Construction companies in San Antonio, Texas: the market in numbers

This page is for anyone looking for San Antonio construction companies: property owners comparing contractors, firms looking for a subcontractor or joint-venture partner, and B2B sellers who supply or serve contractors in Bexar County and the surrounding counties. The figures come from the Census Bureau and the City of San Antonio's own records.

The San Antonio construction market at a glance

County Business Patterns (CBP) counts construction establishments (NAICS 23) for the San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX Metro Area (CBSA 41700). The latest data is for 2023.

Size and location

In bands: 4,204 establishments have 1 to 19 employees (87.8%), 493 have 20 to 99, and 90 sit in the published classes of 100 or more. The 1,000-or-more cell isn't published: the Census Bureau releases a cell only when it holds three or more establishments, and the published classes sum to 4,787, two short of the total.

Bexar County has 63.8% of the establishments and 76.4% of the jobs. Comal County (New Braunfels) is the clear second at 689.

Where the jobs are: heavy civil

The subsector split is what sets San Antonio apart:

Heavy and civil firms are 6.8% of establishments but 31.4% of construction employment, and the 175 utility system contractors average about 100 employees each. In Austin, by comparison, heavy civil is 15% of construction jobs. The Census Bureau flags the heavy civil employment figures as moderately adjusted to protect confidentiality, so treat them as close, not exact.

What CBP doesn't count: it counts locations with paid employees, not companies, so a contractor with yards in San Antonio and New Braunfels counts twice. Self-employed owners without payroll are left out, and so are architects, engineers and suppliers, which sit outside NAICS 23.

Who has to register in San Antonio, and who doesn't

Texas has no state license for general contractors. The City of San Antonio fills part of the gap, but only for residential work:

How to find and vet a San Antonio contractor

1. Search Contractor Connect. The city's Find a Contractor tool searches registered contractors by type of work and shows their tier: Registered Contractor, Registered Contractor Plus (no recent infractions, two city code trainings in the past year) or Premier Contractor (five years' registration plus a residential ICC certification).
2. Check the sanctions report. Canceled and suspended registrations are published in the city's contractor sanctions report, linked from the same page.
3. Verify trade licenses on the TDLR license search and with the Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners.
4. For commercial work, do the checks the city doesn't. Ask for the firm's bonding capacity in writing from its surety, insurance certificates naming you, and three references on similar projects. For public highway work, see whether the firm appears on TxDOT's prequalified contractor list.
5. Confirm the entity is active on the Texas Comptroller's franchise tax account status search.

Permit activity in 2025

The city publishes issued permits on Open Data SA. Our count of permits issued in calendar 2025, from the file downloaded on 26 October 2026:

A multi-building project gets one permit per building, so these are permits, not projects. The file names a primary contact for each permit, usually a person rather than the contracting company, so pair it with Contractor Connect to get company names.

Prospecting San Antonio contractors

Sources for names:

• Contractor Connect for registered residential builders, remodelers and trades.
• TxDOT's prequalified contractor list for highway and heavy civil firms, and the AGC of Texas member directory, the association for highway, heavy and utility contractors.
• ABC South Texas for merit-shop commercial contractors and the Greater San Antonio Builders Association for homebuilders and remodelers.
• The Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce and the San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, both with member directories. greater:SATX, the regional economic development partnership, announces the plant and campus projects that create new construction work.

Who to contact: at the large heavy civil and utility firms, go past the owner to the equipment manager, the safety director and division operations leads, who own the budgets for fleet, tools and training. At the 4,204 establishments with fewer than 20 employees, the owner decides almost everything. Our guide to finding decision makers covers how to get to the right name.

A plan that fits the market:

1. Choose between the two very different markets: residential and remodeling firms (many, small, registered with the city) or heavy civil and utility firms (few, large, visible through TxDOT and AGC).
2. Build the list from the matching source above and remove duplicates and national firms you can't serve.
3. Add size and role data, then find one recent reason to write: a new permit, a TxDOT award, a new yard or a hiring push. Bebop finds companies that match a plain-language description and researches each one, which shortens this step.
4. Write to two people per account and keep the sequence to three or four touches.

Outreach example

Illustrative example. The companies, people and figures are invented.

Mesquite Fleetworks (mesquitefleet.example) sells vehicle tracking and maintenance software priced per vehicle. It targets the metro's 175 utility system contractors. After removing branches of national firms and duplicates, 120 companies remain. With two contacts each (equipment manager and operations VP), that's 240 people. If 5% of accounts reply with interest, that's six meetings; if a third of those run a pilot on an average of 60 vehicles at $30 a vehicle a month, two pilots add $3,600 a month in revenue.

Subject: [company]'s trucks on the [project or corridor] job

Hi [first name],

Utility crews around San Antonio often spread across several counties at once, and most equipment managers I talk to find out a truck missed its service when it breaks down on site.

We help contractors see every vehicle's location and service due date in one place. [A similar contractor] cut [result] within [timeframe].

Would a 15-minute look on [day] be useful, or is fleet tracking already covered?

[Your name]

Fill the proof line only with a real result you have permission to share. More openers are in the cold email templates.

Next step: see how San Antonio compares with the state's other metros in the Texas construction companies market report.