Port Canaveral Cruise Terminal 10 Expansion

Port Canaveral is rebuilding Cruise Terminal 10 for ships that didn’t exist when the original building went up. The $95 million expansion and renovation takes the terminal past 145,000 square feet, about 30% larger than the current facility, and rebuilds passenger flow around vessels carrying as many as 6,700 people.

PCL Construction Services is the contractor. Bermello Ajamil & Partners, the Miami firm behind a long list of North American cruise terminals, handled the design.

Project Scope

The work covers both new construction and a gut of the existing terminal. The redesign adds a glass facade that pulls daylight into what has traditionally been a windowless processing shed, along with reworked interiors and commissioned artwork. Baggage handling, security screening and gangway positions all get resized for larger ships, which is the real driver. Turn time is the binding constraint at a cruise berth, and a terminal built for a 3,000-passenger vessel doesn’t scale by adding staff. Target completion is November 2027.

Terminal 10 is one piece of a capital program the Canaveral Port Authority is running across several berths at once. Cruise Terminal 5 is a separate project of roughly 170,000 square feet targeted for December 2026, and a 13-story parking structure at Terminal 6 East will add about 3,700 spaces. Combined, the port’s current terminal investment runs past $175 million.

Why It Matters

Port Canaveral competes directly with PortMiami and Port Everglades for deployments, and the deciding factor is increasingly whether a berth can handle the newest hulls. Cruise lines order ships years ahead of the shoreside infrastructure that serves them, which leaves ports in a permanent catch-up posture. Building to 6,700 passengers now is a bet that the next order book goes bigger still.

There’s also a scheduling problem specific to cruise work that doesn’t show up on most institutional jobs. The terminal has to keep operating through much of the build, so phasing follows the sailing calendar rather than the critical path. Contractors on this kind of project plan around ship days, not work days.

Project Team & Details