Three people in jeans, orange safety vests, and white hard hats work under lights at night to repair a large hole in a road. Two front-loader trucks are parked nearby, one behind the workers and another at left. Additional cracks in the pavement are shown in close-up in the foreground.
State and local investments in roadways, including new construction and repairs to existing roads and bridges, have decreased over time. One result: Future generations will inherit a growing repair bill and worsening infrastructure.
📉 Between 1999 and 2023, real infrastructure investments (adjusted for inflation and rising construction costs) declined, even as overall nominal spending increased.
📈 The cost of depreciation—think normal wear and tear—rose from $57 billion to $73 billion in the same period.
💵 In 2023 alone, states and local governments spent about $5 billion less on maintaining roadways than what was needed to keep up with depreciation—contributing to an accumulating backlog of $105 billion.
Policymakers and researchers need better data to track maintenance needs and guide budget planning to keep roads safe and avoid an ever-growing shortfall.
Are states investing enough in roads and bridges to prevent them from falling apart and to avoid leaving future generations on the hook for a costly repair bill? Historically, a lack of consistent information on the condition and needs of this infrastructure in states has limited policymakers’ ability to answer this question, prevented governments from making fully informed investment decisions to address maintenance backlogs, and hindered public accountability and transparency about whether decisions are fiscally sustainable
With these limitations in mind, The Pew Charitable Trusts examined data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) to estimate state and local deferred maintenance backlogs for roadways from 1999 through 2023.2 For the purposes of this analysis, “roadways” refers to state and locally owned roads, bridges, and related structures and assets, or what the BEA data categorizes as “highways and streets.”
The analysis shows that during that period, state and local governments fell short of the investments needed to maintain the value of their roadways by $105 billion. Over the first two decades of the 21st century, real investments in state and local roads and bridges fell, and depreciation—the annual decline in the value of infrastructure assets from wear and tear, damage, and age—outpaced spending on preservation, rehabilitation, and repair.3
This brief explores these national findings, which, although they cannot answer questions about individual state performance, highlight the broader roadway-related challenges facing state and local governments, help policymakers understand the scale and scope of needed investments, and underscore the importance of more consistent and detailed data and reporting.
In 1999, state and local governments spent $50 billion on roadways, including for repairs to existing roads and bridges and for new construction. (See Figure 1.) By 2023, that spending had increased to $125 billion, but after adjusting for rising construction costs and other inflationary pressures, the real value of those investments, also called the “real gross investments,” declined. The BEA normalizes investments in infrastructure across years to present a “constant price” based on 2017 costs.4 The $50 billion spent in 1999 is equivalent to $112 billion in 2017 road and bridge construction costs. So, although state and local investments rose from $96 billion in 2017 to $125 billion six years later, the 2023 figure would cover only about $94 billion worth of new highway projects and needed maintenance and repairs based on 2017 prices. As a result, despite the higher spending, the real gross investments decreased over time.
Despite the decline in real investments, the value of state and local roadways still increased by about $791 billion in real terms from 1999 to 2023. This rise in asset value led to higher maintenance costs, with depreciation growing from about $57 billion in 1999 to $73 billion in 2023. (See Figure 2.) This trend underscores the increasing financial resources required to preserve and maintain roadway assets over time.
The change in value of state and local roadways in a given year is represented by “net investment,” which is calculated by subtracting states’ estimated depreciation from their annual real gross investments. From 1999 through 2003, net investment in state and local highways averaged $57.5 billion annually, but over the ensuing 20 years, it dropped to less than $25 billion annually. This decline resulted from the combination of increased annual depreciation driven by the expansion of highway infrastructure and shrinking total investments, especially after 2003.
Although total state and local investments exceeded annual depreciation during the study period, as demonstrated by the fact that net investment remained positive, not all of this spending is directed toward preserving existing roads and bridges. New roads and bridges must also be built, and every dollar spent on new projects represents a missed opportunity to invest in critical maintenance or rehabilitation of existing assets.
To assess whether state investments in existing roads and bridges are adequate, depreciation is compared with capital spending on system preservation, meaning the rehabilitation, repair, or replacement of roadway assets. FHWA data indicates that from 1999 to 2023, the share of highway investments allocated to new construction decreased from about 47% to 27% while the share directed toward system preservation increased from 53% to 73%, with most of that shift in spending occurring after 2008.
n 2023, “net maintenance” of roadways—the annual difference between the share of net investment used to preserve existing assets (or “capital maintenance”) and annual depreciation—was -$5 billion. Though still a shortfall, this was an improvement over the prior year when net maintenance was -$14 billion; the smaller gap was the result of a roughly $10 billion increase in capital maintenance investments in 2023.
Although nearly two-thirds of every dollar spent on state and local roads and bridges was directed toward maintaining existing assets, governments consistently fell short of addressing annual depreciation. In such cases, when net maintenance is negative, the amount of the shortfall is the “deferred maintenance,” which in turn contributes to an accumulated funding gap called the “deferred maintenance liability.”
From 1999 to 2023, depreciation increased as the inventory of roadways expanded and more assets were subject to wear and tear. Although capital maintenance fluctuated during this period from a low of $52.5 billion in 2008 to nearly $71 billion in 2016, net maintenance was negative every year from 2004 through 2023 except for 2016, with the largest gap in 2022. Nevertheless, before 2004, net maintenance was positive, with the largest surplus of over $7 billion in 2002. (See Figure 4.)
The accumulated shortfalls in net maintenance since 2004 resulted in a deferred maintenance liability of almost $105 billion as of 2023. And just stopping the problem from growing will not be sufficient to fix the funding gap that state and local governments now face. A $5 billion increase in capital maintenance investments in 2023 would have prevented additional deferred maintenance liabilities from accumulating but would not have made a dent in the existing backlog.
Given the lack of state-reported data on roadway costs, depreciation serves as a useful proxy for the amount of money that states and local governments should be investing in their roads and bridges. However, state-provided estimates of maintenance and preservation needs and of whether current investments are sufficient to meet those needs would offer a more direct view of the sustainability of individual states’ and localities’ infrastructure policies. For example, if states regularly reported on their deferred maintenance liabilities for key infrastructure, including roads and bridges, and the funding levels necessary to address those liabilities, policymakers, stakeholders, and the public could better understand whether their state’s policies are sufficient to preserve roads and bridges over time and what steps are needed to close any deferred maintenance gaps.
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