ENR published its 2026 Top 250 International Contractors on August 19. Combined international revenue for the 250 firms rose 9.7% to $550.6 billion from $501.2 billion — a rebound from a 2025 edition that essentially flatlined. ACS Group/Hochtief ranks first. Skanska is eighth. Sacyr is 37th, Urbacon 41st, Nesma & Partners 79th, Aecon 88th.
The rankings are the least interesting part. What respondents told ENR about why they can’t grow faster is the story.
It isn’t demand
“Customers today are looking for certainty in an uncertain environment,” said Skanska president and CEO Anders Danielsson. “The challenge is not demand, but access to the specialized workforce needed to deliver complex projects at scale.”
Sacyr’s global director of business development, Jose Manuel Loureda, put the same point on materials: “Megaprojects, especially hyperscale data centers, are creating significant pressure on both skilled labor and critical materials.”
Contractors reported lead times on transformers, switchgear, generators and cooling equipment stretching to over a year in some cases. That number has been creeping for three years and it is now long enough to reorder how projects get sequenced. You buy the gear before you have a design, or you don’t get the gear.
Consolidation is flowing into the U.S.
The survey documents a pattern worth watching from the American side: Aecon has acquired Bodell Construction in Utah, Trinity Industrial Services in Texas, and utility contractors Arc American and C.A. Advanced in Indiana, plus K.P.C.’s Power Electrical and Energy Metering businesses.
Read that list again. Three of the five are electrical or utility contractors. When international contractors buy into the U.S. market right now, they are buying electrical capacity, because that’s the constraint they just told ENR about.
Two projects that bracket the range
ACS Infrastructure, with Fluor and Aecon in the Bridging North America consortium, marked the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge between Detroit and Windsor — North America’s longest cable-stayed bridge, delivered under a 36-year DBFOM availability-payment concession. At the other extreme, Skanska is general contractor on Antarctica’s Troll Research Station and master developer in pre-development on the $8 billion Penn Station renovation in New York.
One caveat on the headline number
The $550.6 billion total and the 9.7% growth figure are self-reported by surveyed firms to ENR, with no independent audit and no published response rate or methodology statement. It’s a useful directional read and a poor precise one. It also measures international revenue specifically, which makes it a weaker signal about the U.S. domestic market than the size of the number suggests.
Related: Denver International Airport Great Hall Completion, a program where phasing inside a live facility drives cost more than materials do.