How many aircraft carriers does the United States have?

U.S. law requires the Navy to maintain at least eleven operational aircraft carriers. Ten belong to the Nimitz class, built between 1975 and 2009 at the Newport News shipyard in Virginia, and the eleventh is the USS Gerald R. Ford, delivered in 2017 and deployed for the first time in 2022. All of them exceed 100,000 tons of full-load displacement, are about 333 m long, and carry two nuclear reactors that give them virtually unlimited range; their embarked air wing numbers around 70 aircraft, including F/A-18E/F Super Hornets, F-35Cs, EA-18G Growlers, E-2D Hawkeyes and MH-60 helicopters. The USS Nimitz, the oldest of the class, has reached the end of its 50-year service life and is scheduled for decommissioning, so keeping the fleet at eleven depends on the USS John F. Kennedy entering service in 2027.

They are not counted as aircraft carriers, but the nine Wasp- and America-class amphibious assault ships, each around 45,000 tons, carry short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing F-35Bs alongside MV-22 Ospreys and Marine Corps helicopters. Under the "Lightning carrier" concept they can embark up to 20 F-35Bs, making them light carriers larger than those operated by most countries.

No other country comes close: China operates three conventional carriers (Liaoning, Shandong and Fujian), the United Kingdom two, India two, and France, Italy and Russia one each, with Russia's inactive for years. Only France, besides the United States, operates a nuclear-powered carrier, the Charles de Gaulle. The United States accounts for more than half of the world's total aircraft carrier tonnage and is the only country able to keep several carrier strike groups deployed simultaneously across different oceans.