The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey authorized $110 million to begin adding eight gates to Terminal A at Newark Liberty International Airport. The terminal opened in 2023.
That’s the whole story in two sentences. A $2.7-billion, 1-million-sq-ft, 33-gate building designed for 13.6 million annual passengers handled more than 18 million in 2024, roughly 49,000 a day and about a third above the capacity it was sized for. Those are 2024 actuals reported by the Port Authority, not current-year traffic.
“We left room for growth back then, and now after the terminal shattered passenger forecasts, it’s time to make good on those ambitions,” board Chairman Kevin O’Toole said, in remarks reported by ENR.
Inside the eight-gate Terminal A expansion at Newark Liberty
The authorization splits into two very different tranches. Phase 1 takes $100 million for a southern expansion: a 25,000-sq-ft addition carrying two common-use gates, with seating, restrooms and grab-and-go concessions. Construction starts in 2027 and is planned to finish in 2029. The package is in design and no contractor has been identified.
Phase 2 takes the other $10 million, and it buys planning only. Six additional common-use gates on the northern end, with project authorization anticipated in 2027 and phased openings from 2030 through 2032. Eight gates total across the two phases, and only two of them have construction money behind them today.
This sits inside the Port Authority’s $45-billion 2026-2035 capital plan, which also carries a new Terminal B at Newark, taxiway work, and a $3.5-billion AirTrain replacement. The agency is also training up to 85 Southeast Queens residents for JFK’s $19 billion rebuild, which gives some sense of how much labor it expects to need across the portfolio.
Who delivered Terminal A, and who has not been picked for the gates
The original Terminal A team is worth naming, with a caveat attached. A Tutor Perini/Parsons joint venture held the $1.4-billion design-build contract. STV was lead design firm and structural engineer. Grimshaw, the UK-headquartered architecture practice, was architect. None of them has been announced for the expansion, and nothing in the board action suggests a carryover.
So the Phase 1 southern addition is a genuine opportunity notice rather than a retrospective: design in progress, construction starting 2027, builder unnamed. Airside work on a terminal running 49,000 passengers a day will be phased around live operations, which narrows the bidder pool to firms that can prove they’ve done it. O’Hare’s Concourse D crews built on 88 acres of live airfield without closing a foot of FAA pavement, and that is the reference class for this kind of package.
The broader point is a forecasting one. Terminal A missed its own passenger projection by more than four million a year within its first full year of operation, and the fix is an expansion that won’t be fully open until 2032, nine years after the building opened. Every aviation owner sizing a terminal on a 20-year demand curve should be looking at that gap. The Port Authority left room for growth in the site plan, which was the right call, and it still ran out of gates in under three years.