Ferrovial Put 47.9% of Its Record €18 Billion Order Book Into North America. US Construction Is Shrinking 3.2% a Year

Two numbers from the same US Census Bureau release, published on 3 August 2026, describe two different countries. Total American construction spending fell 3.2% against June 2025. Data centre construction rose 46%. What a European contractor believes about the American market now depends almost entirely on which of those two numbers its order book is attached to.

The average has stopped meaning anything

Associated Builders and Contractors put its Construction Backlog Indicator at 8.8 months for June 2026, from a survey run between 22 June and 8 July. Split that number and the average dissolves. The 13% of ABC members under contract on data centre work carry 11.0 months of backlog. The 87% that are not carry 8.5 months. Two and a half months of forward visibility separate two halves of the same economy, and no headline statistic reports it.

Composition tells the same story. ABC chief economist Anirban Basu notes that private nonresidential spending peaked at $806.1 billion on a seasonally adjusted annual rate in April 2025 and has expanded only three times in the 14 months since. Census figures for May 2026 put manufacturing construction at $174.8 billion SAAR, down 21.9% year on year as the CHIPS and IRA factory wave rolls off. Commercial fell 6.0% and lodging 10.7%. Private office rose. That last line is doing something strange: the Census Bureau counts data centres inside private office, and by April 2026 data centres reached $50.7 billion SAAR against $43.8 billion for actual offices. The office category is now mostly not offices.

The deadline eight weeks out

Highway and street was the one large public category still growing, at $151.7 billion SAAR in May, up 3.0% on the year. It is also the category with a legislative expiry date. The surface transportation programmes authorised under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act lapse on 30 September 2026.

"While data centers and a handful of other segments remain bright spots, the largest public category — highway construction — is at risk of a sharp decrease if Congress fails to renew federal funding before the current law expires at the end of next month," said Macrina Wilkins, director of market insights at the Associated General Contractors of America, on 3 August 2026.

The arithmetic behind the renewal is worse than the deadline. Congressional Research Service analysis puts the gap between Highway Trust Fund revenues and outlays at $166 billion for a five-year reauthorisation starting in FY2027, and $199 billion over six years. The fund balance at expiry is projected at roughly $45 billion, about seven months of average outlays. Whatever Congress passes, the trust fund cannot carry the current run rate without new revenue or another transfer from the general fund.

Project directors will recognise the mechanism, because the same one governs every EU programming-period transition. Nothing gets cancelled. State DOT lettings slip a quarter, then two, while agencies wait to see what they are allowed to obligate. The work reappears later at a different cost base, and the contractor carries the standing cost of a crew hired for a programme that paused.

Which half the Europeans bought

Ferrovial reported a record construction order book of about €18 billion for the first half of 2026, with North America at 47.9% of it, ahead of Poland at 22.9%, Spain at 14.0% and the UK at 10.8%. Its US civils arm Webber grew like-for-like revenue 24.2% and reached a 3.4% adjusted EBIT margin. That is a good result, earned in the thinner half of the split, and it is weighted towards publicly funded highway and civil work.

Skanska sits on the other side of the line. Its second quarter brought a record SEK 68 billion of order bookings and an all-time-high backlog near SEK 300 billion, with data centres running at roughly 10% of that backlog. The tickets arrive steadily: a supplemental Georgia data centre contract worth USD 255 million booked into second-quarter order bookings, a Virginia job at USD 94 million. HOCHTIEF runs the same exposure through Turner, and is now importing the model back into Europe, with a Turner and HOCHTIEF team building a 36 MW data centre for NTT in Berlin and first halls due in 2028.

None of this is a warning about America. It is a warning about how order books are read. A record backlog says very little until you know how much of it depends on one client type, one asset class and one funding instrument.

Europe has its own 30 September

The Recovery and Resilience Facility requires member states to complete every milestone and target by 31 August 2026, submit final payment requests by 30 September 2026, and receive disbursement by 31 December 2026. There is no extension. Any European contractor holding RRF-funded work is carrying a version of the risk the American highway market is carrying, on almost the same calendar, and most are reporting it inside a single order-book number.

The useful discipline this autumn is disaggregation rather than forecasting. Lenders and boards should be asking contractors to split backlog by funding source and client type before approving a capacity or hiring plan, and contractors should be doing it before they are asked. Two markets moving in opposite directions inside one reported figure is exactly how a record order book turns into a bad year.