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For most of the last decade, the story of UK highways was a story of expansion. Bigger schemes, new capacity, headline projects with tunnels and bypasses attached to them. If you built your career on major schemes, that was a good place to be.
That story has changed. The third Road Investment Strategy (RIS3), confirmed in March 2026, put an unprecedented amount of money behind maintaining and renewing what already exists rather than building something new. At the same time, a second thread has emerged: highway improvements are increasingly being funded because they unlock housing, not because they relieve congestion in their own right.
Both shifts change the shape of the highways jobs market. They change which skills are in demand, which employers are hiring, and where the long-term security sits. Having spent years placing people across highway construction, streetworks and local authority teams, I think this is one of the more significant shift in the sector has seen, and it is largely good news for anyone with in an asset management, or maintenance discipline.
Here is what has actually happened, and what it means in practice.
Part one: National Highways has moved from expansion to maintenance
The strategy is now explicitly about renewals
RIS3 covers April 2026 to March 2031 and commits over £27 billion to the Strategic Road Network, the 4,500 or so miles of motorway and trunk A road that National Highways manages. Of that, £24.99 billion funds the operation, maintenance, renewal and enhancement of the network.
The split inside that number is the interesting part. Renewals take £8.44 billion. Enhancements, the new-build capacity schemes that dominated earlier road periods, take £3.85 billion. The Lower Thames Crossing sits outside these figures, with £1.67 billion being supplied by the government to complete the publicly funded elements while private finance is sought for the remainder.
To put the renewals figure in context, National Highways spent roughly £4.9 billion on renewals across the whole of RIS2. RIS3 nearly doubles it. The Department for Transport has described it as an unprecedented investment in renewals, targeting major structures and road surfaces.
Several major expansion schemes were cancelled
The pivot did not happen overnight. In 2024, the government cancelled a number of major road schemes as part of a wider review of transport spending, including the A303 Stonehenge Tunnel and the A27 Arundel Bypass. The rationale was value for money and the redirection of funding towards work delivering more immediate, local benefit.
For anyone whose CV was built around a small number of very large schemes, that was an uncomfortable period. Several people I spoke with at the time had planned five years of work around projects that no longer existed. What has followed, though, is a pipeline that is arguably more stable — spread across more locations, with a longer tail of work.
What renewals money actually buys
"Renewals" can sound abstract until you look at the commitments attached to it. Under RIS3, National Highways is expected to deliver:
Resurfacing of more than 9,000km of motorway and A road
Reconstruction of 152 lane-kilometres of concrete road
Renewal of 12,650 roadside technology assets
Renewal of 1,191km of road restraint systems
Work on 15 large renewal schemes, with between five and nine due to complete construction by the end of 2030/31
Alongside this sits drainage improvement, bridge and structures maintenance, lighting upgrades and safety barrier replacement. RIS3 also introduces a set of four National Programmes, one of which is a new Safety National Programme covering all English regions and prioritising work on high-risk major A roads using international road assessment ratings.
One thing worth flagging, the draft strategy pushed back the target of zero people killed or seriously injured on the network from 2040 to 2050. That is a long-term ambition rather than an immediate hiring signal, but it tells you safety performance will remain a permanent feature of scheme design and delivery requirements.
Delivery, not funding, is now the constraint
Here is the part that matters most for jobs.
The Office of Rail and Road, which monitors National Highways, published its annual assessment in July 2026 covering the interim funding year from April 2025 to March 2026. That year sat between RIS2 and RIS3 and was funded through a one-year £4.842 billion settlement, of which £1.282 billion went to capital renewals.
The ORR's verdict was broadly positive, National Highways met nine of the government's eleven key performance indicators and delivered almost all of its planned capital investment. But the assessment also identified a pattern of underspend on exactly the programmes that RIS3 is about to scale up:
The large renewals programme was underspent by 33%, or £37 million, with delays to the M6 Lune Gorge bridge renewal scheme and the concrete roads programme cited as causes.
Of 15 concrete road schemes intended to reach design stage before RIS3, only one was successfully developed, a 41% underspend, or £31 million
Designated funds and national programmes were underspent by 16%
The on-road technology programme faced delays, including replacement of roadside signs
At least eight schemes were reported as delayed by the end of the year
The regulator's conclusion was that National Highways needs stronger planning, earlier scheme development and better delivery controls if it is to spend an £8.4 billion renewals programme effectively.
Translate that into recruitment terms and it says something simple: the money is committed, but the capacity to deliver it is not yet fully in place. Underspend caused by delay is, in large part, a resourcing and programme readiness problem. That is a demand signal for project managers, planners, project controls specialists, design engineers who can take schemes through early development stages, and site teams who can convert design into delivered work.