Every site presentation in Slovakia carries a motorway map, and every motorway map flatters the country, because it shows the finished network rather than the year each piece arrives. Read the D1 and D3 completion schedule as a calendar instead and the picture narrows sharply. One section opens in 2026. The Kysuce sections are contracted to 2029. The gap that would make the D1 continuous is still in a permitting file. This piece sets out the dates as they stand, and what the submarket table already says about how slowly roads move markets.
What D1 and D3 completion delivers in 2026
One section. The D1 between Hubová and Ivachnová runs 14.92 km, carries the 3.6 km Čebrať tunnel, nineteen bridges and three interchanges, and takes the through traffic out of Ružomberok. The national motorway company contracted it to OHL ŽS and Váhostav-SK for just under EUR 289 million without VAT, and puts the saving against the first-class road at about sixteen minutes.
The date has moved. The state plan published in December 2025 had it opening in March or May 2026. On 24 August 2026 the transport minister said the first half of October. On 5 September, three days before this was written, the reporting from the site described final maintenance inside the Čebrať tunnel, remediation of ground affected by historical landslides, and safety-system and load tests still to come.
Nothing else in the 2026 column is a new road. The Bratislava to Triblavina work adds lanes to 3.6 km of motorway that already exists. The three Kysuce contracts and the Rajec connector are ground-breakings, not openings. So the year delivers under fifteen kilometres of new motorway, all of it one bypass in one valley. A bypass removes a queue. It does not put a new labour catchment inside a drive time, and it does not create a lettable location that did not exist in 2025.
The gap that is still sitting in a permitting file
Turany to Hubová is the piece that would make the D1 continuous between Bratislava and Košice. It is about fourteen kilometres long, and more than half of it runs in two tunnels: Korbeľka, close to six kilometres, and Havran. The ministry holds it as a strategic investment, and the cost carried in the reporting of August 2026 is EUR 1.573 billion.
The stage matters more than the cost. Territorial proceedings opened in October 2025. In August 2026 the motorway company was still filing statements from affected authorities, and the Žilina building office published the supplementary documents on 10 August with a fifteen-day period for comment. After that come the building permit, the tender and the contract. Construction itself is expected to last seven years.
Put those together and the arithmetic is uncomfortable rather than dramatic. An occupier signing a five-year lease in Žilina, Martin or Ružomberok this year will hand the keys back long before the D1 runs unbroken past the site. A ten-year term is a coin toss. That is worth holding next to the way rents already split along the corridor, which we set out in the piece on the D1 corridor and the south. The road is not a reason to pay more in 2026. It is a reason to ask who owns the building in 2034.
The D3 has been arriving on the Kysuce since 2004
End to end the D3 is 59.1 km, from Hričovské Podhradie to the Polish border. The project portal run by the Kysuce business association records 37.1 km in operation, 22 km under construction and a further 4.8 km being widened to full profile. The first Kysuce section opened in April 2004. The border section opened in June 2017 in half profile. The middle is what is being built now.
The paperwork is recent and it is real. The building permit for Kysucké Nové Mesto to Oščadnica became final on 12 September 2025, the permit for Žilina Brodno to Kysucké Nové Mesto on 17 October 2025, the contracts with the builders were signed on 30 September 2025, and the motorway company records the start of works on 29 December 2025 for both. The three contracts together are worth about EUR 890 million, of which 85 per cent is European money.
The completion year is where the honesty has to sit. The contracts are written to 2029. The project portal that tracks the same works already prints 2030. Either way, an occupier looking at Žilina or the Kysuce valley in 2026 is buying three or four years of construction traffic first and the relief afterwards. The order is the whole point: the disruption falls inside the lease being signed now, and the benefit falls outside it.
What the submarket table already says about roads
Here is an own word count, made on 8 September 2026 on the full extracted text of the Cushman and Wakefield Slovakia Industrial MarketBeat for the first quarter of 2026. The word motorway does not appear once. Nor do highway, road, infrastructure, junction, corridor, transport, D1 and D3. Žilina appears twice, both times as a submarket name. The document that draws the Slovak submarket map and prices every box in it never names the thing that drew the map. Our glossary sets out how those eleven boxes are drawn, and by whom. The MarketBeat is not being careless. It is reporting the result, and the result arrives years after the tarmac.
Read the table and the lag is visible. Slovak modern stock stood at 4,864,800 sq m across eleven submarkets. Bratislava City held 513,100 sq m, Bratislava North 638,200 sq m, the Senec area 895,900 sq m and the Trnava area 933,100 sq m. Those four sit on the oldest finished motorway in the country, and by our own addition they hold 2,980,300 sq m, about sixty-one per cent of everything the country has. The Žilina area, the submarket the D3 is being built for, held 403,800 sq m at 6.8 per cent vacancy with 40,000 sq m under construction. Prešov held 212,100 sq m and central Slovakia 119,500 sq m.
There is no Kysuce submarket in that table, and no Orava submarket either. The researchers have not drawn one, because there is not enough modern stock to report. That is the practical answer to what a completion date does to a submarket. For years it does nothing at all, and then it turns up as stock.
How to price a road date inside a lease term
Start by refusing to pay for it twice. A landlord who prices a 2029 or a 2034 road into a 2026 rent is asking the tenant to fund an option that the landlord will still own when the road opens. The quoted prime rent range for the Žilina area in the first quarter of 2026 was EUR 4.70 to EUR 5.30 per sq m per month, against EUR 3.60 to EUR 4.30 in Trnava. Whatever explains that spread today, it is not a motorway that has not been permitted.
Put the date in the break, not in the rent. If the road genuinely changes what a site is worth to the business, the instrument for that is a break option or a renewal right timed to the year the section opens, not a higher headline rent paid from the first month. And do not price the detour as a saving in the meantime: our reading of the toll decree showed that the table for first-class roads running parallel to a motorway is identical, cell for cell, to the motorway table. The old road through the valley costs the same per kilometre and takes longer.
Then watch the pipeline rather than the ribbon. Under construction was 265,800 sq m nationally in the second quarter of 2026, with vacancy at 7.8 per cent, the highest in five years. Those two numbers move a negotiation this year. A completion date in 2029 does not, which is the same split we described in the review of the second quarter.
Conclusion
The D1 and D3 programme in 2026 is one bypass in the Váh valley and a lot of ground-breaking. The Kysuce sections are written to 2029 and printed as 2030. The last D1 gap is still in territorial proceedings with a seven-year build behind it. None of that is an argument against the north, and none of it is a reason to sign now at a premium. It is a reason to keep the road out of the rent, put it in the break date, and judge the site on the labour, the power and the building it has in the year the lease actually runs.