Strabag, Hochtief and Besix Want Poland's €1.2 Billion Airport Terminal. Poland Wrote the Tender So a Local Firm Leads Every Bid

Five consortia are now in the final round of bidding to build the main passenger terminal at Poland's new central airport, a single building worth more than PLN 5bn (about €1.2bn, or US$1.3bn). Europe's biggest contractors are all in the room: Strabag, Hochtief, Porr and Belgium's Besix, alongside Budimex, the Polish builder whose largest shareholder is Spain's Ferrovial. Yet not one of them is bidding as a foreign prime. Every one of the five shortlisted teams is led by a Polish-registered company, and that is by design.

The five teams now in binding-bid talks

Centralny Port Komunikacyjny (CPK), the state company building the airport 50km west of Warsaw, invited the five shortlisted consortia to submit binding commercial and technical bids in July 2026, giving them a 60-day window, with the contract award expected around the turn of 2026/27 (Regional Gateway; Construction Briefing). Piling for the foundations starts this year, and the main terminal is due to complete by the end of 2031, ahead of a 2032 opening.

The line-up, confirmed by CPK, pairs Polish leaders with international partners (Airport Industry-News, 29 August 2025): Mirbud heads an all-Polish team; Polimex Mostostal leads with Hochtief Polska and Hochtief Infrastructure of Germany; Budimex leads with Strabag's Polish arm; NDI leads with Besix of Belgium; and PORR's Polish subsidiary leads with Doraco. Sixteen firms in total, fourteen of them Polish. The terminal itself, designed by Foster + Partners and Buro Happold, will cover roughly 450,000 sq m and open with capacity for 34 million passengers a year, rising to 44 million.

A tender written to build a Polish champion

The bidding rules read like industrial policy. To qualify, a contractor had to show annual revenue of about PLN 4bn (US$1bn) in each of the last four years, occupancy permits obtained in Poland or the wider EU/EFTA for aviation or large non-residential buildings, and a contract director, construction manager and BIM coordinator who speak Polish well enough to run the job. Extra points go to teams with airport-terminal experience inside Poland.

CPK chief executive Filip Czernicki has been candid about the goal. The approach, he said, can offer Polish companies "an opportunity to replicate a scenario similar to that seen in Spain, which, thanks to significant infrastructure investments partly funded by the EU, has built a strong construction sector" (Passenger Terminal Today, 3 June 2025). Keep the public money, the tax and the jobs at home, and use the airport to grow a domestic contracting industry. The foreign majors have read the signal and localised: Hochtief bids through its Polish and German units under Polimex Mostostal, Strabag through its Polish company under Budimex, Besix under NDI, and Austria's Porr through its own Polish subsidiary.

Budimex already poured the first contract

One package is already let. Budimex won the terminal's deep-foundation works with the lowest of six bids, at nearly PLN 146m gross (about €34m), after CPK opened that tender on 12 December 2025 and closed it on 20 February 2026 (Port Polska; New Civil Engineer, 2 April 2026). The job covers more than 8,194 piles and columns between 9 and 30 metres deep, starts on site in September 2026 and finishes in late 2027. Budimex is the thesis in one company: a Polish national champion whose largest shareholder is Spain's Ferrovial, the very market Poland now wants to copy.

Why it matters beyond Warsaw

CPK plans to launch tenders worth more than PLN 40bn (around US$10bn) across the airport, high-speed rail and roads in 2026, the largest procurement push in the project's history (CPK/Port Polska; Aviation Week). The terminal is the template for how that money gets spent: a local prime, local content and local site leadership, with foreign know-how riding in the passenger seat. For Europe's big contractors, the EU-funded pipeline in Central and Eastern Europe is enormous but increasingly gated on localisation, and a fly-in bid team no longer clears the bar. For Polish and CEE builders, CPK is a chance to graduate into a durable, exporting industry, exactly as EU-funded roads and rail did for Spain's majors a generation ago. The catch is competition: write a tender tightly enough around local capacity and the field thins, which can lift the price. The award at the turn of 2026/27 will show whether five Polish-led teams produce a keen number or a comfortable one, and every sponsor from Bucharest to Prague will be reading the result.