Whenever anything or anyone turns 100, it's a big deal. With a base year of 1913, ENR's cost indexes have joined that category after a century of measuring construction cost fluctuations and reflecting the industry's most important trends. The use of the cost indexes has grown almost as dramatically as the indexes themselves.They captured, for example, the explosion in union wages that caused costs to jump in the 1970s, and they tracked the record hike in steel prices and its effects on overall construction costs in 2004.
Over the years, ENR has labored to ensure the indexes are accurate, objective, transparent and flexible so that they can serve as a benchmark to assess the health of the construction industry's most important sectors. This includes deep-dive analysis that interprets the numbers and tells readers the stories behind them.