Serbia’s national football stadium is now expected to be completed in early 2028, placing the project beyond Expo 2027 and adding another revision to a timetable that initially envisaged completion before the international exhibition.
Construction will be suspended from mid-May until mid-August 2027 while the Expo is under way. The stadium is being built within the wider Surčin development zone, close to exhibition halls, a railway station and major road infrastructure. Officials say the pause is necessary because continued heavy construction would create safety and logistical risks for visitors.
The revised schedule matters because the stadium and the Expo precinct have repeatedly been presented as elements of the same development programme. The stadium will no longer be operational during the event, even though substantial public expenditure will already have been committed to it.
Work formally began on May 1 2024. The 52,000-seat venue was designed by Spain’s Fenwick Iribarren Architects, while PowerChina is the principal contractor. The site required 2,300 piles to stabilise weak ground before the main structure could advance.
The roof’s steel structure is approaching completion and seating tiers are being installed, but significant interior, mechanical and finishing works remain. The official completion target has moved from December 2026 to March 2027 and now to the beginning of 2028.
The government maintains that the price of the stadium itself will not significantly exceed €460mn, with the current figure put at approximately €468mn. That compares with an initial study that estimated the project at about €257mn.
Budget data raise questions about the final cost and the boundaries used in official estimates. More than RSD49bn, equivalent to roughly €420mn, had already been spent by the reported cut-off point. The budget provides another RSD16.4bn for 2027 and RSD7.2bn for 2028, together worth about €201mn.
Those figures cannot be reconciled directly with the stated €468mn price without more detail on what each budget line covers, whether the amounts include taxes and associated works, and how payments are divided between the stadium contract and the surrounding infrastructure.
Annual execution has also been uneven. In 2023, RSD17.3bn was spent against a plan of RSD22.4bn. Spending reached RSD25.6bn in 2024 against a planned RSD31bn. In 2025, only RSD2.5bn was spent from an allocation of RSD18.5bn, while expenditure in the first five months of 2026 amounted to RSD3.87bn from a planned RSD21.2bn.
Low execution does not necessarily mean that physical construction has stopped. Payments on large contracts can be concentrated around certified milestones. But repeated differences between planned and realised spending make the cost-to-complete calculation more difficult and can push obligations into later budget years.
The Fiscal Council has estimated that the stadium and related infrastructure could together cost more than €960mn. That broader figure includes works needed to make the venue accessible and operational, rather than only the stadium structure. The distinction is economically relevant but less meaningful for taxpayers, who ultimately finance the full precinct.
The project is being funded through a mixture of budget resources, bond issuance and commercial borrowing. Unlike some Serbian infrastructure schemes involving Chinese contractors, it is not presented as a project financed through a dedicated Chinese state loan.
For investors assessing Serbia’s public finances, the principal concern is not that a major stadium has been delayed by several months. It is whether the government can publish a stable definition of the project, reconcile spending with the stated contract value and prevent schedule changes from generating additional claims.
The Expo construction pause was foreseeable once the stadium and exhibition site were placed in the same zone. Its financial consequences will depend on the contractor’s entitlement to extensions, site-maintenance costs and the sequencing of works before and after the exhibition.
