Approximately every four years, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)-Maryland Section releases a comprehensive Report Card for Maryland’s Infrastructure meant to inform the state’s long-term public safety, policies, and capital infrastructure investments. Typically, individual state report cards are released in tandem with ASCE’s nationwide report card for the U.S.
Infrastructure systems have a significant impact on states’ economies, quality of life, and environmental health, so it is imperative that these systems are equipped for long-term resilience.
Released in October 2025, the most recent Maryland report card from ASCE-MD is a comprehensive evaluation of the condition, performance, and future needs of 13 key infrastructure categories across the state. The report provides letter grades for aviation, bridges, dams, drinking water, energy, hazardous waste, ports, rail, roads, solid waste, stormwater, transit, and wastewater—based on eight criteria that include capacity, condition, operation and maintenance, funding, future needs, public safety, resilience, and innovation. The grades are then averaged to provide an overall infrastructure grade for the state.
The committee who produces the report, comprising civil engineers from across Maryland, collects and analyzes publicly available data, meets with the agencies responsible for various infrastructure systems, prepares and reviews findings, and presents their conclusions. They view the report as a tool to help residents, businesses, and policymakers understand and improve the state’s infrastructure.
The 2025 report assigned Maryland a cumulative grade of ‘C’, which means that, overall, the state’s infrastructure is performing adequately to meet current needs, but additional investment is needed to ensure the long-term success of these systems.
Rachel Sangree, structural engineering expert and associate teaching professor in Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Civil and Systems Engineering, served as part of the all-volunteer committee that researched and authored the 2025 report card. Based on her structural expertise, Sangree, a licensed professional engineer, was part of the team assigned to evaluate the state’s bridge infrastructure.
“Bridges generally have a maximum design life of about 50 to 75 years, and a large share of Maryland’s bridges were built during President Eisenhower’s interstate expansion in the 1950s through 1970s, so we’re approaching that design life threshold which means now is the time for intervention,” says Sangree.
She says that because the state’s bridges are inspected every two years, there is a substantial amount of data available through the National Bridge Inventory for the evaluation committee to see how bridge conditions have changed, and to determine the portion of bridges in good, fair, and poor condition for the report.
“Those of us on the bridge evaluation team also spoke with different agencies, like the Maryland Department of Transportation’s State Highway Administration and Maryland Transportation Authority, to uncover information that’s not readily available from NBI data,”
Sangree says. “We gather information about how these agencies are extending the lives of existing bridges and building greater resilience into new bridges through innovative materials and design details and gauge available funding levels for maintenance, repair, and replacement.”
In comparison, Maryland’s grade matches the ‘C’ average for states across the U.S. in ASCE’s 2025 national report.
“We’ve really endeavored to be consistent in the state’s infrastructure report card across years and within each category,” Sangree says. “Given that infrastructure is closely tied to our economy, quality of life, and environmental health, the goal is to make comparisons easier for those reading the reports so that the information can readily be used for long-term improvements.”