USDOT Awards $1.74 Billion in BUILD Grants With Roads and Bridges Taking the Largest Share
The U.S. Department of Transportation awarded nearly $1.74 billion in BUILD grants to 127 transportation projects across all 50 states, with roughly 77% of the funding directed toward road and bridge work.
On July 7, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced its FY2026 selections for the BUILD grant program, awarding nearly $1.74 billion to 127 projects spread across all 50 states, plus Washington D.C., American Samoa, Guam, and Puerto Rico. The program’s statutory goal is to fund projects with national or regional significance, and this year’s distribution shows a clear emphasis on surface transportation infrastructure.
Road and bridge work captured the overwhelming majority of the funding: approximately $1.33 billion, or about 77% of the total pool. The remaining roughly $400 million was divided among transit ($169.9 million), maritime ($136.8 million), rail ($87.7 million), and aviation ($11.6 million). That split reflects both the sheer scale of road and bridge maintenance needs across the country and the political economy of a program that members of Congress tend to experience through ribbon-cuttings in their districts.
Texas received the largest aggregate share of any state at approximately $105 million, a figure that reflects both the state’s geographic size and its growing infrastructure demands. The per-state distribution otherwise varied widely, with rural and urban projects competing in the same pool for a finite amount of discretionary funding.
The BUILD program — formally the Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development program — has always operated as something of a hybrid: a merit-based competition in theory, with projects evaluated on criteria like safety, economic competitiveness, and environmental sustainability, but also a vehicle for direct federal investment that members of Congress can point to. The 2026 awards continue that pattern, with the 77% road-and-bridge share suggesting that traditional infrastructure categories still dominate even as the program’s statutory criteria nominally favor multimodal and innovative projects.
The maritime and rail allocations, while smaller, include some of the more technically complex projects in the portfolio — ports and freight corridors that don’t generate the same visibility as a bridge replacement but often carry significant national freight volumes. The aviation category, at $11.6 million, is essentially a rounding error in the total, reflecting the fact that most airport capital needs flow through separate FAA programs rather than BUILD.
For the 127 selected projects, the announcement means moving into final design and construction. For the applicants that weren’t selected — and there are always more qualified projects than available dollars — the July 7 announcement is the end of a process that began with pre-application submissions months earlier. The program’s competitive nature means most states will see some funding, but the concentration in road and bridge work suggests that the infrastructure priorities reflected in this year’s awards are, in the aggregate, fairly traditional ones.