Walmart plans 650 store remodels, 20 openings, boosting U.S. fleet

Walmart is putting more than 650 Supercenters and Neighborhood Markets through remodels and planning about 20 new store openings in 2026 and early 2027, a rollout that will change day-to-day work for hourly associates, department managers and assistant managers across its U.S. fleet.

For store teams, the biggest shift is not the ribbon cutting. It is the work that comes before it: construction traffic, reset crews, new fixture sets, wider aisles, reconfigured layouts, updated Vision Centers and pharmacies, better signage and more digital touchpoints tied to pickup and delivery. Walmart said the refreshes are meant to make stores faster and more convenient, but inside the building that translates into moved departments, altered traffic patterns and more coordination between associates and remodel crews.

The company has already opened several stores this year, including Supercenters in Eastvale, California; Apollo Beach, Florida; Jacksonville, Florida; and The Villages, Florida, plus a Neighborhood Market in Ocala, Florida. More projects are ahead in Tucson, Arizona, and Celina, Texas. Those locations are likely to see the most visible changes first, but the wider effect will spread through stores that are being reset to handle more online orders, more pickup volume and more delivery handoffs.

Walmart is also testing a faster remodel model in Neighborhood Markets in Florida, Oklahoma, Texas, Georgia, South Carolina and Louisiana. Under that four-week process, the main sales floor is temporarily closed while pharmacies and fuel stations stay open, a sign that the company wants to shorten disruption even as it keeps pushing work into the store. For associates, that means some departments will be squeezed tighter during the transition, while pharmacy and fuel operations keep serving customers through the construction.

The campaign builds on a larger modernization push that Walmart has described as its “Store of the Future” strategy. On January 31, 2024, the company said it would build or convert more than 150 stores over five years and remodel 650 stores in the next 12 months, with the projects creating tens of thousands of jobs and each new store bringing hundreds of jobs to a community. Walmart said it directly employs about 1.6 million people in the United States and has been leaning harder into speed, saying in 2025 it was on track to reach 95% of U.S. households with delivery within three hours. The company had also said in 2023 that it invested more than $9 billion in two years to upgrade more than 1,400 stores, showing that this year’s remodel and opening wave is part of a longer retail rebuild, not a one-time burst.