Boeing St. Louis Advanced Combat Aircraft Facility Expansion

A construction project located in Berkeley.

A Bit About Boeing St. Louis Advanced Combat Aircraft Facility Expansion

Fighters have come off this ground since the 1940s. McDonnell built F-4s here, McDonnell Douglas built F-15s, Boeing built Super Hornets. The next one is the F-47, and it needs 1.1 million more square feet.

Boeing is spending $1.8 billion expanding its military aircraft complex in north St. Louis County, one of the largest defense construction programs in the region’s history. The buildout supports full-rate production of the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance fighter, which Boeing won in March 2025.

Project Scope

The expansion adds 1.1 million sq ft of high-bay production space across multiple buildings on the existing campus, next to St. Louis Lambert International Airport. Jacobs was selected in June 2025 to provide design, engineering and environmental services across the whole program.

Delivery is phased. The first facility sections open in 2026, with remaining phases completing through 2030. Site construction began following the June 2024 announcement, after the project was initiated in 2023.

The St. Louis County Council approved roughly $155 million in Chapter 100 tax abatement through the St. Louis Economic Development Partnership. Boeing projects about 500 new jobs.

Why It Matters

The site selection tells you more than the dollar figure does. Boeing could have built greenfield anywhere, and the reason it didn’t is sitting right next door: an operating runway and the flight-test infrastructure that goes with it. Building a sixth-generation fighter means test articles have to fly from the same place they’re assembled, and that adjacency is expensive to replicate. It’s the same logic that keeps aerospace manufacturing clustered around fields that already exist.

Detail is thin by design. Boeing has published no dedicated project page, no general contractor has been named publicly, and the delivery method hasn’t been disclosed. That’s normal for classified-adjacent work, and it’s worth flagging for anyone tracking the job: the numbers here come from ENR, Aviation Week and Jacobs’ own announcement, all traceable to primary disclosures, but the subcontractor tier is invisible from outside.

For the regional market, an $1.8 billion program running through 2030 is a floor under trade capacity in a metro that has watched a lot of manufacturing leave.