Booz Allen Hamilton announced in November 2025 that it would move its global headquarters from McLean to Reston Station. The announcement came with a target of fall 2027 and little else, and the company has said nothing publicly about the schedule since.
The first building permits were issued at 1870 Reston Row Plaza in early September. Demolition and framing are now filed at both towers. Forty-eight construction records have gone into Fairfax County since August 3 under a single project name, and in the county’s files that name is spelled Project Lightening.
What lands at Reston Station when the work finishes is a Fortune 500 global headquarters, roughly 310,000 square feet of offices, and a five-minute walk to the Wiehle-Reston East Metro station.
Booz Allen is taking two towers and treating them as one building
Booz Allen leased the entire nine-story building at 1870 Reston Row Plaza, 220,000 square feet, plus multiple floors of the thirteen-story building next door at 1800. Both sit in The Row at Reston Station, the second of five planned phases of Comstock’s 90-acre development wrapped around the Metro station and the Dulles Toll Road. HKS Architects designed the towers, Michael Graves Architecture handled the interior common spaces, and both buildings are built to LEED Silver.
The county records show the work moving through them in order. Framing and demolition permits at 1870 were issued in September, which means crews can proceed. On September 16, eight more permits landed at 1800, four for demolition and four for framing. Demolition and framing filed the same day, in one stack, is a contractor sequencing a full interior build rather than a small fit-out.
A 1,500-square-foot bridge will join the towers at the seventh floor
In December 2024, Comstock asked Fairfax County for permission to build an elevated pedestrian bridge between the two office buildings, on behalf of a tenant it declined to name. The application, RZPA-2024-HM-00052, described an enclosed span of roughly 1,500 square feet crossing the internal road. The Planning Commission recommended approval in July 2025. The Board of Supervisors approved it on October 14, 2025. Booz Allen was revealed as the tenant five weeks later.
The build-out at 1800 runs in numbered phases, and Phase 1 is Level 7. The seventh floor went first because the seventh floor carries the bridge.
The bridge itself has not been filed. No building permit for it appears anywhere in the Reston Row records. Two Code Modification requests do sit at 1870 under Booz Allen’s name, both filed August 5 and both still under review. A code modification asks the county to accept an alternative to a literal requirement in the building code. Neither record names the bridge.
Booz Allen is taking 27 percent less space than it leaves behind
The company has occupied 8283 Greensboro Drive in McLean since that ten-story building went up in 1997. It holds 428,000 square feet there. The Reston Row lease is 310,000, a reduction of about 27 percent for a company with roughly 32,500 employees worldwide.
Chief Operating Officer Kristine Martin Anderson framed it that way in the announcement, saying the new headquarters would give employees upgraded resources “while rightsizing our facilities footprint.” Booz Allen went through a slowdown in revenue growth and two rounds of layoffs during 2025 as federal spending tightened. The McLean building comes offline in 2028, a year after the Reston space opens.
Booz Allen has not said where the project name came from. Fairfax County spells it Lightening in all forty-eight records, rather than Lightning. Lightening is a word about making something lighter.
Booz Allen has been in this corridor before, leasing most of the Dulles Overlook building at 575 Herndon Parkway for about thirteen years.
Four cleared-workforce employers filed on Reston space in a single month
Anduril filed for floors at One Freedom Square in Reston Town Center. GRVTY filed to put its name on a Herndon office building at Dulles View. CACI filed its certificate of occupancy for roughly 140,000 square feet at Reston Commons on Sunset Hills Road. And Booz Allen moved demolition and framing into the second of its two towers.
Four employers with cleared workforces committed space inside one month, inside one corridor, within walking distance of two Silver Line stations. The people those companies hire rent and buy near their offices, and the Reston Row build-out puts roughly 310,000 square feet of that demand a short walk from Wiehle-Reston East.
The JW Marriott hotel and the residences above it opened into the same block last year. Adding a Fortune 500 headquarters to it gives Reston Station a daytime population it did not have two years ago.
The bridge permit is the next record to watch
Three of the 1870 permits are issued, which means work can proceed there, and the rest of the demolition and framing stack is waiting on county review. The 1800 permits filed last week sit about a week of paperwork behind them.
The bridge is the record that has not appeared. When a building permit for it shows up at 1800 or 1870, the seventh floors connect and the two towers become one headquarters in practice.
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