A $3.2 billion diversion channel being dug around Fargo, a $663 million-approved water pipeline crossing the state, a $163 million STEM complex rising at UND in Grand Forks, and a $78 million state museum gallery paused mid-build in Bismarck headline North Dakota'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.
14 major public projects are listed. The listed figures sum to ≈$5.2B — and one record dominates it: the Fargo–Moorhead Area Diversion at its published ≈$3.2B programme total. It is a BI-STATE total, listed once and labelled as such, on this North Dakota page: the Metro Flood Diversion Authority is a North Dakota-based joint-powers authority, most construction is in North Dakota, the federal share is $750M, and Minnesota's page will carry only a pointer to this record. The total has not been halved. Outside the Diversion, North Dakota's honest tally is modest — about $2.0B across thirteen records — because those are the public builds with published figures above the $10M floor that could be verified; this is a majors list, not a census of every city and county job in the state.
How the phased water programmes are counted: the Red River Valley Water Supply Project is tallied at the $663M approved to date against its $1.4B indexed total project cost (March 2026 legislative presentation) — not at the full total. The Northwest Area Water Supply project is listed at its published ≈$325M revised total, and in Minot only the priced Maple Diversion phase ($110M) of the Mouse River plan is tallied; the wider Mouse River Enhanced Flood Protection Plan (published at $1.028B in 2020) is disclosed on that record, not summed. The Hector International expansion is printed at the Airport Authority / delegation's 'nearly $200M' figure; an earlier $155M estimate is disclosed on the record.
News-flagged sources: several rows rest on news or trade-press reporting of official figures, flagged 'news-flagged' in the data — the UND flight operations centre (Aero-News, from UND / McGough figures), the NDSU Bolley Laboratory construction contract (Kraus-Anderson / Spaces4Learning), the Military Gallery pause (North Dakota Monitor, from State Historical Society figures) and the Fargo Main Avenue reconstruction (City of Fargo staff figures via Citizen Portal). Each record names the underlying official source. The softest records on the page are the NAWS revised total (a consultant's published estimate for a multi-decade, multi-phase programme) and the Maple Diversion phase total (a 2021 Souris River Joint Board figure; the $61.45M federal construction share secured in 2022 is the hardest number inside it) — both are labelled as such on their records.
Deliberately excluded: projects completed in a prior year, however large — the Long X Bridge replacement on US-85 near Watford City ($34M, completed 2021) and NDSU's Peltier Complex ($75M, completed 2024). At the floor and excluded on that ground: the Oriska Rest Area on I-94 (exactly $10M, opened October 1, 2026 — the floor is more than $10M, so an exactly-$10M project is out). Excluded as private by rule, however large: the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora (a private 501(c)(3) foundation build, built with private and state dollars and no federal construction funds; it opened to the public July 4, 2026 — excluded on BOTH the private-owner ground and as an earlier-2026 completion), Altru Health and Sanford Health builds (private nonprofit / private health systems), and private data centres. Excluded as an unfunded proposal: the FY2027 budget request for two Sentinel facilities at Minot AFB ($108M + $124M = $232M) — a presidential budget request, not an appropriation. Tribal-government projects are outside the locked owner rule for this build-out and are not listed. No verified termination was found among North Dakota's majors in this cycle; the one suspended record (the Military Gallery) is listed as suspended.