, plus two at the World Trade Center due for completion soon, will help Manhattan add 9 million sq ft of new office space to its inventory between 2013 and 2015, according to the study.

Tech Strides

In New York state, the tech sector is making strides and providing industry work, says Rick Whitney, president and CEO of M+W U.S. (ranked No. 7). "We're seeing growth in the tech clusters—first was Albany, then Utica, then the Buffalo-Rochester area," he says. Highly attractive state tax incentive packages are spurring development, he adds.

"There are dozens of sites around the state, most of them affiliated with universities, [that qualify] for zero tax programs," Whitney says. M+W's largest project to break ground last year was the Technology Development Center, part of computer chip maker GlobalFoundries' multibillion-dollar building program that is under way in Malta, N.Y.

From southern New Jersey to Delaware, a new corridor of large data centers is developing, similar to a steadily increasing nationwide trend, he adds. "We see data projects in New Jersey through several of our clients and large developers that we work with [being announced] in the next 12 to 18 months."

Several ranked firms also report major heavy-industry projects under way. These include Skanska USA (No. 2), which is working in a joint venture with Kiewit (No. 20) to raise the deck of the Bayonne Bridge between Staten Island, N.Y., and Bayonne, N.J.; China Construction America (No. 33), which is working on the Pulaski Skyway renovation project in New Jersey; and J. Fletcher Creamer & Son (No. 14), which has a contract for PSEG's Susquehanna-Roseland transmission line project between New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Despite such huge projects in the sector, however, "there's a lot of uncertainty" hanging over road and bridge work, says Mike Elmendorf, CEO of the Associated General Contractors of America, New York state chapter. "On the highway side, we're facing two things: the Federal Highway Trust Fund, which will be insolvent this summer unless Congress acts—they've got to fix this," he says. Elmendorf also points to state highway spending issues. "The largest expense for the state's dedicated highway and trust fund is debt service—that's not good."

As a result, the outlook for the transportation component is cloudy "because tough decisions on financing need to be made in both the nation's capital and in Albany," he says.