Local Affairs
The Georgia Ports Authority has its federal permit to build a third container terminal at the Port of Savannah. The authority said on Oct. 14 that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approved the permit for the planned Savannah Container Terminal after a three-year review. GPA President Kevin Price announced it at the annual State of the Port of Savannah event at the Savannah Convention Center.
The permit clears the main federal approval for the project. It does not start construction. The authority says work begins in January 2028, and it expects the terminal to be finished in the mid-2030s.
What is planned
The authority puts the project’s cost at $2.3 billion. The terminal would cover 350 acres on Hutchinson Island, on the north bank of the Savannah River near the Talmadge Memorial Bridge, and would have three berths built to handle the largest container ships. It is designed to add 3.5 million twenty-foot equivalent units, or TEUs, of annual capacity.
Savannah’s container capacity is 7.75 million TEUs today, according to the authority. With the new terminal and other projects, GPA says the port’s capacity would eventually reach 12 million TEUs. One of those other projects is already under construction: a $1.6 billion rebuild of Ocean Terminal that will take that facility from 200,000 to 1.75 million TEUs, with completion expected by the end of 2028.
GPA calls this a “self-financed investment plan of nearly $5 billion for the next ten years” that adds five big-ship container berths in Savannah and a fourth roll-on/roll-off berth at the Port of Brunswick. The authority’s release does not say how the Savannah Container Terminal itself will be paid for beyond that description.
A later timeline than first proposed
The project has slipped since it was first proposed. When GPA applied for the Corps permit in 2023, it planned to start construction in 2026 and open the terminal in 2030 with about 3 million TEUs of new capacity, according to industry coverage at the time. Savannah Morning News reported in December 2023 that the application covered about 395 acres and called for filling nearly 27 acres of freshwater wetlands and 5.6 acres of salt marsh. The Corps then refused environmental groups’ requests to extend the public comment period a second time. The authority’s new figures are a 350-acre footprint, a larger capacity target, a 2028 start and completion in the mid-2030s.
Why it matters for job seekers
The authority did not give a job estimate for the new terminal: no construction headcount and no number of permanent operating jobs. Neither GPA’s release nor the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s report on the announcement gives one, and none should be assumed.
What is documented is the scale of employment already tied to Georgia’s ports. A University of Georgia study that GPA released on Sept. 1 found that port activity supports 605,616 full- and part-time jobs at Georgia businesses, about 12% of statewide employment. That figure counts jobs supported across the economy, from trucking and warehousing to manufacturing and retail. It is not a count of people employed at the docks, and it does not measure what the new terminal would add.
The construction start is still more than two years away. Workers looking at port-related jobs now will find them in current operations and in the Ocean Terminal rebuild, not in the new terminal. At the Oct. 14 event, the authority also pointed to its work on future staffing, including a youth program that offers mentoring, apprenticeships and on-the-job experience to recent high school graduates.
The catch
Capacity is not cargo, and it is not jobs. The new terminal adds room for future growth, but how much work it creates will depend on shipping volumes in the 2030s, how much automation the terminal uses and how construction is contracted. None of those has been announced. Savannah handled 5.67 million TEUs in fiscal 2026, roughly flat from a year earlier, the AJC reported. That is well below the port’s current capacity.
Sources
- Georgia Ports Authority, “Georgia Ports achieves permit for 3.5 million TEU container terminal,” October 14, 2026. https://gaports.com/press-releases/georgia-ports-achieves-permit-for-3-5-million-teu-container-terminal/
- The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “Georgia Ports Authority gets OK to build $2.3B Savannah container terminal,” October 15, 2026. https://www.ajc.com/news/2026/10/army-corps-oks-construction-third-terminal-savannah-port/
- The Maritime Executive, “Georgia to Continue Savannah Port Expansion with Third Container Terminal,” October 5, 2023. https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/georgia-to-continue-savannah-port-expansion-with-third-container-terminal
- Savannah Morning News via Yahoo News, “More public comment on Port terminal ‘isn’t warranted,’ Corps of Engineers says,” December 23, 2023. https://www.yahoo.com/news/more-public-port-terminal-isnt-110012245.html
- Georgia Ports Authority, “Georgia Ports generates $181 billion in economic impact annually, supports 605,000 jobs,” September 1, 2026. https://gaports.com/press-releases/georgia-ports-generates-181-billion-in-economic-impact-annually-supports-605000-jobs/
Featured photo: Container ships docked at the Port of Savannah at dusk, July 29, 2021. Representative image; not the planned Savannah Container Terminal site on Hutchinson Island. Photo: CBP Photography (Jerry Glaser, U.S. Customs and Border Protection), via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain). Cropped from the original.
