Columbus construction projects, live across Franklin County.

Columbus runs a two-tier AHJ stack: the City of Columbus Department of Building & Zoning Services inside the city limits, and Franklin County for the unincorporated metro plus a roster of suburban building departments — Dublin, Westerville, Hilliard, Gahanna, New Albany. The metro's defining feature in the data is attribution: 94% of active projects carry an identified contractor, which is unusually clean and means you can profile the GC and sub network on a project before you ever pick up the phone.

The single biggest driver is Intel's multi-billion-dollar "Silicon Heartland" semiconductor fabs in New Albany / Licking County, just northeast of the city — and the ecosystem forming around them: chemical and gas suppliers, the New Albany and Hilliard hyperscale data centers (Google, Amazon, Meta), and the Honda–LG Energy Solution EV battery plant down in Jeffersonville (Fayette County). That industrial wave is why HVAC/mechanical and electrical dominate the trade mix — fab and data-center work is mechanical- and power-heavy, and the supplier build-out multiplies it.

Underneath the megaprojects, Columbus has a deep institutional and infill base. Ohio State University drives steady higher-ed permitting; Nationwide Children's Hospital, OhioHealth, and Mount Carmel keep healthcare expansion booking mechanical and plumbing scope; and downtown, the Short North, and Grandview Yard continue to lead multifamily and mixed-use. The Rickenbacker Inland Port anchors a logistics corridor on the south side. The sales teams winning here pick a lane — the Licking County fab ecosystem, suburban data centers, healthcare, or urban multifamily — rather than trying to cover all of Franklin County at once.