Timmons Group is a Richmond-based civil engineering and technology firm founded in 1953. Its core work is site development engineering: grading, stormwater, utilities and the entitlement path that gets a project from raw parcel to permitted construction documents. The firm pairs that with land surveying, environmental consulting and a large geospatial and GIS practice that serves utilities and local governments as a standalone service line. Timmons handled civil engineering on the $306 million critical care tower at Bon Secours St. Mary’s Hospital in Richmond, an eight-story, 200,000-square-foot addition on an operating hospital campus where site logistics and phased utility tie-ins drive the schedule. The firm works across commercial, healthcare, higher education, residential and transportation sectors from offices throughout the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast.
Scale first, because it explains the rest: more than 1,100 staff across eighteen offices, and a place on ENR’s Top 500 Design Firms list for over thirty consecutive years. The 2025 edition put Timmons Group at 125, ten spots up from the year before.
In spring 2025 the firm moved into a purpose-built headquarters at 7053 Celebration Park Avenue, part of the Springline at District 60 development in Chesterfield County just outside Richmond. About 400 employees work from that building.
The service catalogue is broader than “civil engineering” suggests. Under engineering sit environmental, geotechnical, land surveying, power engineering, site engineering, stormwater management, structural engineering, traffic and transportation, and water and wastewater. Planning and design covers land planning, community engagement and landscape architecture. A third bucket, labelled specialised services, is the interesting one: cultural resources, economic development, grant writing and right-of-way acquisition — disciplines that decide whether a project clears its approvals at all, and that most site engineering firms do not carry in-house.
Geospatial runs almost as a separate business under the timmonsGIS brand, serving utilities and local governments with asset management, application development, roadmapping and cloud services rather than functioning purely as a drafting support group.
Markets are spread across colleges and universities, commercial and retail, design-build, energy and renewables, federal government and military, healthcare, K-12 schools, local and state government, parks, sports and recreation, and residential and multi-family. The firm also markets a proprietary site selection method it calls Analytical Data Driven Site Selection, aimed at owners weighing candidate parcels before committing.
The Richmond project list reads like a tour of the region: Altria’s headquarters, Stone Brewing’s East Coast facility, Richmond International Airport, Richmond International Raceway, Amazon fulfilment centres, St. Francis Medical Center, Innsbrook Corporate Center, Cardinal Commerce Center, the Meadowville Technology Park and Gateway, Otis in Scott’s Addition, and the Huguenot Flatwater accessible launch on the James River.
Geographically the practice concentrates on Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia and the Washington-Baltimore corridor, with named market focus on the Triangle, the Triad and Charlotte. For a developer, the practical draw is that survey, geotechnical, environmental, entitlement support, civil design and construction-phase services can all sit under one contract, with the GIS group available when a client needs the finished asset tracked rather than just built.
