Iowa has 4,279 bridges in Poor condition, more than any other state and about one in ten of the national total. The next state on the list, Pennsylvania, has 2,718. Those two figures come from the 2026 release of FHWA’s bridge condition table, which classifies all 624,939 bridges in the National Bridge Inventory as Good, Fair or Poor and reports 41,148 of them as Poor.
A count of Poor bridges is the number most often quoted about any state, and it is the least informative one on its own. It rises with the size of the inventory, it treats a culvert on a farm road the same as an Interstate river crossing, and it says nothing about direction. The ten states below hold half of all Poor bridges in the country, and they got there by quite different routes.
The ten largest counts
| Rank | State | Poor bridges | Total bridges | Share Poor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Iowa | 4,279 | 23,398 | 18.3% |
| 2 | Pennsylvania | 2,718 | 23,333 | 11.6% |
| 3 | Illinois | 2,584 | 26,946 | 9.6% |
| 4 | Missouri | 2,158 | 24,696 | 8.7% |
| 5 | New York | 1,780 | 17,613 | 10.1% |
| 6 | Oklahoma | 1,620 | 22,929 | 7.1% |
| 7 | North Carolina | 1,483 | 19,331 | 7.7% |
| 8 | Kansas | 1,370 | 24,945 | 5.5% |
| 9 | Ohio | 1,370 | 26,786 | 5.1% |
| 10 | Louisiana | 1,304 | 12,647 | 10.3% |
Kansas and Ohio are a useful pair. Each has close to 25,000 bridges or more and each reports 1,370 Poor, yet both sit near the national rate of 6.6 percent. They appear on this list because they own a lot of bridges. Texas owns more than twice as many as either, 57,571, and does not appear at all: only 619 of its bridges are Poor, about 1.1 percent.
Louisiana is the reverse case. It has roughly half the inventory of Kansas or Ohio and nearly the same number of Poor bridges, so its share is about twice theirs.
Share tells a different story
Ranking by the share of each state’s bridges in Poor condition moves smaller and colder states up.
| Rank | State | Share Poor by count | Share Poor by deck area |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Iowa | 18.3% | 9.5% |
| 2 | West Virginia | 16.6% | 11.4% |
| 3 | Maine | 15.2% | 10.0% |
| 4 | South Dakota | 14.8% | 7.1% |
| 5 | Puerto Rico | 14.0% | 11.3% |
| 6 | Rhode Island | 12.2% | 11.2% |
| 7 | Pennsylvania | 11.6% | 6.7% |
| 8 | North Dakota | 11.4% | 5.2% |
| 9 | Michigan | 10.8% | 7.6% |
| 10 | Louisiana | 10.3% | 5.2% |
The second column changes how the first should be read. In Iowa, the Dakotas and Louisiana, the share by deck area is roughly half the share by count. The Poor bridges in those places are mostly short spans, the kind that carry low-volume rural roads. In West Virginia, Rhode Island and Puerto Rico, the two figures are much closer, which means some larger structures are in Poor condition too.
At the bottom of the ranking, six jurisdictions report fewer than 2 percent of their bridges as Poor: Arizona, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Georgia, Nevada and Texas. Warm, dry climates spare bridge decks most freeze-thaw cycling and much of the road salt that corrodes reinforcing steel, which likely helps the Sun Belt on this measure. Climate cannot be the whole explanation, since Louisiana is warm and sits in the top ten.
Why the federal measure uses deck area
The share that binds state transportation departments is the area-weighted one. Under 23 CFR 490.409, the percentage of National Highway System bridges in Good or Poor condition is calculated by summing deck area, length times width, for each class and dividing by the total. A bridge that is a hundred times larger counts a hundred times as much.
Weighting by area makes sense for budgeting. Repair and replacement costs scale roughly with deck area, and the largest structures tend to carry the most traffic. It also makes rankings by count a poor guide to where the money needs to go. Nationally, 6.6 percent of bridges are Poor but only 4.8 percent of deck area is, and states with many small rural bridges look far worse on the first number than the second. The method behind the Good, Fair and Poor classes is explained in more detail in how bridges are inspected and rated.
Who improved, and how
Comparing the 2026 table with the 2016 table shows which states cut their counts. Nationally the number of Poor bridges fell from 48,559 to 41,148 over that decade.
Pennsylvania made the largest cut, from 4,430 Poor bridges to 2,718, a drop of 1,712. Ten years ago 19.4 percent of its bridges were Poor, a higher share than Iowa had then. Part of the change is traceable to one contract. The state’s Rapid Bridge Replacement Project, profiled by FHWA’s innovative finance office, replaced 558 structurally deficient bridges under a design-build-finance-maintain agreement that reached financial close in March 2015. The design-build contract was $899 million inside a 28-year availability payment concession, and the procurement bundled hundreds of small bridges into a single deal rather than letting them one at a time.
Oklahoma cut its count by 1,257, from 2,877 to 1,620, and its share by deck area is now 3.3 percent. Mississippi, Ohio and Iowa round out the five largest reductions, though Iowa’s drop of 392 left it far ahead of every other state.
A smaller group went the other way. Illinois added 427 Poor bridges over the decade, from 2,157 to 2,584, and 11.2 percent of its deck area is now Poor, among the highest shares in the country. Florida, Kentucky, Puerto Rico and Massachusetts also report more Poor bridges than in 2016. More on why owners choose to rehabilitate some structures and replace others is in the rehabilitation versus replacement analysis.
The quieter shift toward Fair
The national trend in Poor bridges is steady improvement. The 2009 table counted 60,817 Poor bridges, 10.1 percent of the inventory. Every annual table since has reported fewer.
The Good class has moved the other way. In 2009, 47.5 percent of bridges were Good. In 2026 the figure is 43.0 percent, the lowest share in the series, while Fair has grown to more than half of the inventory. Targeted programs are pulling the worst bridges out of Poor while a larger group slides from Good into Fair. A Fair bridge is still a candidate for preservation work such as deck sealing, joint replacement and spot painting, which is far cheaper than replacement. Whether owners fund that work now decides how many of today’s Fair bridges become the Poor bridges of the 2030s.
The full state table, with Good and Fair counts and a downloadable file, is on the bridge condition by state data page. Broader context on the inventory as a whole sits in the bridges and structures coverage.