Austal adds 500 workers for shipbuilding ramp

Austal will recruit 500 additional workers in Western Australia over the next 12 months as production ramps across the Australian Army’s Landing Craft Medium and Landing Craft Heavy programmes.

The recruitment campaign covers trades and office-based roles at Henderson and Fremantle, including fabrication, pipe fitting, welding, electrical work, mechanical fitting, cabinet making, engineering, project management, procurement, quality, and support functions.

Austal employs more than 1,000 people across Australia, making the planned intake a substantial expansion of its domestic workforce. The hiring programme arrives as Henderson begins a sustained sequence of Army shipbuilding work rather than a short production surge around a single vessel class.

The immediate workload covers 18 Landing Craft Medium vessels and eight Landing Craft Heavy vessels. Austal Defence Australia secured a A$1.029 billion design-and-build contract for the medium craft in December 2025, with construction due to begin in 2026 and the final vessel scheduled for delivery in 2032.

The Landing Craft Medium is a steel vessel intended to move heavy Army equipment through littoral environments, including main battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, protected mobility vehicles, and rocket artillery depending on load configuration. The programme therefore connects shipbuilding capacity directly with the Army’s ability to move increasingly heavy land systems through regional operating areas.

The larger programme adds eight Landing Craft Heavy vessels based on the Damen LST100 design. Austal received a contract worth about A$4 billion for those ships in February 2026, with construction centred on Henderson facilities and the adjacent Common User Facility.

The Strategic Shipbuilding Agreement signed in 2025 provides the framework for that continuity, with Austal acting as prime contractor for the 18 medium and eight heavy landing craft following their respective contract negotiations. Maintaining one production system across both classes should allow facilities, workforce training, procurement processes, and supplier relationships to be carried from one build sequence into the next rather than recreated for each programme.

Together, the two programmes create a 26-vessel pipeline stretching well into the next decade. The Commonwealth is using that workload as part of a continuous shipbuilding model in Western Australia, intended to retain labour, infrastructure, and supplier capability between successive programmes rather than rebuilding them after gaps in demand.

Continuity changes the workforce requirement. Shipbuilding depends on welders, fabricators, electricians, mechanical fitters, planners, production engineers, quality specialists, and supply personnel whose skills become progressively more valuable as teams move from first-of-class work into repeatable construction.

Austal’s campaign therefore includes apprentices and graduates alongside experienced tradespeople. The company is also recruiting candidates without previous shipbuilding experience where their existing trade skills can transfer into marine production, widening the available labour pool while placing more emphasis on conversion training and supervision.

The industrial requirement extends beyond direct employment. Government estimates for the Landing Craft Medium and Heavy programmes point to more than 1,100 direct jobs and over 2,000 indirect positions, while Austal has committed to Australian contract expenditure above 60% across the work.

That domestic-content target pushes workload into fabrication, systems supply, engineering, materials, outfitting, logistics, and specialist services outside the prime contractor. Supplier readiness will influence production cadence because a shipyard can add labour faster than some long-lead equipment manufacturers can increase output.

The Henderson precinct is being developed around a broader naval and defence industrial strategy, with landing craft forming an early part of the continuous-build workload. The model relies on consecutive programmes maintaining demand for people and facilities that would otherwise be difficult to sustain between large contracts.

At yard level, production will be governed by skilled labour availability, steel and equipment deliveries, outfitting sequences, test capacity, and the rate at which successive hulls can move through construction without creating bottlenecks. Those constraints become harder to recover once several vessels are competing for the same bays, electricians, engineers, and quality staff.

Recruiting ahead of peak workload is therefore a practical capacity measure. The additional workforce has to be trained and integrated before serial construction reaches its busiest point, particularly when the same industrial base is expected to support follow-on shipbuilding after the landing-craft programmes.

The first Landing Craft Medium will enter the programme years before the final vessel is delivered in 2032, while the heavier LST100-based ships extend the workload further. Austal’s 500-person expansion now has to convert into productive capacity quickly enough to support that build sequence rather than simply increase headcount.