- Parent / corporate of record
- United Parcel Service
- Type
- logistics hub
- Address
- 911 Grade Lane, Louisville, Kentucky
- Employment
- ~20,000–25,000 Louisville-based UPS employees
- Established
- 1980 (Louisville hub); 2002 (Worldport branding)
- Website
- https://www.ups.com
UPS Worldport is United Parcel Service's global air-cargo hub at Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport (SDF), the largest air-sortation facility UPS operates. The hub covers roughly 5.2 million square feet, handles about 155 aircraft per day at peak across roughly 300 daily flights, and sorts up to 2 million packages per night during peak season. UPS announced in January 2025 that Amazon shipping volume would drop by roughly half by mid-2026 and that its Network of the Future plan would cut management positions — an inflection that ripples through the vendor concentric of aircraft maintenance, ground handling, sortation-equipment upkeep, customs brokerage, freight forwarding, and last-mile delivery. Worldport remains the structural anchor of the Louisville logistics economy and a labor-shed reference point for surrounding counties.
Recent capital investment
- $1.1 billion (2002)
Original Worldport build-out at Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport — the project that turned the Louisville hub into UPS's primary global air-cargo sortation facility.
- $310 million (2010)
Worldport expansion adding roughly 1.1 million square feet of sort capacity and additional aircraft loading positions.
- $460 million (cumulative) (2013–2016)
Centennial Hub and follow-on sortation, automation, and aircraft-handling investments through the mid-2010s, bringing the facility footprint to roughly 5.2 million square feet.
- Network of the Future restructuring (January 2025)
UPS announced in January 2025 that its Network of the Future plan would cut management positions and that Amazon shipping volume would drop by roughly half by mid-2026, reshaping the Worldport vendor concentric without altering the physical hub footprint.
Mentioned in these county reports
Procurement notes
UPS procures through the UPS Supplier Portal at suppliers.ups.com, with most aircraft-maintenance, ground-handling, sortation-equipment, and food-and-fuel work routed through a multi-tier captive architecture (Boeing and Pratt & Whitney for engines; sortation OEMs; food-service primes; flight-crew transport primes). Trucking carriers contract separately on lane-by-lane bid sheets. Airside and landside services at SDF run through the Louisville Regional Airport Authority on a separate procurement track, including FAA Airport Improvement Program work. Adjacent warehousing, customs-brokerage, and freight-forwarding firms typically enter the Worldport orbit through shipper-side relationships and Foreign-Trade Zone 29 paperwork rather than direct UPS contracts.