Anduril Is Taking Floors at Reston Town Center: What Four County Permits Show

Fairfax County issued two more interior build-out permits at One Freedom Square on August 31. That makes four permits at the same Reston Town Center office tower inside eight days, two of them carrying Anduril’s name in the project description. We searched for coverage of any of them on Friday morning and found none.

Anduril Industries builds autonomous systems, sensors, and software for the United States military and its allies. The company’s publicly listed Reston address is 11955 Freedom Drive, which is Two Freedom Square. All four permits sit next door at 11951 Freedom Drive, One Freedom Square. Those are two separate towers with two separate addresses, and that gap between the directory listing and the permit record is a good part of the reason this activity has gone unnoticed.

The four permits

The county’s own record spells the company two ways. One project description reads “Anduril” and another reads “Andruil.” A keyword search of the permit database returns an incomplete picture because of it, which is a useful thing to know about Fairfax PLUS generally.

Read the descriptions in order and they describe a tenant moving through a building in stages. Phase 2 covers the fifth floor. Phase 3 covers suite 200 on the second floor. Interior alteration permits of this type cover demolition, partitions, electrical, mechanical, and finishes inside existing shell space, so these are fit-out jobs rather than new construction.

What the permits do not say

Square footage is not in the permit record for any of the four. Neither is headcount, lease term, nor a move-in date. Fairfax County’s interior alteration permits capture the work being done and the suite it happens in, and leave the commercial terms to the parties. Everything below is read from the permit record and from the public leasing history of this block. Neither BXP nor Anduril has announced anything, and this post does not claim otherwise.

A landlord finishing space while a tenant takes floors

The other two permits belong to the building’s owner rather than to a tenant. A spec suite is office space a landlord builds out to a finished, move-in-ready condition before signing anyone, on the bet that a tenant will take it faster if the walls, ceilings, and lighting are already in. Suites 1300 and 1340 put two of them on the thirteenth floor.

Set the four permits side by side and they describe two different bets on the same tower. One tenant is taking floors in phases from the bottom, and BXP is finishing space on speculation near the top. Landlords build spec suites in markets where they expect showings.

Reston Town Center has been filling up for a year

The Anduril permits are not an isolated event on this block. BXP announced on January 13, 2026 that all 1.1 million square feet of office space in the first phase of RTC Next had leased, with Fannie Mae, Volkswagen Group of America, Noblis, Palo Alto Networks, and Ofinno among the tenants. Bechtel, which has kept its headquarters in Reston since 2012, renewed and expanded to roughly 289,000 square feet across eleven floors of Reston Overlook.

Two more government technology firms signed this summer. TekSynap took 26,500 square feet on the second floor of 11921 Freedom Drive in early August. The company runs cloud integration, cybersecurity, and IT modernization work for civilian, defense, and intelligence agencies, and counts roughly 1,800 employees including subcontractors. MetroStar Systems signed for 37,844 square feet at 12010 Sunset Hills Road, moving up from about 24,000 square feet on Old Reston Avenue, with more than 500 employees and a target of the second quarter of 2027.

That runs against the direction of most Reston development news this year. We have covered Toll Brothers filing to replace a 1975 office building on Association Drive with 54 townhomes and Maker’s Point proposing hundreds of homes on an aging Sunrise Valley Drive office park. Older, lower-density office product on the corridor’s edges is coming down for housing. Amenitized towers at the core are absorbing tenants.

The defense and engineering base underneath it

Fairfax County’s economic development authority counts 38 of the world’s 100 largest defense companies operating inside county lines, more than 125 aerospace and defense firms across Northern Virginia, and a sector workforce above 184,000. Seventy companies relocated to or expanded within Fairfax in the past three years.

Reston holds a large share of that. Leidos runs its headquarters here. Bechtel runs its headquarters here. Peraton, Booz Allen Hamilton, and General Dynamics all carry Northern Virginia operations, and the county’s list of aerospace and defense employers reads like a directory of the Dulles corridor.

Smaller firms are growing faster in percentage terms. Blue Sky Innovators, a Reston defense technology company, announced a $7 million expansion on March 30, 2026 that adds 175 jobs and builds SkyLab, a 20,000-square-foot secure facility for electromagnetic spectrum and national security work. Virginia backed it with an $840,000 Commonwealth’s Opportunity Fund grant.

The space companies are here too

The Fairfax EDA ranks the Washington region first in the world for combined government and private space investment at $142.5 billion, third for aerospace and engineering employment, and second for computer and mathematical employment.

HawkEye 360 anchors the local commercial side from its Herndon headquarters, where it operates a satellite constellation that collects radio frequency intelligence. Umbra Space and SpiderOak both list Reston addresses. Scout Space, which builds sensors and autonomy software for space domain awareness, announced on June 10, 2026 that it would add 31 jobs and more than $1 million of new office and manufacturing space. Blue Origin opened a Reston location in 2022, and The Aerospace Corporation moved its headquarters to Chantilly in 2024.

Put the three threads together and the Dulles corridor is adding defense contracting, engineering, and space payload work at the same time, in the same twelve miles, and largely in buildings that already exist.

The employers named in this post

Why this work concentrates on the Dulles corridor

Cleared programs need three things in one place: proximity to the agencies that buy them, buildings that can be secured, and a labor pool that already holds clearances. Northern Virginia has carried all three since the 1980s, and the office stock built along the Dulles Toll Road during that period was designed with the second one in mind. Blue Sky Innovators is spending part of its $7 million on a 20,000-square-foot secure facility rather than on open floor plan. That is the shape of the demand.

The Silver Line added a fourth ingredient. A tenant on Freedom Drive can now recruit from Loudoun County, Tysons, Arlington, and the District without asking anyone to sit on the toll road. Fairfax County’s economic development authority counts 70 company relocations or expansions inside the county in the past three years, and the county’s aerospace and defense workforce sits above 184,000 people.

What these jobs pay

Anduril’s posted Reston openings carry published salary bands. A senior embedded software engineer role lists $168,000 to $252,000. A computer vision software engineer role lists the same band. A senior manufacturing engineer role lists $146,000 to $194,000 and requires an active Secret clearance.

For comparison, the Bureau of Labor Statistics put Fairfax County’s average weekly wage at $2,451 in the first quarter of 2026 across 622,800 jobs, which ranks thirteenth among all counties in the United States. Annualized, that average lands near $127,000. The engineering roles on Freedom Drive start above it and top out at roughly double.

Two features of these jobs matter for housing. Cleared work generally happens in a secure facility, so remote arrangements are limited and the commute is real. And the salary bands clear the qualifying income for most of what sells inside Reston’s urban core.

What it means for the housing market here

The Reston Town Center Association counts roughly 5,000 residences inside Reston Town Center across condominiums, townhomes, and apartments. The condominium buildings include Midtown, the Savoy, Market Street, and Stratford. On the rental side, the Harrison, Signature at Reston Town Center, the Avant, and Cosmopolitan all sit within a short walk of Freedom Drive. Every floor that fills at One Freedom Square adds households who can walk to work from any of them, and Reston Station catches the same commuter one Silver Line stop east.

The jobs arriving on this block have a particular shape. Cleared work happens inside a secure facility, so the employee comes in most days and the commute is a fixed cost rather than a preference. An engineer relocating on a posted band of $168,000 to $252,000 usually arrives without a house to sell, often with relocation money, and shops on proximity and speed. That buyer rents first more often than not, then buys within a year or two once the clearance transfers and the program looks durable.

Supply is not moving at the same pace. The first phase of RTC Next delivered 1.1 million square feet of office and a retail lineup, not for-sale housing. The new for-sale product entering the Reston pipeline sits outside the Town Center core, on Association Drive and along Sunrise Valley Drive, and most of it is years from delivery. Meanwhile TekSynap moved onto Freedom Drive in August with roughly 1,800 employees and subcontractors, MetroStar brings more than 500 people to Sunset Hills Road in 2027, Blue Sky Innovators is adding 175 positions, and Anduril is on its third permitted phase inside one tower. Employment at the core is growing faster than for-sale inventory at the core, and the existing condominium buildings absorb the difference.

For owners in those buildings, that is the case for reading a permit record. Four filings on one tower is a small signal on its own. Set next to a year of leasing news on the same six blocks, it points where the rest of that news points.

What we are watching

Four things would move this story. A square footage disclosure from BXP or Anduril. A fifth permit at 11951, which would extend the pattern past three floors. A certificate of occupancy, which would set an actual move-in. And whether the two thirteenth floor spec suites lease quickly, which is the cleanest available read on how deep demand runs in this building.

We track Fairfax County permit and rezoning filings for Reston and Herndon every week, and we publish what they show before it reaches the news. If you are buying or selling near Reston Town Center or Reston Station, or you are relocating here for a defense or government technology role and want to understand which buildings actually fit your commute, reach out to us at Greater Reston Living. We will walk you through both districts and what is available in each.