BL Harbert International

BL Harbert International is a general contractor headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama, tracing to a business founded in 1946 and now working through domestic and international building groups. Its International Group is one of the principal builders of U.S. diplomatic facilities abroad, delivering embassies and consulates for the State Department’s Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations, while the U.S. Group builds commercial, institutional, healthcare and industrial work across the Southeast and beyond. The firm delivered structures within the Airbus expansion at the Mobile Aeroplex at Brookley in Alabama, working alongside architect FSB. BL Harbert self-performs concrete and other trades on much of its domestic work and delivers through general contracting, construction management and design-build.

The numbers BL Harbert publishes about itself are worth reading together: $1.6 billion in revenue for 2025, roughly 6,000 employees worldwide, more than $4.1 billion in green construction to date, and an experience modification rate of 0.44. Building Design + Construction ranks it second among top federal government building firms, and the company places ninth on a list of American companies working abroad. The construction business traces to 1949, when brothers John and Bill Harbert founded Harbert Construction Company with Ed Dixon.

Management is deliberately decentralized, and that shows up in the two operating groups. The International Group handles preconstruction, design-build and MEP engineering for U.S. Government secure facilities plus civil, industrial, commercial and hospitality clients. Since 2000 it has put in place more than $5 billion of new construction in over 50 countries, all built to U.S. specifications and standards, and it works from offices in Dubai’s Internet City, London’s Old Park Lane, Istanbul’s Maslak business district and a Birmingham international office with an attached logistics center. Recent embassy compounds include Podgorica, Montenegro and Guatemala City.

The U.S. Group runs preconstruction, design-build, construction management and hard-bid estimating from Birmingham, Houston, Huntsville, Oxford, Nashville, Atlanta, Charleston and Washington, D.C., and organizes itself around three market sectors: industrial, federal and commercial. That narrowing is intentional, and the group pairs it with long-standing subcontractor and vendor relationships across the Southeast, drawing on a wider network when local trade labor runs short. Recent domestic work spans hospitality projects such as The Nickel on King Street in Charleston and The Moxy, a ribbon cutting at Fort Rucker, and the Regions Arena project in Birmingham. On international jobs the firm makes a point of hiring and training from the local workforce, framing the transferable trade skills left behind as part of the deliverable alongside the building. Sustainability is presented in similar whole-business terms, covering waste reduction in the construction process and the long-term fiscal performance of what gets built rather than a checklist of certifications.