North Carolina Construction News staff writer
The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has released its 2025 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, which evaluates the state of U.S. infrastructure and assigns an overall grade of ‘C.’
This marks an improvement over the ‘C-’ grade given in 2021, reflecting progress sparked by recent legislation. However, the report emphasizes that more work and investment are required to address the challenges stemming from decades of underinvestment and to modernize critical infrastructure such as transportation networks, water systems, the electric grid, and broadband services to meet both current and future needs.
The 2025 grade is the highest ASCE has awarded since the report began in 1998. While the infrastructure improvements funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) passed in 2021 are beginning to show positive effects, ASCE estimates a $3.7 trillion gap between current infrastructure investments and what is needed to bring the nation’s infrastructure up to standard—an increase from the $2.59 trillion gap identified four years ago.
The report underscores the urgent need for lawmakers to sustain federal investment in infrastructure, as well as encourage greater involvement from state and local governments and the private sector. These efforts are crucial to reducing costs for American households and fostering economic growth.
“Every American household or business immediately feels the impact of just one inefficiency or failure in our built environment. However, if we maintain investments, each American household can save $700 per year,” said Darren Olson, Chair of the 2025 report card. Better infrastructure is an efficient investment of taxpayer dollars that results in a stronger economy and prioritizes American jobs, resilience, and connectivity.”
ASCE’s Report Card uses an ‘A’ to ‘F’ grading scale to assess the condition of 18 infrastructure categories, with broadband added as a new category this year. The individual grades in 2025 ranged from a ‘B’ for ports to a ‘D’ for stormwater and transit systems.
While no category received a ‘D-’ for the first time since 1998, nine categories were still graded in the ‘D’ range. However, eight categories—such as dams, hazardous waste, inland waterways, levees, ports, public parks, roads, and transit—showed improvement since the 2021 report.
In contrast, the grades for energy and rail infrastructure declined.