The US Navy has awarded Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) a $5.10 billion contract to refuel and modernise aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75).
HII announced the award to its Newport News Shipbuilding division on September 29. Options could raise the contract’s value to $5.18 billion, with work scheduled for completion in November 2031 in Newport News, Virginia.
The navy initially obligated $547,826,087 in fiscal year 2026 shipbuilding and conversion, navy funds.
The refuelling and complex overhaul (RCOH) will include refuelling both nuclear reactors and work in thousands of compartments and tanks. Major upgrades are slated for the propulsion plant and combat systems, alongside work on most ship systems.
HII said the overhaul accounts for almost one-third of the maintenance and modernisation an aircraft carrier receives over its service life.
“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,” said Bryan Caccavale, Newport News Shipbuilding vice president of program management.
The execution award follows a January 2024 advanced-planning contract with a potential value of $913 million. That work involved engineering and design, procurement of materials, fabrication, documentation, forecasting of resources and inspections before the overhaul.
The navy said in June 2026 that commercial contracts would take on supplementary shipyard tasks during the overhaul, including painting and transportation.
It said the approach could return up to one million man-hours to Truman’s crew, allowing sailors to concentrate on training.
By June, five such contracts had returned about 690,000 labour hours to crews, with five more planned over the following five years.
The navy has also scheduled full repair of the carrier’s collision damage during the RCOH.
Truman collided with merchant vessel Besiktas-M near Port Said, Egypt, on February 12, 2025, and subsequently underwent repairs in Greece to restore weathertight integrity before returning to operations.
