Honduras Courts US Investment for Ports and Energy as Remittances Reach US$7.7 Billion

HONDURAS · ECONOMY

Honduras is pitching itself to Washington as a nearshoring bet, with a US-funded study for a coast-to-coast corridor and ports on two oceans. At home, remittances reached US$7,692.2 million in the first seven months of 2026, up 11.2 percent on the year.

What Washington signed in Arlington

On 5 March 2026, the US Trade and Development Agency hosted President Nasry Asfura in Arlington, Virginia. The agency, known as USTDA, funds project preparation in emerging markets, always with an eye on US exports.

The two sides signed an agreement to accelerate an overland corridor linking the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. The signing came ahead of President Donald Trump’s Shield of the Americas Summit in Miami.

USTDA will pay for a feasibility study covering new port and rail infrastructure. Deputy director Thomas R. Hardy said the goal is secure US trade routes, built with American technology and free of Chinese influence.

The money goes to CONFI, the state commission charged with building an interoceanic railway. CONFI has picked Hudson-Arvon LLC, a New Jersey firm trading as ShorelineHudson, to run the study.

The consultants will examine bottlenecks at two ports. One is San Lorenzo, on the Pacific Gulf of Fonseca, and the other is Puerto Cortés, the country’s main Caribbean gateway for container cargo.

The study will also design an inland rail terminal to ease congestion at Puerto Cortés. It then recommends rail standards and a financing plan built around US suppliers.

That supplier list is the commercial point of the exercise. USTDA names locomotives, freight wagons, container-handling equipment, terminal operating systems and security systems.

An old dream with a new sponsor

The interoceanic railway is one of the oldest ideas in national politics. A first attempt in the nineteenth century collapsed in debt, and the project has resurfaced in almost every decade since.

What is different this time is the sponsor. The United States now frames the corridor as a supply-chain security project, not just a national development plan.

The corridor study sits inside a wider courtship of the new government. On 14 May, Ben Black, chief executive of the US International Development Finance Corporation, met Asfura in Tegucigalpa.

Black travelled with a delegation led by Caleb Orr, the State Department’s top economic affairs official. He named energy and port modernisation as priority sectors for US investment.

Asfura, who took office at the start of 2026 after a Trump-backed election win, needs the capital. His government has moved to rejoin ICSID, the World Bank’s arbitration body, to reassure foreign investors.

It has also extended the Temporary Import Regime, the tax-incentive scheme that anchors the country’s maquila export industry. Road repairs are the visible domestic priority, after a slow start drew public criticism.

Remittances keep climbing, but the pace is cooling

The other half of the economy is money sent home by migrants. Family remittances reached US$7,692.2 million between January and July 2026, the Central Bank reported.

That is 11.2 percent more than in the same period of 2025. It keeps remittances far ahead of exports, tourism and foreign investment as the country’s top source of foreign currency.

The flows equal roughly a quarter of gross domestic product. Some 98.5 percent of the money originates in the United States, where about 1.8 million Hondurans live, with or without papers.

Growth is still in double digits, but it is cooling. Remittances jumped 25.3 percent in 2025 to a record US$12,212 million, and the central bank expects moderation this year.

The regional picture shows the same pattern. Remittances to the three Northern Triangle countries, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, reached US$24,554.6 million in the first half of 2026, up 7.8 percent, according to International Organization for Migration data.

Mothers receive more than 37 percent of the transfers. Over 80 percent of the money goes to food, health and education, the central bank says.

The 1 percent tax and the deportation risk

Two US policy shifts hang over the numbers. Since 1 January 2026, the United States has applied a 1 percent tax to remittances sent from its territory.

The levy has not stopped the flows, but it raises the cost of sending money home. The central bank also lists a US slowdown and rising deportations as persistent risks for this year.

That combination explains the official caution. In January the bank projected about US$10,670 million for all of 2026, below the record 2025 total, precisely because of migration policy.

The January-to-July figure already covers 72 percent of that projection. Households, in other words, are beating the official forecast even as Washington tightens the screws.

What to watch from here

The first marker is the ShorelineHudson study itself. Neither USTDA nor CONFI has published a deadline for its conclusions.

The second is whether American interest becomes committed money. Delegations and feasibility studies are cheap, while financed ports and railways are not.

The third is the remittance trend into the final quarter. December is traditionally the strongest month, and December 2025 alone brought US$1,106.3 million.

For now, the country offers Washington a friendly government and a strategic corridor. In return, it asks for the one thing studies cannot deliver, which is construction.

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