UAE contract awards reached close to $30bn in the first quarter of 2026, about a fifth below the same period last year. Transport and gas grew sharply while buildings and power fell back. Behind the quarter sits a heavier pipeline: Etihad Rail's high-speed line, a AED55bn Abu Dhabi PPP programme and AED200bn of ADNOC awards.
Contractors in the United Arab Emirates were awarded just under $30bn of work in the first quarter of 2026 — a figure that looks substantial in isolation and rather less so against what came before it. The quarter was built from $6.875bn of awards in January, $13.149bn in February and $9.72bn in March, according to a tally of monthly awards published in Abu Dhabi. Set against roughly $35.8bn in the first quarter of 2025, that is a decline of close to a fifth.
The composition tells a more useful story than the total. Transport was the largest single category at around $10bn, up from about $3bn a year earlier. Gas awards rose to roughly $8.5bn from $2.9bn. Moving the other way, building and construction awards fell by about 40 per cent to around $7bn, and the power sector recorded $333m against $8bn in the first quarter of 2025 — a collapse in the comparison rather than in the underlying market, since generation and water packages are lumpy by nature and several very large ones happened to land in early 2025.
February was the strongest month of the quarter on both value and count, with 52 awards. March saw the number of contracts drop to 16 even as the value held above $9bn, which is the signature of a month dominated by a handful of very large packages rather than a broad spread of work.
The largest of those packages belongs to Etihad Rail. The company has awarded design-and-build contracts covering the civil works and stations of the high-speed line between Abu Dhabi and Dubai, a scheme reported at more than $8bn in total. The Abu Dhabi side went to a consortium of National Projects Construction, Trojan Tunnelling, Turkiye's Kalyon and China State Construction Engineering Corporation, with Jacobs as designer. The Dubai side went to Larsen and Toubro, China Harbour Engineering Company and local contractor Wade Adams. The first phase runs about 150km from Al-Zahiyah in Abu Dhabi to Al-Jaddaf in Dubai, with stations at Reem Island, Saadiyat Island and Yas Island in the capital and near Al Maktoum International Airport and Al-Jaddaf in Dubai.
The consortium structure is worth noting on its own. Both packages pair a UAE contractor with a large Chinese state builder and a third international partner. That is now the standard shape of very large UAE civil works: local firms hold the client relationship and the site, and international groups bring tunnelling, viaduct and systems capacity that no single domestic contractor holds at that scale.
Behind the quarter, two forward programmes are considerably larger than anything awarded in it. In May, the Abu Dhabi Investment Office and the Abu Dhabi Projects and Infrastructure Centre launched a AED55bn ($15bn) public-private partnership pipeline covering 24 projects to be brought to market across 2026 and 2027. Transport dominates it: 11 road schemes worth about AED35bn, adding more than 300km of new road along with tunnel, intersection and network upgrades. A further AED11bn covers five projects in dams, water storage, floodwater management, stormwater drainage and associated urban works, and AED9bn covers eight social infrastructure projects spanning sports facilities, specialist healthcare, schools and university campuses.
Separately, ADNOC has said it will award AED200bn ($55bn) of new projects between 2026 and 2028, across upstream and downstream. That is a three-year commitment roughly double the value of everything awarded in the UAE in the first quarter, concentrated in one client and in the two categories — energy and heavy industrial construction — that already lifted the quarter's numbers.
Building work has not disappeared, but it is being led by fewer, larger assets. In May, ALEC Engineering and Contracting received a letter of award from the Department of Culture and Tourism - Abu Dhabi to build Sphere Abu Dhabi, a contract valued at about $1.7bn. ALEC takes full design, procurement and construction responsibility for the venue, which will seat up to 20,000 on a site between Yas Mall and SeaWorld Abu Dhabi and is scheduled for completion in the third quarter of 2029. It will be the second Sphere anywhere, after Las Vegas, and the first outside the United States.
Taken together, the picture is not a market slowing down so much as one changing shape. The UAE has accounted for roughly 41 per cent of the value of all GCC construction contracts since 2004, with more than $443bn of building and infrastructure awards. What is different in 2026 is the weighting: rail, roads, drainage, gas processing and chemicals rather than towers and mixed-use podiums. That shift favours contractors with tunnelling, marine, pipeline and process plant capability, and it puts a premium on the joint-venture structures that let domestic firms reach into it.
It also front-loads risk. A pipeline concentrated in a small number of very large multi-year packages means award values will swing hard from quarter to quarter, and a soft three months says little about the direction of the market. The AED55bn PPP programme and ADNOC's three-year award schedule will do more to set the tone for UAE contractors through 2027 than any single quarter's total.