Telecom Revenue Is Up 87%. Where AEC Pursuits Should Aim Next.

What ENR's 2026 Top 500 Ledger Just Confirmed

ENR released the 2026 Top 500 Design Firms on April 27. Of the 475 firms that filed comparable surveys both years, 83.2% reported revenue increases — but the line item that mattered most ran far ahead of every other category.

Telecommunications revenue for the Top 500 increased 31.3% between 2024 and 2025. Stretched out two years, that line is up roughly 87% since 2023. The label is "telecom," but inside ENR's category accounting it captures data centers and the infrastructure that surrounds them — fiber, edge facilities, hyperscale campuses, and the substation, transmission, and distribution work that sits between a data hall and the grid.

Total domestic design revenue for the Top 500 grew 8.1% to $136.3 billion. Median firm revenue grew 6.4%. The data-center category grew at four to five times the median rate. That gap is the story.

For AEC firms that compete for federal A/E work, state DOT consultant selections, and locally-funded civil and utility projects, the Top 500 is the broadest, most credible benchmark available for "where the work is going" in 2026. The answer is on one line of the ledger.

The Spread Is Widening Faster Than the Average

A 6.4% median growth number means roughly half of the Top 500 firms grew slower than that. Some firms grew much faster. The same survey that produced the 6.4% median produced the 31.3% telecom number — meaning the firms that captured telecom and data-center revenue grew far above median, and the firms that did not pulled the median down.

ACEC's Q1 2026 Engineering Business Sentiment survey, drawn from 628 firm leaders, sharpens the same observation. Industry sentiment is highest in Energy and Utilities (+47), Water/Wastewater (+39), Roads and Bridges (+37), and Data Centers (+37). Sector sentiment is especially strong in data centers (+60), energy/utilities (+56), and industrial/manufacturing (+50). Sentiment in government buildings, education, and transit has softened. The market is bifurcating, not slowing.

The practical read for a mid-market civil or transportation firm is straightforward: the firms that positioned for data-center-adjacent civil, utility, environmental, and transmission work two years ago are the ones now reporting above-median growth. The firms that stayed in their traditional pursuit lanes are the ones reporting below-median growth.

The next two quarters are the window in which firms not yet positioned can still get there.

What FERC Actually Did in June 2026

The federal mechanism behind the data-center surge has its own clock, and it did not run the way anyone expected.

In October 2025, the Department of Energy directed FERC to take final action by April 30, 2026 on a proposed rulemaking to standardize how large electricity loads, particularly data centers, interconnect to the interstate transmission grid. FERC then signaled it would act by the end of June instead.

It did not issue that rule. On June 18, 2026, FERC took a different route entirely, having concluded that a generic rulemaking would be too slow for the problem. It issued show cause orders under Federal Power Act section 206 to all six regional grid operators, PJM, MISO, SPP, CAISO, ISO-NE, and NYISO, together with their transmission owners. Each must either justify why its existing tariff remains just and reasonable or propose the revisions that would fix FERC's concerns, within 60 days, on or by August 17, 2026. FERC has not foreclosed a future rulemaking.

The reason the generic rule was hard is the reason the regional route was chosen. Under the Federal Power Act, transmission interconnection is federally regulated, while retail load, the load served at the data hall meter, is regulated by the state public utility commission. A single national rule has to standardize what happens exactly at that boundary, and multiple state utility commissions flagged jurisdictional concerns.

The consequence is the part that matters for positioning, and it is not what most coverage said in June. There is no single national standard coming. Interconnection procedures will be set region by region through tariff filings, which means how a large load connects, what studies it triggers, and how costs are allocated will differ between PJM and MISO and CAISO. For an A/E firm, positioning now depends on which RTO your target sites sit in rather than on one federal rule you could track in a single docket.

What this means for proposal teams: the categories of A/E work driven by large-load interconnection, meaning utility coordination, transmission line studies, substation civil, reliability modeling, and environmental review for grid infrastructure, are operational right now and will accelerate region by region as tariff changes are filed and accepted.

Which A/E Scopes Are Active Now vs. Which Follow the Tariff Filings

Not every data-center-adjacent scope is on the same clock. Some categories are active regardless of what the regions file; some firm up once a region's procedures settle.

Active right now

• Utility coordination. Every data-center site requires coordination with the serving utility — load forecast, distribution upgrade, easements, customer-funded distribution work. Utilities are already engaged.
• Transmission line studies. Routing studies, environmental review, structural design for new transmission to serve large loads. Transmission owners are filing under existing interconnection procedures while the regional tariff questions are resolved.
• Site civil and stormwater. Data-center sites require pad-ready engineering — grading, drainage, water/sewer service, permitting. This work is independent of the federal interconnection clock.
• Environmental review. NEPA, state environmental policy review, wetlands permitting, threatened-and-endangered-species coordination. Required regardless of how any region ultimately structures its interconnection timelines.
• Geotechnical and survey. Site-specific work that proceeds in parallel with all other engineering.

Firms up as each region files

• Substation civil and structural. Substation siting and civil design depends on which interconnection pathway the project ultimately uses. Firms with substation experience are building pipeline now; specific project assignments firm up as regional procedures settle.
• Reliability modeling. Load-flow studies, stability studies, harmonics. The methodology responds to whatever procedures each RTO adopts, which is now a regional question rather than a single national one.
• Co-located generation siting. FERC's orders squarely address co-located load, and joint load-and-generation arrangements are part of what the regions have been told to address. The civil and environmental work for co-located gas, battery, or renewable generation tied to a data-center load is a category that did not exist at scale before.

Straddles both

• Permitting strategy. State and local permitting timelines are independent of FERC, but the regional tariff terms affect what's required at the interconnection boundary.
• Public engagement and stakeholder management. Required throughout, with intensity scaling around the federal-state-local jurisdiction friction that pushed FERC to the regional route in the first place.

For a mid-market firm with transmission, utility, or power-adjacent experience, the practical posture is to compete actively for the categories in the first list while preparing teaming and qualifications for the second, with the regional question answered first: find out which RTO governs the sites you are targeting, because that is now what determines the procedures your clients will be working under.

How Mid-Market Firms Position SOQs Without a Data-Center Portfolio

The most common question from civil and transportation firms looking at this market is not "should we pursue this work" but "how do we qualify for it without a single data-center logo on our project sheet."

The honest answer is that you do not qualify by claiming data-center experience. You qualify by translating the experience your firm already has into the language the data-center procurement uses.

Section E — staff qualifications

Every data-center procurement is going to ask for senior personnel with relevant transmission, substation, utility coordination, or large-site civil experience. Most firms have those credentials buried in resumes written for state DOT or municipal pursuits.

Specific moves:

• Identify your senior engineers with substation, transmission, or utility-coordination experience. Even if they did the work for a different end user, the technical scope qualifies.
• Reorganize the project bullets in their SF330 Section E resumes to lead with the technical scope (substation civil, transmission routing, utility coordination) rather than the end-client agency (state DOT, municipality).
• Pull project values, MW served, and acreage forward into the bullets where applicable. Data-center procurement evaluates scale, not just scope.

Section F — project experience

Project experience sheets for data-center pursuits look different than project sheets for state DOT pursuits. Specifically:

• Site civil work for industrial, manufacturing, or large institutional clients translates more cleanly than site civil work for transportation projects. The closer the project is to "large pad-ready site with utility coordination," the more it qualifies.
• Substation and transmission projects qualify directly, regardless of whether the original client was a utility, a generation owner, or a transit agency.
• Stormwater design for large impervious sites — distribution centers, manufacturing campuses, sports facilities — translates because the engineering math is the same.

The realignment exercise is the same one federal proposal libraries are going through right now: reorganizing existing experience around the categories the current market is buying, rather than the categories your firm has historically chased.

Section H — approach narratives

Section H for data-center adjacent pursuits should make three points clearly:

1. The firm understands the federal-state interconnection split and how to navigate it.
2. The firm has a defensible approach to the specific scope being procured (utility coordination, transmission, substation civil, environmental review, etc.) that is grounded in delivered work.
3. The firm has the staff capacity to execute on the timeline the project requires.

The trap to avoid is writing Section H as if your firm is a data-center specialist when it is not. Procurement evaluators read a lot of proposals; they can identify a firm overstating data-center expertise quickly. The stronger position is to write as a firm with deep, transferable experience that fits the specific scope being procured.

Teaming as a positioning strategy

If your firm has strong transmission or utility experience but no civil scale to match a 200-acre hyperscale site — or strong large-site civil experience but no transmission credentials — teaming is the way in. Joint load-and-generation interconnection arrangements are part of what FERC has directed the regions to address, which is a teaming pattern that did not exist at scale before. Mid-market firms that build the teaming arrangements before their region's procedures settle will be positioned when the procurement wave starts.

What Proposal Teams Should Be Doing Now

Five concrete moves:

1. Identify your firm's three closest-fit projects. Not data-center projects — projects where the technical scope translates. Substation civil, transmission routing, large-site civil with utility coordination, environmental review for grid infrastructure. If you do not have three, the gap is what to address through teaming.
2. Realign your senior personnel resumes. Lead with technical scope, not historical client agency. Pull MW, acreage, and project value into the bullets.
3. Build a teaming list. Identify two or three firms with complementary experience whose qualifications round out yours for a target pursuit category. Have the teaming conversation now, not when an RFQ drops.
4. Track your region's filing, not a national docket. Identify which RTO governs the sites you are targeting and follow that proceeding. Procurement language in subsequent solicitations will reflect whatever that region files and FERC accepts, and because the regions are moving separately, a firm working across two RTOs now has two sets of procedures to track rather than one rule.
5. Audit your boilerplate library. The structured proposal content your firm reuses across pursuits was built for the markets your firm chased two years ago. The content reuse infrastructure that worked for state DOT and federal building work is not the same content reuse infrastructure that supports data-center-adjacent pursuits.

What Did Not Change

It is worth being clear about what FERC's regional route does not mean.

It does not mean the data-center surge has slowed. Dodge Construction Network's March Momentum Index increased 1.8% to 250.5, with commercial planning growth concentrated almost entirely in data-center projects. Planetizen reported in April 2026 that without data centers, nonresidential construction would be down 12.7%. ENR's 2026 Top 500 confirmed at the revenue level what Dodge confirmed at the planning level: data centers are now the dominant non-residential design category.

It does not mean the federal-state jurisdictional issue is going away. Regional tariff filings will not resolve every state utility commission concern, and the procurement structures that emerge will continue to reflect the tension. If anything the regional route makes this more pronounced, since each RTO negotiates that boundary with a different set of state commissions. AEC firms positioning for this market need to understand both pathways — federal under the Federal Power Act, state under retail-rate regulation — because most data-center projects will involve both.

It does not mean traditional A/E markets disappear. State DOT, federal building, education, transit, and water/wastewater work all continue. ACEC's Q1 sentiment data shows softening in some categories, not collapse. The narrative is not "abandon traditional markets" — it is "the firms growing fastest are the ones who added data-center-adjacent capacity to their existing pursuit mix."

The Practical Frame

The 87% telecom growth number on the ENR Top 500 ledger is not a forecast. It is the past tense — what already happened. The forward question for AEC firms is whether the next two years look like the last two years.

Two pieces of evidence point to yes. ACEC's forward sentiment is highest in data centers and energy/utilities. Dodge's forward planning index is concentrated in the same categories. The regional tariff filings now underway are going to make pursuit procurement more, not less, formalized, and having six regions formalize separately raises rather than lowers the premium on firms with structured proposal content and clean qualification libraries over firms whose source-of-truth content lives in scattered Word documents.

The firms positioned to compete for this market two years from now are the ones putting the qualifications work in now. The 87% is the headline. The positioning is the work.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did FERC issue a final rule on large load interconnection?

No. On June 18, 2026, FERC took a different route than the generic rule expected in Docket RM26-4. It issued show cause orders under Federal Power Act section 206 to six regional grid operators, giving them 60 days to justify their existing tariffs or file changes. Interconnection procedures will now vary by region.

How can an A/E firm qualify for data center work without data center projects?

By translating the experience you have rather than claiming experience you do not. Substation, transmission routing, utility coordination, and large-site civil work qualify on technical scope regardless of the original end client. Reorganize resumes and project sheets to lead with that scope instead of the agency you delivered it for.

What engineering scopes does data center growth actually create?

Utility coordination, transmission line routing and studies, substation civil and structural, site civil and stormwater for large pad-ready sites, environmental review and permitting, geotechnical and survey work, and reliability modeling. Co-located generation siting — gas, battery, or renewables tied to a large load — is the newest category.

Is the data center design market still growing in 2026?

By the available measures, yes. ENR's 2026 Top 500 recorded telecommunications revenue, the category that captures data centers, up 31.3% in a single year against 6.4% median firm revenue growth. That gap, roughly four to five times the median, is the clearest signal of where design work concentrated.

Should our firm move away from state DOT and municipal work?

No. The pattern in the data is additive, not substitutional. Firms reporting above-median growth added data-center-adjacent capacity to an existing pursuit mix. Transportation, water, and municipal work all continue, and sentiment softened in some categories rather than collapsing. Treat this as a lane to add.