Balfour Beatty commits to 2,000 new UK jobs as infrastructure pipeline surges
Balfour Beatty plans to grow its UK workforce to 16,000 by end of 2027, adding 2,000 roles — half through apprenticeships and early-career schemes — as a £2.1bn power transmission order book and £6-8bn pipeline drive a 30 per cent headcount rise in four years.
By the end of 2027, Balfour Beatty expects to employ roughly 16,000 people in the UK — a jump of about 2,000 from the 14,000 it had at the close of 2025, prompted by a power transmission order book worth £2.1 billion and a broader pipeline the company puts at £6 billion to £8 billion.
That number tells a longer story than one year’s hiring can explain. At the end of 2023, Balfour Beatty employed 12,200 people in the UK, meaning the projected 16,000 figure represents a workforce expansion of more than 30 per cent across four years.
Group chief executive Philip Hoare framed the announcement in market terms, calling the move ‘a clear vote of confidence in the market’ — and the numbers behind that confidence are concentrated in one subsector. UK power transmission revenue rose 24 per cent in the first half of 2026, according to the company’s own figures, on the back of a £2.1 billion order book and a pipeline that stretches well beyond current contracted work.
The hiring plan is also partly a training plan. About 1,000 of the 2,000 new roles will be filled through apprenticeships, graduate schemes, internships, and trainee positions — a deliberate attempt to grow the workforce while also growing the people inside it. The remaining thousand are experienced hires, which in the current construction labour market is a different kind of challenge entirely.
Taken together, the picture is of one of the UK’s largest contractors scaling up hard in response to a specific and measurable surge in infrastructure demand. A four-year headcount increase of 30 per cent for a company this size is not a tweak at the margins — it is a bet that the power transmission and wider infrastructure pipeline the company has identified will keep materialising at something like the pace it currently projects.