The FAA Just Opened $100 Million for Airport Towers With a $55 Million Ceiling and 25 Days to Apply
September 27, 2026 · 6 min read
Granted Research Team · Editorial policy
The FY2027 FAA Contract Tower Competitive Grant Program has two numbers that do not belong in the same notice. The program is offering up to $100 million. The award ceiling is $55,000,000.
That means a single selection can absorb 55 percent of the entire annual program. Two can take essentially all of it. For a program that spent FY2024 spreading $20 million across 20 towers in 17 states, this is not a bigger version of the same competition. It is a different competition wearing the same name.
The notice published in the Federal Register on September 22, 2026 and posted to Grants.gov as DOT-FAA-26-0117-002 on September 24. Applications are due 5:00 p.m. Eastern on October 19, 2026 — roughly 25 days of runway on a construction-grade capital request.
What the program funds
The FAA Contract Tower Competitive Grant Program makes annual Airport Infrastructure Grant awards, authorized under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, for airport-owned air traffic control tower projects. The stated purpose is aging infrastructure: towers that are functionally obsolete, structurally deficient, or badly sited for the traffic they now handle.
Eligible project types are narrow and specific:
- Sustaining, constructing, repairing, improving, rehabilitating, modernizing, replacing, or relocating non-approach control towers
- Acquiring air traffic control, communications, and related equipment
- Constructing FAA-certified remote towers
The federal share is the headline benefit. Cost sharing is not required. For a small or non-hub airport sponsor facing a $12 million tower replacement, the absence of a local match is the difference between a fundable project and a decade of deferral. Award amounts run from a floor of $25,000 — small enough to cover a single equipment package — to the $55 million ceiling.
Who can actually apply
This is where most airport sponsors reading the notice for the first time discover they are already out.
Eligible applicants are public agencies, state agencies, Indian tribes and pueblos, and private owners of public-use airports included in the National Plan of Integrated Airport Systems (NPIAS). That is the ordinary Airport Improvement Program eligibility universe, and it is broad.
Then the additional requirement narrows it hard: the sponsor must already be approved in the FAA's Contract Tower Program or the Contract Tower Cost Share Program.
Contract Tower Program membership is not something you obtain in October to apply in October. It runs through a separate FAA application and benefit-cost process on its own timeline. The practical effect is that the eligible pool for this $100 million was fixed long before the notice published, and it is a known, enumerable list: as of March 2026 the FAA Contract Tower Program included 266 towers across 46 states and territories, staffed by more than 1,500 controllers.
Those 266 towers represent roughly half of all control towers in the National Airspace System and handled more than 18 million tower operations in calendar year 2024. They are not marginal facilities. They are the operational backbone of general aviation and regional commercial service, run under contract rather than by federal employees.
The funding trajectory nobody priced in
Read the program's recent history as a series and the FY2027 notice stops looking like an anomaly and starts looking like a plateau after a step change.
| Fiscal year | Program funding | Award ceiling |
|---|---|---|
| FY2024 | $20 million | — |
| FY2025 | $20 million | — |
| FY2026 | $120 million | $83,300,000 |
| FY2027 | $100 million | $55,000,000 |
FY2024 distributed its $20 million across 20 airport-owned towers in 17 states — awards in the $1–2 million band, including $2 million to Laughlin/Bullhead International Airport in Arizona and $2 million to the University of Oklahoma's Max Westheimer Airport. Those are equipment upgrades and partial rehabilitations, not new towers.
Then FY2026 multiplied the program sixfold and set a ceiling of $83.3 million — a number that only makes sense if the FAA intended to fund at least one complete tower replacement outright. FY2027 holds most of that expansion at $100 million while pulling the ceiling down to $55 million.
The ceiling reduction is the more informative change. Dropping the maximum from $83.3 million to $55 million while keeping the pot near $100 million signals an agency that wants at least two significant awards rather than one dominant one. If you are sizing a request, that is the read: the FAA has left room for a pair of major projects plus a tail of smaller equipment grants, not for a single program-consuming build.
The staffing subtext
There is a second story running underneath the capital program, and it shapes how the FAA is likely to score projects.
The Contract Tower Program was roughly 18 percent understaffed as of April 2025, a shortfall serious enough that the DOT Inspector General opened an audit of the program's workforce needs. The FAA's response has been structural: effective July 9, 2026, it made permanent a hiring pathway allowing contract tower companies to hire graduates directly from FAA-approved Control Tower Operator Partnership schools.
Capital money and controller supply interact. A brand-new tower cab at an airport that cannot staff its existing shifts does not produce operational benefit. Applicants who can demonstrate that their facility is fully staffed — or that their project reduces staffing burden through better sightlines, consolidated positions, or remote tower technology — are making an argument the agency is currently very receptive to. The remote tower eligibility in the notice is not decorative. It is the one project type that directly addresses the workforce constraint.
How to apply, and why the mechanics matter
Applications are submitted using FAA Form 5100-144, filed electronically through the FAA's airport infrastructure portal at faa.gov/bil/airport-infrastructure/fct following the instructions under the program's "How to apply" FAQ. Prior-year cycles have also routed material through Grants.gov; sponsors should confirm the FY2027 channel against the notice itself rather than reusing last year's workflow.
The FAA's stated priorities across recent cycles have been consistent: projects that advance aviation safety, improve air traffic efficiency, and can be implemented quickly. That third criterion is doing quiet work. With 25 days to apply and a federal fiscal year already underway, a project with completed design, a current engineer's estimate, and environmental review already cleared is competing on an entirely different footing than one that exists as a concept and a wish.
Strategy for the October 19 date
Confirm your Contract Tower Program status today, not next week. If you are not already approved in the FCT Program or the Cost Share Program, you are ineligible for this cycle and your work is to get into the program before the FY2028 notice. That is a separate, longer process, and starting it in October gives you a full year of runway.
Size your request against the $55 million ceiling deliberately. The ceiling is not a target. If your project is a $3 million cab rehabilitation, ask for $3 million and compete in the crowded, high-hit-rate tail. If it is a genuine tower replacement, understand that you are one of a small number of applicants making a nine-figure-adjacent argument, and your benefit-cost case has to carry it.
Lead with readiness, not need. Every one of the 266 eligible sponsors has aging infrastructure. Fewer have a 100-percent-design-complete package, a NEPA determination in hand, and a contractor who can mobilize in the first quarter. State the construction start date in the first paragraph.
Make the staffing argument explicitly. Tie your project to controller workload, retention, or the staffing shortfall the agency is actively managing. If your project is a remote tower, say so loudly — it is the intersection of the capital program and the workforce problem.
Do not assume the no-match provision means no local cost. There is no required cost share, but design, permitting, and project management carried locally before award are real and unreimbursed. Sponsors that already spent that money are the ones positioned to file by October 19.
Plan for the reallocation channel. The FAA operates an AIG Funding Reallocation program for unobligated Airport Infrastructure Grant funds. Sponsors who miss the competitive window, or whose project matures mid-year, should track that pathway rather than waiting a full twelve months.
The structural point for airport sponsors is that this program changed character between FY2025 and FY2026 and has not changed back. A competition that used to distribute $1–2 million equipment grants to twenty airports now funds tower replacements outright, with no local match, on a compressed timeline, to a fixed roster of 266 eligible sponsors. If you are on that roster with a shovel-ready tower project, this is the most favorable federal capital program available to you — and the next 25 days are the whole opportunity. If you are mapping infrastructure programs with eligibility gates that close before the notice ever publishes, Granted can help you find the ones you need to qualify for now, a year ahead of the money.