By Darian Macey, January 7 2026
Those expecting a “Christmas present” from Service Delivery Division in the form of an updated forecast will be disappointed. Nothing is coming before mid-2026.
Contractors should not expect an updated Estate Works Program (EWP) procurement forecast until at least June 2026. That is now explicit on Defence’s website, and it matters more than Defence seems willing to acknowledge.
According to the EWP webpage, the delay is due to the transition to new Project Delivery Services providers, onboarding activities, and a program rebalance to redistribute workloads and confirm priorities. In plain terms, the machine is being reconfigured, and Defence is not prepared to publish a forward view until it settles.
Even if that explanation was administratively reasonable (which is a stretch given the PDS transition-in period started six months ago), the consequences are not.
For small and mid-sized builders, the Estate Works Program forecast is more than a nice-to-have. It underpins workforce planning, subcontractor engagement, cashflow modelling, and decisions about whether to stay in the Defence market at all. Telling industry to wait another six months or more, with no interim visibility, simply pushes risk downhill to the businesses least able to absorb it.
What makes this harder to swallow is that Estate Works Program tenders continue to be released every week. That is a clear signal that many projects are already allocated to Project Delivery Services providers and are progressing through the system. In other words, Defence does have line of sight over a substantial portion of the pipeline. It is just not sharing it.
No one in industry expects the forecast to be perfect. Everyone understands that scopes shift, budgets move, and priorities change. But anything is better than nothing. Even a partial, indicative, or caveated list would be materially better than silence.
This is not just an information problem; it is a confidence problem. Defence continues to say it wants to support SME participation in the Estate Works Program, yet withholds the very information SMEs rely on to plan sensibly. The result is frustration, wasted effort, and growing scepticism about whether the system is genuinely designed with smaller builders in mind.
DECNet will continue to liaise directly with PDS regional leads to gather what updates we can and share them with our subscribers. That said, this should not be left to informal back-channels and analyst workarounds.
If Defence wants a stable, capable, and competitive Estate Works market, it needs to do better on pipeline visibility. Publishing nothing for an entire year, while tenders continue to flow, is not good enough.
A notice will eventually appear on AusTender when the 2026 forecast is finalised. By then, many smaller firms will already have made hard decisions in the dark.
Author: Darian Macey
Darian is a former Engineering Officer with the RAE with tertiary qualifications in Engineering and Project Management. He is a leading practitioner within Australia's NSI sector with previous employment in Government, project management and building contractor organisations.
