Seven times the money, a third as many newcomers

The finding that spoils the headline

A collapsing newcomer share reads like a cartel forming. It is not what the record shows. If a handful of firms were taking over, the combined share of the ten largest would climb. It fell — from 20.53% to 16.02%. Both things are true at once, and together they describe something more specific than a takeover: the same broad set of incumbents kept circulating the work among themselves, and almost nobody new got in.

That is a harder sentence to shout, and a more useful one to act on. A market that is concentrating can be broken up. A market that has simply stopped admitting entrants is a question about prequalification, bonding, and who is able to bid at all.

Where the money went

Award value by region across the whole period, against a national total of ₱1.59T. This is geography, and nothing more should be read into it: a region can lead this table because it floods.

Region III (Central Luzon)

₱267.14B · 16.8%

National Capital Region

₱157.85B · 10.0%

Region V (Bicol)

₱154.28B · 9.7%

What this has to do with the budget in front of Congress

Everything above is contracts already awarded. The proposal still open is the other end of the same pipe: Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) is asking for ₱643.95B in FY2027, +21.3% against the ₱530.90B it was given for FY2026. An appropriation is not a contract and a contract is not a finished structure — but the appropriation is the only one of the three a member of the public can still speak to before it is decided.

What these numbers are not

• They are awards, not spending. The record carries contract award value, not money disbursed. A contract can be awarded, paid in part, or never built, and nothing here distinguishes those.
• They are not ours. Every other figure on this site is computed at render time from the budget API. These were computed by Paper Trail PH from the DPWH transparency data, published by BetterGov.PH. We checked each one against that project’s published outputs and the code that produced them; we have not re-derived them from the source dataset, because it is unreachable from where this was written.
• 2025 is a partial year. It holds 3,051 contracts against 5,074 in 2024, which is why the 7.0× above is measured to 2024 and not past it.
• The source is the audited party’s own record. DPWH publishes it. A project that was paid for and never built appears in it as completed, so no absence here is evidence of anything.
• No firm is named on this page. The underlying analysis goes considerably further, including statistical guesses about which companies may be linked. Those are screening indicators, not findings, and they are not this site’s to publish.

Go to the source

• Paper Trail PH: the analysis these figures come from, by xmpuspus. It treats every contract and partnership as a dated event, which is how the trend above is visible at all. It carries considerably more than we have reproduced.
• DPWH transparency data, published by BetterGov.PH: the underlying contract record, CC0 1.0 Universal. Free to reuse, including commercially, with no attribution required — we credit it anyway.
• PCIJ’s flood-control document set: the SEC incorporation papers and information sheets for 24 contractors, obtained and redacted by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. Linked, not rehosted.