Toyota Kentucky Advanced Paint Facility, Georgetown

Toyota Kentucky’s paint facility is the least glamorous $922 million the company has committed in the United States, and probably one of the more consequential. Paint is where an assembly plant burns most of its energy and where it’s hardest to change anything without stopping the line. Toyota’s answer at Georgetown is to build new beside the old.

The company broke ground on June 22, 2026, the same day the plant began assembling the redesigned RAV4 Hybrid. Governor Andy Beshear’s office had announced the investment in December 2024 as the state’s largest by dollar value that year.

Project Scope

The new building adds 1 million square feet of paint capacity to a complex that has been producing vehicles since 1988. It sits inside an operating campus of nearly 10,000 workers with stated annual capacity of about 550,000 vehicles and 600,000 engines.

Toyota hasn’t published much technical detail. What it has said is that the facility is designed to cut carbon emissions from paint operations by 30 percent and reduce water use by about 1.5 million gallons a year, and that it will give the plant more flexibility across models. Those are company figures with no baseline year attached, so treat them as targets.

There’s some evidence the Georgetown paint team knows where the energy goes. In June 2026 the Department of Energy gave the existing Line 1 paint shop a Better Project Award for rebuilding its fresh air supply house to draw on pre-tempered building air. Toyota says that cut outside air flow by more than 55 percent and booth energy costs by over 80 percent.

The state has skin in the game. The Kentucky Economic Development Finance Authority approved a performance-based retention agreement worth up to $267.5 million, tied to annual investment and job targets of as many as 8,950 positions.

Toyota has not named a contractor or paint systems supplier.

Why It Matters

Georgetown is one of Toyota’s biggest plants, and the company says it has put more than $12 billion into the site. The paint project is part of roughly $2 billion announced there in two years, alongside the retooling for a battery-electric three-row SUV.

One thing to watch is the date. The 2024 announcement said the facility would open in 2027. Ground didn’t break until mid-2026, and the groundbreaking release gave no opening year at all. A million square feet of paint shop, with ovens, booths and air handling to commission, is not a twelve-month build.

Project Team & Details