Federal data shows the state’s bridge network is in better shape than the national average. But the money meant to keep it that way is about to get squeezed, and the Key Bridge rebuild alone is now pushing $5 billion.
By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Two and a half years after the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed into the Patapsco River, Marylanders still ask a version of the same question every time they cross an overpass: how many more of these are one bad day away from failure?
The honest answer, according to the most current federal inspection data, is fewer than you’d think, and the Key Bridge would not have been on the list anyway.
The Federal Highway Administration’s National Bridge Inventory, using data pulled in June 2025, counts 240 of Maryland’s roughly 5,500 bridges as “structurally deficient.” That’s 4.4 percent, down from 253 bridges in 2021. A separate Fox45 review of federal data from earlier in 2025 put the number slightly higher, at 250 out of 5,484 bridges, or 4.6 percent, but noted the count has fallen every year since 2020.
Either way, Maryland’s rate compares favorably to the rest of the country. The national average sits close to 6.8 percent, meaning Maryland’s rate runs about a third lower than the national figure. West Virginia and Iowa, the worst performers, sit around 19 percent. In one recent national ranking, Maryland placed 12th best among the states, though that comparison reflects a single year of data rather than an established multi-year trend.
None of that changes what happened on March 26, 2024, when the container ship Dali lost power and struck a support pier of the Key Bridge, killing six construction workers and severing a critical Baltimore Harbor crossing. The Key Bridge was not on any structurally deficient list before it fell. Its failure had nothing to do with deck cracks or corroded steel. It was a ship strike against a pier that, like most bridges of its era, was never designed to survive a direct hit from a vessel that size.
“‘Structurally deficient’ is a maintenance category, not a collapse forecast.”
That distinction matters for anyone trying to understand bridge risk in Maryland. “Structurally deficient” is a maintenance category, not a collapse forecast.
What the rating actually means
A bridge earns the structurally deficient label when at least one of three major components, the deck, the superstructure, or the substructure, is rated a 4 or lower on a 0-to-9 federal condition scale. A 4 means “poor.” It is a signal to engineers that a bridge needs attention and funding, not a warning to avoid it.
MDOT’s own State Highway Administration tracks a narrower, related measure for the 2,574 bridges it directly owns and maintains. As of 2026, 24 of those are rated “poor,” a slight uptick from 20 in 2025 but far below the 143 poor-rated bridges the state was carrying in 2005.
A few numbers worth keeping in mind:
- Maryland’s statewide deficiency rate (4.4 to 4.6 percent) runs roughly a third below the national average of about 6.8 percent.
- The count of deficient bridges has fallen every year since 2020, according to the Fox45 analysis.
- Some of the busiest deficient spans carry extraordinary daily traffic. The I-695 crossing over U.S. 40 in Baltimore County, built in 1958, was estimated to carry nearly 189,000 vehicles a day in one 2022 analysis.
- Fox45’s 2025 review found Perring Parkway and Russell Street in Baltimore each carry about 70,000 vehicles a day over structurally deficient spans, more than any other bridges on the state’s list.
Where the deficient bridges are
FHWA breaks its bridge inventory down by county, and the same June 2025 dataset behind the statewide 240-bridge figure shows exactly where those bridges sit. A few things stand out. Garrett County, Maryland’s westernmost and most rural county, has the highest deficiency rate in the state at over 11 percent, more than double the statewide average, despite having only 140 bridges total. Baltimore City carries the largest raw number, 34 deficient bridges, and the highest deficiency rate among the larger jurisdictions at just over 9 percent. Calvert County has the fewest bridges of any county, 34, and is the only jurisdiction in the state with zero rated deficient bridges.
“Garrett County has the highest deficiency rate in the state at over 11 percent. Baltimore City carries the largest raw number: 34.”
| County | Total Bridges | Rated Poor / Deficient | Share of County’s Bridges |
|---|---|---|---|
| Baltimore City | 374 | 34 | 9.1% |
| Montgomery | 522 | 25 | 4.8% |
| Baltimore County | 786 | 22 | 2.8% |
| Prince George’s | 576 | 18 | 3.1% |
| Garrett | 140 | 16 | 11.4% |
| Howard | 312 | 16 | 5.1% |
| Frederick | 485 | 14 | 2.9% |
| Allegany | 244 | 13 | 5.3% |
| Washington | 300 | 13 | 4.3% |
| Harford | 276 | 12 | 4.3% |
| Carroll | 205 | 10 | 4.9% |
| Charles | 94 | 8 | 8.5% |
| Caroline | 70 | 7 | 10.0% |
| Cecil | 193 | 6 | 3.1% |
| Dorchester | 47 | 5 | 10.6% |
| Wicomico | 98 | 5 | 5.1% |
| Anne Arundel | 392 | 4 | 1.0% |
| Somerset | 46 | 3 | 6.5% |
| Kent | 44 | 2 | 4.5% |
| Queen Anne’s | 88 | 2 | 2.3% |
| St. Mary’s | 50 | 2 | 4.0% |
| Worcester | 82 | 2 | 2.4% |
| Talbot | 42 | 1 | 2.4% |
| Calvert | 34 | 0 | 0.0% |
A note on how to read this: the “Rated Poor” figure is FHWA’s current terminology, the direct successor to “structurally deficient,” and is counted the same way: one or more major components rated 4 or below on the federal 0-to-9 scale. The county totals include bridges owned by the state, county, and municipal governments, and any federal bridges within county lines, which is why some counts differ slightly from separate SHA or MDTA figures that cover only state-owned structures. These 24 county totals add up to Maryland’s full 5,500-bridge inventory and 240 deficient bridges exactly, so this table and the statewide figures above come from the same underlying dataset.
Two patterns worth flagging for a state government audience: rural counties with older, lower-traffic bridges (Garrett, Dorchester, Caroline) post some of the highest percentage rates even though their raw numbers are small, while the state’s most populous and heavily trafficked jurisdictions (Baltimore City, Montgomery, Baltimore County, Prince George’s) carry the largest absolute counts. Both are fair ways to read the risk, and they point to different policy problems. A rural county with four deficient bridges out of forty has a maintenance backlog. A jurisdiction with two dozen deficient bridges carrying tens of thousands of daily commuters has a different kind of exposure.
The busiest bridges aren’t the deficient ones, and that’s its own story
Here’s a distinction the deficiency numbers don’t capture. Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, both of which post double-digit deficient bridge counts in the table above, are also home to two of the highest-volume bridges in the entire country, and neither one shows up on any deficiency list.
The American Legion Bridge, carrying I-495 across the Potomac between Montgomery County and Fairfax County, Virginia, opened in 1962 and now carries somewhere between 232,000 and over 300,000 vehicles a day, depending on which traffic count you use, more than any bridge in the state’s deficiency table by a wide margin. Maryland’s own planning documents describe the bridge as “structurally safe.” It isn’t deficient. It’s simply old and built for a fraction of the traffic it now carries, which is a capacity problem rather than a condition problem, but one that produces its own kind of risk, most of it economic and quality-of-life rather than structural.
“Maryland’s busiest bridges aren’t structurally deficient. That doesn’t mean they aren’t infrastructure risks.”
The Woodrow Wilson Bridge, carrying I-95 and I-495 across the Potomac between Prince George’s County and Alexandria, Virginia, and touching the southern tip of Washington, D.C., carries roughly 243,000 to 250,000 vehicles a day, making it one of the highest-volume bridges in the nation. It’s a non-issue for the deficiency conversation because it was entirely rebuilt in 2006 and 2008. A newer bridge, still one of the most heavily loaded in America every single day.
Put together, this cuts against reading the county table as a complete picture of bridge risk in the DC-Baltimore corridor. Maryland’s most consequential bridges, in terms of sheer number of people and amount of commerce that depend on them daily, aren’t showing up as structurally deficient at all. That’s precisely why the American Legion Bridge rebuild, covered in more detail below, is treated as such a high priority by both Annapolis and Washington despite the bridge carrying a clean condition rating. Volume and age are their own category of infrastructure risk, separate from the deficiency metric this article has focused on so far, and Maryland’s two busiest Potomac crossings sit squarely in that category.
“Maryland’s bridges are in better shape than the national average. The harder question is whether the state can afford to keep them that way.”
The money problem behind the numbers
Here’s where the story gets less reassuring, and where Marylanders should be paying closer attention than the topline percentage suggests.
Governor Wes Moore signed a $70.8 billion state budget on April 8, laying out roughly $3.6 billion for MDOT and a six-year, $22.1 billion Consolidated Transportation Program built partly on $450 million in new annual transportation revenue the legislature approved in 2025. That sounds like real money going into roads and bridges, and it is.
But county governments, which maintain more than 80 percent of Maryland’s road miles and lean heavily on Highway User Revenue to pay for it, are staring at a cliff. Under current law, the counties’ share of that revenue drops from around 20 percent to 15.6 percent starting in fiscal 2028. The Maryland Association of Counties estimates that’s a nearly $110 million hit in a single year, growing to roughly $520 million in cumulative losses by fiscal 2031 if lawmakers don’t intervene. Local bridge repairs and resurfacing work are exactly what that revenue was built to fund.
“Counties are staring at a nearly $110 million transportation funding hit in a single year.”
At the same time, the state’s marquee infrastructure project keeps getting more expensive, and the contractor problems that come with cost overruns have already started. The Maryland Transportation Authority estimates the Key Bridge rebuild will cost between $4.3 billion and $5.2 billion, more than double the original 2024 estimate of under $2 billion, with completion pushed back to 2030 instead of 2028. U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy met with Moore in Washington on January 15 specifically to address the cost overruns, and the two announced afterward that they’d made “significant progress” on accelerating the rebuild and on a separate, long-stalled plan to reconstruct the American Legion Bridge over the Potomac, this time with private financing back on the table.
That reopening was notable on its own. Moore had scrapped a public-private partnership approach to the American Legion Bridge shortly after taking office in 2023. Reopening the door to private capital, under pressure from the Trump administration’s DOT, suggested the state’s transportation trust fund didn’t have enough room to do both projects at once, and Moore followed through in April by creating a new state office dedicated to structuring public-private infrastructure deals.
“The Key Bridge rebuild is now estimated at $4.3 billion to $5.2 billion — more than double the original estimate.”
The Key Bridge cost dispute came to a head that same month. In late April, MDTA announced it would not retain Kiewit Infrastructure Co., the contractor handling the project since 2024, for the bridge’s second and far larger construction phase, after Kiewit’s price proposal came in well above the state’s own independent cost estimates. Kiewit is finishing its Phase 1 work, driving foundation piles and building a temporary construction trestle, through the end of 2026. In May, MDTA split the remaining work into four separate contracts, together estimated at $4 billion to $4.8 billion, covering demolition, the north and south approaches, and the main span over the shipping channel. The agency released its request for qualifications on the main span contract in July, with qualification submissions due August 19, the day before this article was published. MDTA has not announced a target date for selecting the new contractor.
What to watch
“Keeping Maryland’s bridges in good condition is going to cost more at the exact moment counties are being asked to do more with less.”
- Which contractor MDTA selects for the Key Bridge’s main span, and whether the new procurement structure actually holds costs closer to the state’s own estimates than Kiewit’s rejected bid did.
- Whether the General Assembly revisits the Highway User Revenue cliff in its 2027 session. A bill to permanently fix the formula, HB559/SB288, was introduced in 2026 and got a hearing but never came up for a vote, leaving the fiscal 2028 cut on track under current law.
- Progress on the American Legion Bridge P3, now being coordinated through the state’s new public-private partnership office, and whether Virginia and federal partners commit matching funds.
- MDOT’s next Consolidated Transportation Program update, which will show whether the 240-bridge deficiency count keeps falling or starts climbing as maintenance dollars get stretched thinner.
The bottom line for now: Maryland’s bridges are, on paper, in better shape than most of the country’s. Keeping them that way is going to cost more than the state currently has budgeted, at the exact moment counties are being asked to do more with less, and the state’s largest bridge project just demonstrated in real time how quickly those cost estimates can slip.
Sources: Federal Highway Administration National Bridge Inventory “Bridge Condition by County” data for Maryland, June 15, 2025 (fhwa.dot.gov/bridge/nbi/no10/county25b.cfm); Federal Highway Administration National Bridge Inventory data for Maryland, via the American Road & Transportation Builders Association’s 2025 bridge report (artbabridgereport.org); Fox45/OpenTheBooks review of federal bridge data, published March 2025; Maryland Department of Transportation State Highway Administration “Poor Rated Bridges” data, 2026; The Center Square/24-7 Wall St. analysis of 2022 ARTBA bridge data; Maryland Association of Counties analysis of the draft FY 2026-2031 Consolidated Transportation Program, September 2025, and 2026 legislative session tracking on HB559/SB288; Maryland General Assembly 2026 session transportation budget summary and Department of Legislative Services 90 Day Report; U.S. Department of Transportation and Office of Governor Wes Moore joint statement following the Washington, D.C. meeting, January 15, 2026; The Washington Post, The Baltimore Banner, Maryland Matters, CBS News Baltimore, WMAR-2 News, and The Daily Record reporting on the Moore-Duffy meeting, January 2026; Maryland Transportation Authority cost estimates for the Francis Scott Key Bridge reconstruction, November 2025; Maryland Transportation Authority news releases on the Kiewit Infrastructure Co. contract off-ramp (April 28, 2026) and four-contract procurement restructuring (May 19, 2026); Maryland Matters, CBS News Baltimore, and Construction Dive reporting on the Key Bridge contractor change, April-July 2026; Bond Buyer reporting on the creation of Maryland’s public-private partnership office, April 2026.
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