The Federal Bridge Fund Expires in September. The Backlog It Was Built For Is $467 Billion.

Most of the country's 624,167 bridges belong to states, counties, and cities, not to Washington — but federal inspection standards are what tell you whether one is safe, and federal law is what decides whether fixing it is anyone's dedicated job to fund.▸ For nine years, after Congress let the previous bridge program expire in 2012, it wasn't: bridge repairs competed for money against every other paving and transit priority in each state's flexible federal grant. The 2021 infrastructure law restored a bridge-specific fund — the first one since FY2012, per the Congressional Research Service. That fund runs out this fall, and Congress has not finished deciding what replaces it.

Every U.S. bridge gets inspected roughly every two years and rated on a 0-to-9 scale for its deck, superstructure, and substructure.▸ A rating of 4 or below on any of those components makes the whole bridge "poor" — the term federal engineers used to call "structurally deficient." In the 2025 National Bridge Inventory, 41,677 bridges — 6.7% of the inventory — carry that rating, and motorists, school buses, and emergency vehicles cross them 163 million times a day, per ARTBA's analysis of the federal data.

Poor bridges are the acute cases, but they're not the whole backlog.▸ Counting bridges rated poor or fair that need real work — not just routine upkeep — ARTBA counts 220,295 spans needing repair or replacement, over a third of the national inventory, including 74,472 that should be replaced outright rather than patched. Using the average per-bridge repair and replacement costs states report to the U.S. DOT, ARTBA puts the total bill at $467 billion. Separately, the average U.S. bridge is now 47 years old, and roughly 45% have already outlived their 50-year design life, per the American Society of Civil Engineers' 2025 Infrastructure Report Card.

Federal bridge money has been an on-again, off-again proposition for fifteen years.▸ The Highway Bridge Program funded repairs directly until 2012, when MAP-21 let it lapse and rolled bridge-eligible funds into flexible highway grants with no bridge-specific guarantee. The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) restored one: the $27.5 billion Bridge Formula Program ($5.5 billion a year, drawn from the Highway Trust Fund) plus the $12.5-billion-and-growing Bridge Investment Program, a competitive grant fund. Combined, that's $8.65 billion a year in dedicated bridge money — and it runs out with the rest of IIJA on Sept. 30, 2026.

A successor bill exists, but it is not law.▸ The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee advanced the BUILD America 250 Act (H.R. 8870) by a 62-2 vote on May 22, 2026 — a five-year, $580 billion surface transportation package. Its bridge provisions would actually grow the formula side, to $46 billion over FY2027-2031 ($9.2 billion a year, still HTF-funded and assured), per Holland & Knight's analysis of the bill. But it would replace the discretionary Bridge Investment Program with a new $10 billion "Competitive Highway Bridge Program" funded from the General Fund without advance appropriations — meaning, unlike the program it replaces, none of that money is guaranteed until Congress appropriates it year by year. The bill still needs a House floor vote and a Senate companion before Sept. 30. If neither happens in time, the $8.65-billion program lapses with nothing yet in its place.

Bridge condition and crossing figures are ARTBA's analysis of the FHWA National Bridge Inventory dataset downloaded June 24, 2025; the NBI updates continuously as inspections occur, so current totals on FHWA's site may differ slightly from this snapshot. FY2027-2031 funding figures reflect the House committee-passed text of H.R. 8870 as of May 2026 — not enacted law, and subject to change before any final reauthorization.