A $34.8 billion high-speed rail segment rising in the Central Valley, a $20.1 billion Delta tunnel in design, BART tunnelling toward San José, a subway that reached Beverly Hills in May 2026, two $4 billion-class university hospitals and a $1.3 billion Burbank terminal finished in October headline California's public pipeline.
*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.
20 major public projects are listed — California is a majors-list state, and this page is a majors list, not a census. The listed figures sum to $142,761,527,697 (≈$142.76B). Three records dominate it and all three are early-stage estimates, printed with their caveats on their records: High-Speed Rail's $34.76B Merced–Bakersfield segment estimate (2026 Business Plan), the Sepulveda Transit Corridor's $24.2B preliminary design estimate — this page's softest record, with only a fraction of its funding identified — and the Delta Conveyance Project's $20.1B (in 2023 dollars). Bases differ and are labelled on every record: published project totals, program totals, one life-of-project budget and one firm contract. California's state capital program, Caltrans' work program, and the capital budgets of Metro, the Bay Area agencies, the ports, the airports and the University of California carry hundreds of further projects at and below this page's $10M published-figure floor.
Counted-once discipline: the D Line Extension is one record for all three sections (Section 1 opened May 8, 2026; Sections 2–3 build into 2027); San Diego's New Terminal 1 is one program record (Phase 1A opened September 23, 2025 — a prior-year opening printed on its record; Phase 1B builds to 2028); SMForward and Pier B are program records whose priced components ($390M SMF garage, $283M Pier B federal grant, and the rest) are disclosed in their cost notes and never added; Pure Water San Diego lists only the priced, building Phase 1 ($1.5B) — Phase 2 has no published city cost and is tallied nowhere. Bi-state discipline: no Colorado River / Hoover Dam work is listed here — it belongs to Arizona's page. No project on this page is counted on another state's page.
Deliberately excluded — private builds, however large: Brightline West high-speed rail to Las Vegas (a private railroad, excluded despite federal support — the same ruling as Nevada's page), the Inglewood and Los Angeles stadium and arena builds, LA28 Olympic and Paralympic venues (mostly private or existing facilities), Intuit Dome (opened 2024), all private hospital, university, housing, data-center and energy construction, and NV-style utility builds by the investor-owned utilities. Excluded — tribal-government projects, documented and named, not listed: tribal governments are sovereign and their projects are documented here rather than counted. The largest recent case is Hard Rock Casino Tejon (Mettler, Kern County): a $600M multi-phase tribal gaming and entertainment development of the Tejon Indian Tribe in partnership with Hard Rock International, whose first phase opened November 13, 2025 (150,000 sq ft of gaming space, 2,000+ slot machines, 1,000+ permanent jobs), with a second phase (400-room hotel and a 2,800-seat venue) planned from late 2026 within the same $600M multi-phase figure. California's many other tribal casino, hotel and government projects of the period are likewise named as a class and not listed.
Completed in a prior year, however large: Caltrain Electrification ($2.44B, fully electric service September 21, 2024); the Metro A Line Foothill Extension to Pomona (opened September 19, 2025); San Diego New Terminal 1 Phase 1A as a standalone phase (September 2025, inside the listed program record, above); the Salesforce / Transbay Transit Center (Phase 1 of the Transbay Program, opened 2018 — The Portal, its Phase 2, IS listed); the Sixth Street Viaduct replacement in Los Angeles (opened 2022); and the Folsom auxiliary spillway ($900M Joint Federal Project, 2017). Terminated, excluded-and-named, never 'suspended': the Los Vaqueros Reservoir Expansion (Contra Costa Water District) — a $1.6B project (up from $980M in 2018, with $477M of state storage funding promised) whose partnership collapsed and which withdrew from the state Water Storage Investment Program in November 2024 after about $70M of study spending. No record on this page is carried as suspended; no verified pause of a listed project was found. Unfunded or unpriced planning, named not listed: the Second Transbay Tube / Link21 program (study stage, no published construction price), the Inglewood Transit Connector (funding unresolved at verification), the G Line conversion to rail (a future Measure M concept beyond the listed-class G Line busway works, which are themselves below this list's majors cut), the Southeast Gateway Line's later phases, later High-Speed Rail Phase 1 segments beyond Merced–Bakersfield (priced only as scenarios in the 2026 Business Plan), and Pure Water San Diego Phase 2 (above).
2026 completions and openings, per the current ruling: one clean 2026 completion IS listed — Hollywood Burbank Airport's $1.3B replacement terminal (opened October 13, 2026). Two 2026 openings sit inside records carried as under-construction, with the opening printed on the record: D Line Section 1 (May 8, 2026) and, in the other direction, the LAX people mover, whose repeated 2026 opening targets all slipped — it is explicitly NOT a 2026 completion. Softest records, disclosed: Sepulveda (preliminary estimate, funding mostly unidentified), Delta Conveyance (financing route rejected by the Court of Appeal in December 2025; opponents' $60–100B cost claim disclosed on its record), High-Speed Rail (federal funding termination in litigation), The Portal (about $737M gap unplanned at publication) and the Capitol Annex (a priced budget, but a thin, partly sealed public record). Where a figure could not be verified from a published source, the candidate was dropped rather than estimated.