ASCE released its 2025 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure this week.
The cumulative GPA for America’s infrastructure was a C, the highest mark since ASCE started releasing report cards in 1998.
Beyond the top-line grade, the complete report card provides a treasure trove of information about America’s infrastructure – grades across 18 infrastructure sectors and recommendations on how to improve that GPA and make infrastructure more resilient.
The report card is available as a free download – both as a complete report and the executive summary. However, as you prepare to deep-dive into all that good information, here is a more bite-sized list of five key takeaways from ASCE’s 2025 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure.
Investment matters
This year’s report card is ASCE’s first since the signing of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in November 2021.
The all-time best C cumulative grade is a good indicator that the $1.2 trillion investment in the nation’s infrastructure has already made a positive difference.
Additionally, eight individual report card categories improved since the 2021 assessment and seven more maintained their grade levels.
“We worked really hard to get IIJA passed,” said Greg DiLoreto, a longtime member of ASCE’s Committee on America’s Infrastructure, which developed the report card. “We spent the last 20 years working on it. And clearly, you can see the benefits, particularly in several areas, transportation being the main one. Without IIJA, it’s pretty convincing that we would not have raised the grades.
“The important thing to remember is not just that we secured that funding but that we continue to get it. Because if we don’t, we’ll most likely fall back to where we were before. The federal government is an important partner in funding our infrastructure.”
Playing the long game
While the C grade for America’s infrastructure marks a 27-year high, it still isn’t exactly a grade covered in glory. It also marks just a slight uptick from the C- on the 2021 report card. Nine of the 18 categories earned grades in the D or D+ range.
So why hasn’t $1.2 trillion moved the needle even more?
Well, in short, these things take time.
“It takes a while to get these projects from a planning stage or even an engineering stage to actually constructed, where their impacts are being felt by the public,” said Darren Olson, chair of the Committee on America’s Infrastructure.
“I think we’ve set ourselves up fairly well to hopefully continue this trajectory upward with this funding that we’ve received. But there just simply weren’t enough projects that have been constructed and not enough metrics out there on projects that had been constructed to justify raising the grades in a lot of the categories.”
The gap persists
There remains much work to do.
The IIJA funding authorization expires next year. And even extending that investment beyond 2026 at the same levels wouldn’t be enough. The 2025 report card estimates that $9.1 trillion in investment is required to bring infrastructure in all 18 categories up to a state of good repair.
“The investment we received from IIJA was tremendous,” said 2025 ASCE President Feniosky A. Peña-Mora. “But that money only covered part of the work that needed to be done.
“And the costs have increased. When you invest to bring infrastructure into a state of good repair, you’ve reduced the cost of maintaining that infrastructure. However, we are coming back from years of no investment, years of deterioration. So our costs continue to increase, and we have to continue investing to close that gap.”
Broadband is infrastructure
Reflecting the digital world of 2025, the report card added a new category: broadband.
It debuted with a C+ grade. Despite recent investments from the federal government and the private sector, 12.7 million American households still lack a broadband subscription at home or on a mobile device.
“Broadband is so important,” said Ana Tijerina Esquino, a member of the Committee on America’s Infrastructure. “Especially in the modern world, it is hard to do anything without the internet. So when we have disparate access to the internet, it means that we have disparate opportunities for people.
“It is also important for a lot of our infrastructure systems that rely on the internet for their operations and maintenance in response to disasters. Honestly, the importance of broadband can’t be overstated.”
There are solutions
All the various grades in need of improvement risk painting a bleak picture. Yes, there are challenges ahead, but there are also solutions.
The report card concisely outlines a way forward. Three recommended steps to help close the funding gap:
- Sustain investment
- Prioritize resilience
- Advance forward-thinking policies and innovation
“What we’ve shown is that when we invest, our nation’s infrastructure improves,” Olson said. “And that leads to families saving money and a more efficient economy. I believe lawmakers see that.
“The next recommendation is resilient infrastructure. We’ve seen the results of not building resilient infrastructure. And too many times, that’s in the headlines. So what we’d like to see is a discussion about building resilient infrastructure, so that the headlines are about how that infrastructure withstood the next hurricane.
“And finally, innovation is critical. Whether it’s policies or permitting or new technologies, I believe civil engineers are on the forefront of being able to use those innovations to help our nation’s infrastructure.”
Learn more about the 2025 Report Card for America's Infrastructure.
