Commercial
SCIF Construction Booms Across Greater D.C. as Defense Spending Surges
By Real Estate Wire Staff, . Real Estate Wire.
Sensitive compartmented information facilities, the heavily shielded rooms where government officials and contractors handle classified national security work, are driving one of the few genuine growth stories in the Greater Washington office market right now. Bisnow reported the trend in depth, drawing on data from JLL, Savills and several major contractors.
According to JLL's second-quarter SCIF report, the volume of projects handled by the firm's secure environments group in Northern Virginia and Maryland rose from 907,000 SF in 2023 to 1.3 million SF in 2024 to 1.6 million SF in 2025. JLL's Brian Metras, who heads the group, told Bisnow that SCIF inventory in the region has increased 430% over the past five years. "We're in the boom," Metras said. "We accredited 35 SCIFs last year. This year, we're doing 45 SCIF spaces, 1.3M SF, just in our group."
The spending backdrop explains much of the acceleration. Defense contract spending in Maryland and Northern Virginia climbed from $46.1 billion in 2023 to $76.3 billion in 2024 to $79.7 billion in 2025, according to JLL. Savills Managing Director Nicholas DiChiara told Bisnow that a shift in contracting strategy is also a factor: the federal government is awarding more contracts to smaller defense companies that do not already have SCIF infrastructure, creating fresh build-out demand that the established primes never generated.
A 2025 federal directive requiring existing SCIF space to be upgraded to new radio frequency protection standards added another layer of demand. That directive was rescinded in May, Bisnow reported, and the final requirements and revised deadline remain unclear. But contractors say clients are not waiting. HITT Contracting Vice President Cullen Hitt told Bisnow that many tenants are concluding it is cheaper to build new space than to retrofit existing facilities, and that his firm's private-sector SCIF work has expanded 20% to 30% over the past year and a half to two years. HITT has grown its SCIF team by 10% to 20% in response.
Davis Construction Director Dustin Hoffman, who leads a secure space team at the firm, told Bisnow that Davis is now actively working on 10 to 20 SCIFs at any given time, up from five to ten a year or two ago and just a handful four or five years back. "Our group, we're turning down some SCIFs because we can't meet the demand," Hoffman said. Clune Construction Senior Vice President Conor Brandquist described the trajectory as "a hockey stick" and said his firm had received roughly 10 SCIF opportunities in the prior month and a half.
For landlords, the dynamic is structurally different from conventional office leasing. Because SCIFs cannot be transferred to a new tenant in anything close to a completed state, each occupant must build from scratch, making the facilities extraordinarily sticky. DiChiara put it plainly: "Ninety-nine times out of 100, someone's going in there, they're building their own SCIF."
JBG Smith is the clearest public example of a landlord capitalizing on this. In his August shareholder letter, CEO Matt Kelly described SCIF demand at National Landing as "particularly strong" and said 92% of the REIT's National Landing GSA tenancy now has a SCIF in place, which he called "a lasting competitive advantage that is difficult to replicate elsewhere in the market." JBG Executive Vice President of Leasing Brian Cotter told Bisnow that when the Department of Labor returned significant space at National Landing last year, the REIT was able to backfill it with a secure government user.
The harder question for the broader Northern Virginia office market is how widely the SCIF boom distributes its benefits. DiChiara told Bisnow that landlords with established track records in the sector will capture the majority of demand, because tenants require trust and proven capability. Other landlords are trying to enter the market, Hoffman noted, precisely because SCIF tenants are so difficult to displace once they are in. Whether that competitive pressure produces meaningful new supply or simply concentrates activity among a small group of experienced operators is the dynamic worth watching over the next 12 to 18 months. The rescission of the 2025 upgrade directive also leaves a regulatory variable unresolved: if a new deadline is set with stricter requirements, another wave of retrofit-versus-rebuild decisions could follow.