The aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75) is back at the shipyard that built it. Truman arrived at HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding division in Virginia on Sept. 30, 2026, to start its refueling and complex overhaul, the mid-life yard period in which a Nimitz-class carrier’s reactors are refueled and most of its systems are modernized. Truman is the eighth carrier of the class to go through it.
The work is covered by a $5,099,973,132 contract that HII announced on Sept. 29, the day before the ship arrived. The carrier was christened in 1996 and delivered to the Navy in 1998, according to HII, and the overhaul is meant to carry her through the second half of a planned service life the company puts at more than 50 years.
HII’s Sept. 30 release announcing Truman’s arrival describes the overhaul as “representing about a third of all maintenance and modernization completed during its service life that will span over 50 years.” The release lists hull and freeboard blast and paint; propeller, sea chest, shaft and rudder repairs; and the defueling and refueling of the ship’s power plant among the work ahead.
“This extensive engineering and construction project to ready the ship to rejoin the fleet is a team effort, across shipbuilders, suppliers and our Navy partners.” — Bryan Caccavale, Newport News Shipbuilding vice president of program management
The $5.1 billion overhaul contract
The contract value comes from HII’s Sept. 29 award announcement: $5,099,973,132 for the base work, with options that could bring the cumulative value to $5,183,380,744. The release says the job covers “refueling the ship’s reactors, as well as extensive modernization work in thousands of compartments and tanks, as well as on most ship systems,” along with major upgrades to the propulsion plant and combat systems.
“Our team has been diligently working to get ahead on this critical engineering and construction project that will prepare USS Harry S. Truman for the second half of her service life,” Caccavale said in that release. HII also states that Truman will be the eighth Nimitz-class carrier to undergo the overhaul at Newport News.
The schedule is long. USNI News, reporting the Navy’s award on Sept. 29, wrote that “work is expected to be completed by November 2031.” The same report noted that the Norfolk-based carrier “has been in a pierside maintenance phase since returning from deployment in June of 2025.”
Advance planning since January 2024
The shipyard did not start cold. On Jan. 26, 2024, HII announced an advance planning contract for the Truman overhaul with a total potential value of $913 million. That work covered engineering, design, material procurement and fabrication, documentation, resource forecasting and pre-overhaul inspections, according to the 2024 release.
“Comprehensive planning is vitally important to the overall success of an engineering and construction project of this magnitude on the aircraft carriers that serve our nation,” Rob Check, Newport News Shipbuilding’s vice president of in-service aircraft carrier programs, said at the time. The award came more than two and a half years before the ship reached the yard.
A Newport News carrier from the keel up
Truman’s history runs through the same yard. The Navy’s Naval Air Force Atlantic command history for CVN 75 records that Newport News Shipbuilding laid the keel for the $4.5 billion warship on Nov. 29, 1993. Margaret Truman Daniel, the ship’s sponsor, christened her on Sept. 7, 1996, and the carrier was commissioned on July 25, 1998, at Naval Station Norfolk before an estimated 20,000 people.
The command history describes Truman as “the ninth nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and the eighth in the Nimitz class.” Twenty-eight years after commissioning, she is now the eighth of that class to come back to Newport News for refueling, a job HII’s own figures put at about a third of all the maintenance and modernization the ship will receive in its life.
On completion, HII’s Sept. 30 release says, the recapitalized carrier will continue to serve as the fleet’s centerpiece for decades. Under the Navy’s schedule as reported by USNI News, that return is set for November 2031, with the reactors refueled and the propulsion plant and combat systems upgraded under the contract HII announced on Sept. 29.
Top image: USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75) underway in the Atlantic, Sept. 11, 2018. Image Credit: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Thomas Gooley — Public domain / Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Combat Rated editors prior to publication.