Boeing South Carolina 787 Site Expansion

Boeing broke ground in November 2025 on a second 787 final assembly building in North Charleston, roughly the same size as the one it already operates on the site. The company put the investment at more than $1 billion and hasn’t published a completion date.

The build team is a BE&K Building Group and HITT Contracting joint venture as construction manager, with BRPH as architect of record. Boeing estimates the program at more than 6.2 million construction labor hours and 1,000 new jobs over five years.

Project Scope

The new final assembly building runs about 1.2 million square feet, which Boeing describes as similar in size to the existing one. Around it sits the rest of the package: a parts preparation facility, a vertical fin paint facility, additional flight line stalls, and additions to the Interiors Responsibility Center campus a few miles away.

That list matters more than the headline square footage. Final assembly buildings are not warehouses. They carry crane loads, precision floor tolerances, compressed air and electrical distribution sized for assembly tooling, and paint operations with their own containment and air handling requirements. The flight line stalls tie the building to an active commercial airport apron, which puts FAA coordination and airfield security in the critical path alongside the structure itself.

Why It Matters

North Charleston has assembled 787s since 2011 and became the sole 787 final assembly site in 2021. Doubling that capability is Boeing betting that widebody demand holds long enough to fill two lines, and it commits a decade of aerospace manufacturing work to a state that had none of it twenty years ago.

For the Southeast contracting market, the more immediate effect is absorption. Six million labor hours concentrated in Charleston County, alongside the port expansion and the region’s data center pipeline, tightens the same trades that everyone else is bidding. Mechanical and electrical capacity in that market was already the constraint. A second aerospace assembly building doesn’t loosen it.

Project Team & Details