René Muschter
Research Expert covering Industry & Mobility
Infrastructure in the United States - statistics & facts
Given the essential role of infrastructure in the economy, but also in individuals’ lives, spending on its construction and maintenance made up a big share of the construction industry in the United States. Power and transport infrastructure were some of the largest segments in terms of construction spending in 2024. For example, public spending on highways and streets amounted to 143 billion U.S. dollars that year. Those amounts were not just headed to the creation of new roads, but also to the repair and maintenance of already existing ones. California, Rhode Island, Nebraska, and New York were the U.S. states with the highest shares of urban highways with poor pavement, which will need to be repaired in the coming years. Meanwhile, the state of urban roads in DC and Puerto Rico was even worse.
Although the investment in infrastructure has been growing at a fast pace in the past few years, those investment levels may need to continue to solve challenges, including the state of disrepair of certain types of infrastructure and the need to transition to cleaner energy.
Does the U.S. invest enough in its transport infrastructure?
The spending on highway, street construction, and other transportation projects rose from 137 billion U.S. dollars in 2015 to 212 billion U.S. dollars in 2024, making it one of the types of infrastructure in the U.S. that increased the most in the past decade. Those figures, which were already high in absolute terms, were expected to keep increasing, with forecasts indicating that spending on new road construction would reach approximately 175 billion U.S. dollars by 2028. However, in relative terms, the United States was one of the developed countries with the lowest levels of investment in inland transportation infrastructure, with that segment only making up 0.5 percent of its GDP in 2021, while in 2022, those figures amounted to 1.56 percent of Australia's GDP and one percent of the Netherlands' GDP.Power infrastructure for a lower-carbon economy
In 2024, power construction spending in the U.S. was roughly 148 billion U.S. dollars. Despite the negative views of the first and second Trump Administration on clean energy, investment in renewable energy has been growing in the past years. Renewables made up 23 percent of electricity generation in the country, which was a much higher share than a decade earlier, while the role of coal has decreased rapidly. However, the electricity generated from natural gas has also risen considerably in the past few years. Apart from that investment in sources of renewable energy, the electricity grid is also necessary for a transition to a lower-emission economy. Investing in electric transmission projects to ensure that electricity grids are well connected is crucial. Even if solar or wind power plants are not generating electricity in a given area, transmission lines may be able to provide that renewable energy from other regions where those plants are functioning. Thus, smart grids could also be an important tool in our path toward decarbonization, as they allow distributing electricity even more efficiently.Although the investment in infrastructure has been growing at a fast pace in the past few years, those investment levels may need to continue to solve challenges, including the state of disrepair of certain types of infrastructure and the need to transition to cleaner energy.
