An I-49 bridge rising over the Arkansas River at Barling, two brand-new highways in the northwest — one of them a new Interstate 42 — a $117 million utility plant at Little Rock's airport, and UAMS's first Northwest Arkansas hospital headline Arkansas's public pipeline, concentrated where the state is growing: the northwest corner and the capital metro.
*How to read the total: the sum of the published figures in the list below. Bases differ by project — most are total cost estimates, some are federal grants, program totals, or construction contracts as awarded. Each project's expanded view labels its own basis. We add them up with the labels showing rather than pretend they're all the same kind of number.
Hover a pin for the project snapshot. Pin numbers match the project list below. Locations are approximate (nearest city or corridor midpoint) on a schematic state outline.
Click any project to expand its full record — description, owner, dates, funding, the law behind it, and its source. Filter by who owns it and where it stands, or sort by cost.
16 major public projects: 8 in Northwest Arkansas, 5 in Little Rock, and one each at Van Buren and Corning and two on the Arkansas River navigation system. The listed figures sum to ≈$1.82B. This is honestly a MAJORS list: it is dominated by ARDOT highway contracts and the two metros' airports because those are the public projects above the $10M floor with published figures that could be verified — the Delta and south Arkansas produced few qualifying records, and none was padded in to fake geographic balance. Two Springdale bypass phases and the XNA connector opened on September 4, 2026 and are kept under this section's 2026-completion convention, with their opening dates printed on their records.
News-flagged sources: eleven rows rest on news or trade-press reporting of official figures, flagged 'news-flagged' in the data — the two September 2026 ARDOT openings, Highway 112, the I-49/MLK interchange, bypass Phase 3 and the Van Buren harbor (Talk Business & Politics reporting ARDOT, XNA, WAIA and MARAD figures), the Clinton National utility plant (Arkansas Business reporting the airport commission), the UAMS hospital (Talk Business reporting UAMS), the UA–Pulaski Tech training center (Government Market News) and the River Market renovation (Arkansas Money & Politics reporting the city). Each record names the underlying official source.
Bi-state note: the I-55 Mississippi River bridge replacement at West Memphis (America's River Crossing) is NOT listed here — it is already listed once, at its total published figure, on the Tennessee page (Memphis), and is not duplicated. September 2026 ARDOT/TDOT meeting reporting put that project at $900M, above the figure carried on the Tennessee record — the update belongs to that record.
Deliberately excluded: 30 Crossing Phase 1 in Little Rock ($632.9M contract; $1.15B programme) — completed in a prior year (wrapped late 2024), and its later phases are unfunded; the I-30 widening in Saline County ($187.3M) — reported nearing completion with works substantially done in 2025, treated as a prior-year completion; the Franklin County state prison — a consultant's $825M estimate whose $750M appropriation failed in the 2025 legislative session, an unfunded proposal; private and independent-nonprofit projects of any size (Walmart's headquarters campus, the Google data center in West Memphis, Arkansas Children's $318M expansion, the Alice L. Walton Foundation / Mercy campus in Bentonville) — out of scope by rule; prior-year completions including UA Fayetteville's I³R building ($137.6M, opened August 2025) and XNA's $41.6M terminal renovation; and unfunded plans including 30 Crossing Park ($93–128M, no construction funding), Clinton National's $300M terminal expansion (concept designs only) and the Greenwood–Texarkana I-49 segments (over $6B, environmental study only).
Softest record: the MKARNS 12-foot channel deepening — its $92.6M is the Corps' 2022 IIJA funding 'to initiate construction' against a $274.7M total estimate, and no 2026 Corps status update was retrieved to confirm the current construction pace; the record is labeled committed-funding and flagged on its face. Next softest: bypass Phase 3, counted at the $200M floor of a published $200–250M estimate range, and the UA–Pulaski Tech training center, which has committed funding but no published dates.