A $445 million new terminal rising at Des Moines International Airport, a $306 million federal flood-protection system on the Cedar River, a $206 million viaduct replacement in Sioux City and a $140 million new Black Hawk Bridge at Lansing headline Iowa's public pipeline — a smaller, majors-only tally, counted honestly.
*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: 6 in the Iowa City / North Liberty corridor, 3 in the Des Moines metro, 2 each in Cedar Falls and the Ames corridor, plus Cedar Rapids, Sioux City and Lansing. The listed figures sum to ≈$2.1B. Iowa's tally is honestly smaller than its neighbours' — this is a majors list, not a padded one: these are the public builds above the $10M floor with published figures that could be verified. One record is a BI-STATE total, listed once and labelled as such: the Black Hawk Bridge replacement ($140M), led by Iowa DOT and not duplicated on the neighbouring state's page. Two further bi-state projects are pointers, not rows: the I-80 Mississippi River bridge at Le Claire (Illinois DOT leads; Iowa's programmed share is $241.2M in 2028–30 — see paragraph two) and Nebraska-side Missouri River work at Omaha, including UNMC's Project Health, which belongs on Nebraska's page when it exists.
How the borderline records are counted: the I-380 widening is tallied at its $56.2M ALLOCATED figure, labelled committed funding, because no published total cost for the full six-laning exists — the number must not be quoted as a total. The Gordon Drive viaduct ($206M) and the Greenhill Road interchange ($54.65M) carry Iowa DOT's own 'underfunded' flag from the adopted 2027–31 programme, and both are listed at DESIGN. UI Health Care's $72.5M early-work programme is tallied at that figure only; its wider $380M five-year request is disclosed on the record, not summed. At Cedar Rapids only USACE's authorised federal project total ($306.4M) is tallied, not the city's $550M–$750M long-horizon master-plan range.
News-flagged sources: ten rows rest on news or trade-press reporting of official figures, flagged 'news-flagged' in the data — the Iowa DOT 2027–31 programme projects (Albia News / Iowa Capital Dispatch and Iowa Media Wire, from the adopted programme), the Black Hawk Bridge opening (Daily Reporter, from Iowa DOT), the UI Health Care pivot and its North Liberty and downtown-ramp projects (Press-Citizen and Construction Review Online, from Board of Regents figures) and the Iowa Advanced Technology Laboratories renovation (Government Market News). Each record names the underlying official source. The softest records on the page are the I-380 allocation (money allocated so far, not a total) and the UI Health Care early-work programme (a September 2026 announcement figure whose project-level split has not yet been published) — both are labelled as such on their records.
Deliberately excluded: the VERIFIED TERMINATION of UI Health Care's Patient Care Tower (842,000 sq ft, $2B-plus; removed from the five-year plan in September 2026 after ≈$209M of planning and enabling spend) — excluded, not listed as suspended; its $72.5M replacement programme is ia-007. Projects completed in a prior year, however large: UI Health Care's North Liberty hospital itself ($525M, opened April 2025), Iowa State's Therkildsen Industrial Engineering Building ($70M, dedicated May 2025), the ISU Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory Phase 1 ($75M, completed spring 2024) and the I-74 Mississippi River bridge (completed earlier this decade). Unfunded proposals, excluded and named: the Centennial Bridge replacement at Davenport (≈$237M preferred alternative announced October 2026; construction not before ≈2032, unfunded). Private builds, however large: CyTown's private development buildings in Ames (developer-led, ≈$185M private investment) and private data centres and health-system builds statewide — out of scope by rule.