Orange County Convention Center Grand Concourse Expansion (Phase 5A)

Orlando is betting $560 million that the fight for big tradeshows is won on contiguous square footage.

Orange County broke ground in December 2025 on Phase 5A of the Orange County Convention Center, an expansion of the North-South Building that adds a 100,000-square-foot grand ballroom and 44,000 square feet of meeting space. Construction runs through 2029. The work is paid for out of the county’s Tourist Development Tax, so there is no general-fund exposure and no bond referendum behind it.

Project Scope

The expansion sits inside the existing North-South Building, the larger of the center’s two halls. The headline element is the grand ballroom, at 100,000 square feet the largest single assembly room in the complex. Around it go 44,000 square feet of meeting rooms, multipurpose space and reworked concourse circulation that ties the new rooms back into the existing hall.

A second phase, 5B, is already through design approval. It would add 200,000 square feet of contiguous multipurpose and exhibit space plus a concourse connection running north to south. Together the two phases bring the North-South Building to 1.15 million square feet of exhibit space.

Orange County has not publicly named an architect or a general contractor for Phase 5A, which is unusual this far into a job of this size.

Why It Matters

Convention centers compete on one number: how much unobstructed floor a show can occupy without splitting across buildings. Las Vegas and Chicago have both spent the last decade adding contiguous space. Orlando’s answer is to fill in rather than build out. That is the cheaper move and the harder one, because all of it happens next to an operating hall that averages about 200 events a year, including 115 conventions and tradeshows drawing more than 1.5 million attendees.

The center generates roughly $3.9 billion in annual economic impact for Central Florida. A ballroom is not glamorous construction. But ballroom capacity is what decides whether a citywide show can hold its general session on site or has to bus delegates to a hotel, and Phase 5A is a bet that the second option loses bookings.

Project Team & Details