If you’ve ever winced at a $2,500 transmission bill, I’ve got some perspective for you. The Navy just dropped a ship off for service. The bill is $5.1 billion, and the shop says it’ll be ready in November 2031.
The ship is the USS Harry S. Truman, a 1,092-foot nuclear aircraft carrier that’s been in the fleet since 1998. On Wednesday she left her pier at Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, and made the short run over to Newport News Shipbuilding, the same yard that built her. HII confirmed her arrival on September 30. As commutes go, it’s basically nothing. As stays go, it’s a hair over five years.
The job is called a Refueling and Complex Overhaul, or RCOH, and the Navy describes it as a “once-in-a-carrier-lifetime” maintenance period. Every Nimitz-class carrier gets exactly one, at midlife, and it sets the ship up for the back half of a service life that runs past 50 years. The contract, awarded to the yard a day before the ship showed up, comes to $5,099,973,132, with options that would push it to about $5.2 billion.
So what do you get for that kind of money?
The fuel only comes out once
The Truman runs on two Westinghouse A4W nuclear reactors. They boil water into steam, the steam spins turbines, and the turbines turn the shafts that push 103,900 tons of ship along at better than 30 knots. The cores are loaded with enough fuel to cover half of a 50-year service life, which is why a carrier doesn’t ever pull into a gas station. It’s also why, once in that life, the whole ship has to go into the shop at once.
The catch is there’s no fuel cap. The reactor compartments sit deep in the hull, sealed behind heavy shielding, so getting at the cores means going through the ship itself. The yard cuts its way in, lifts the spent cores out, loads fresh ones, and seals everything back up. That’s the “refueling” half of the name, and it’s a job on the scale of stripping a land-based reactor, except this one has to run for another 25 years afterward.
The “complex overhaul” half is pretty much everything else. Per HII, the yard will blast and repaint the hull and freeboard, repair the propellers, shafts, rudders and sea chests (the openings in the hull where the ship pulls in seawater for cooling), and work through thousands of compartments and tanks. The propulsion plant and combat systems get major upgrades on top of that. HII says this one visit packs in about a third of all the maintenance and modernization the ship will ever get. For scale, we recently covered a 200-ton valve in Tennessee that gets touched once a decade, and that visit took a 60-day shutdown. The Truman’s stay runs about 30 times longer.
Bryan Caccavale, Newport News Shipbuilding’s vice president of program management, said the yard spent years getting ready, “from ordering long lead-time materials to conducting thousands of inspections and preliminary work.” I believe him, because the recent track record shows what happens when one of these jobs gets away from you.
Ask the carrier next door how five years goes
The Truman is the eighth of 10 Nimitz-class carriers to go through an RCOH at Newport News, so there’s plenty of history to check. I went looking. It isn’t reassuring.
The USS John C. Stennis arrived there in May 2021 for what was planned as a five-and-a-half-year overhaul, and it hasn’t gone to schedule. USNI News reported in June that the job had slipped by around 14 months. She’s now scheduled to depart shortly, with more than 25 million man-hours of work in her, according to the Navy. The carrier before that, the USS George Washington, needed nearly six years before she was handed back in 2023. That’s two overhauls in a row running long.
Which brings me to a small wrinkle in the Truman’s own paperwork. Stars and Stripes calls it a three-year overhaul right next to the November 2031 finish date, and September 2026 to November 2031 is five years and change. I’m going with the date, since that’s the one the Navy attached to the schedule. Either way, you shouldn’t plan on seeing this ship at sea before the 2030s.
The sailors are getting out of the painting business
One change this time around isn’t about steel at all. For decades, sailors assigned to a carrier in overhaul got handed the grunt work: painting, insulating, hauling material around an industrial yard. The Navy decided to stop doing that with the Truman. It awarded five contracts to have commercial contractors take over those jobs, handing an estimated 690,000 labor hours back to the crew for training and actual Navy work, per USNI News. The push came after years of complaints about what a long overhaul does to a crew, especially during the George Washington’s stay, and frankly it sounds overdue. A ship in RCOH is a construction site, not a warship, and her crew stays assigned to her through it.
The Truman, for her part, has earned the break. She got back to Norfolk in June 2025 from a 251-day deployment, and along the way she collided with a merchant ship near the northern entrance to the Suez Canal in February 2025, taking damage to her starboard aft section. The Navy said at the time that the damage would be repaired during this overhaul, so that fix gets handled during the stay.
When she comes out the other side, the Navy says she’ll be the most advanced carrier in the Nimitz class, with fuel and upgrades enough to serve into the 2050s. The yard, meanwhile, gets to swap one flattop for another: the Stennis, in since May 2021, heads out with her 25 million man-hours, and the Truman settles in for a redelivery the Navy has scheduled for November 2031.
