New Howard University Hospital
The new Howard University Hospital will create a modern setting for patient care, clinical education, research, and community health while extending the University's historic health-sciences mission.
2026-2027 Academic Year Opening Status: The new hospital is a multi-year construction program. Site logistics, enabling work, utility relocation, and early construction activities are active, and the project will remain under construction throughout the academic year.
A Legacy of Care, A New Chapter
Howard's hospital tradition reaches back to Freedmen's Hospital, established in 1862 to care for formerly enslaved people and other Black residents who were excluded from much of American medicine. Freedmen's became inseparable from Howard's medical education, providing care to Washington's African American community and creating essential training opportunities for Black physicians during eras when many hospitals denied them internships and residencies.
Howard University Hospital opened in 1975 and carried that mission into a modern academic medical center. The new hospital will carry the mission forward in a contemporary setting built for the care, teaching, research, and community partnerships the next generation requires.
Why the New Hospital Matters
The hospital is being planned as both a place of care and a place of learning. A contemporary clinical environment can better support patients, families, and care teams while bringing medical education closer to the daily practice of medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, and allied health. It can also create stronger connections among research, treatment, prevention, and community health.
HBCU medical schools have played an outsized role in educating Black physicians. From Howard's founding through the 1960s, Howard and Meharry trained most of the nation's African American physicians, and the Howard University College of Medicine today counts more than 4,000 living alumni. That legacy strengthens care far beyond campus: Howard prepares clinicians, researchers, and health leaders to improve health in Washington, across the United States, and around the world, with particular importance for communities that remain underrepresented and underserved in medicine.
Washington's hospital landscape has changed markedly in recent years, and public-health planning continues to document uneven access and outcomes across geography, income, and race. No single project can erase those inequities. A strong Howard academic medical center can, however, preserve trusted capacity in the heart of the District, educate the professionals who will serve communities across the country, and sustain a mission built around patients too often left at the margins of American health care.
From Enabling Work to a New Hospital
Years of planning, design, approvals, and site coordination have moved the project from concept into active delivery. Construction fencing and logistics are in place, utility relocation and enabling activities are advancing, and excavation is beginning to prepare the site for the major phases of construction to follow.
Work will continue throughout the 2026-2027 academic year as the site transitions into full construction. The hospital remains a multi-year program with a current delivery target in 2028.
Renderings illustrate the current design vision and may evolve as the project advances. Schedule information reflects current targets as of the opening of the 2026-2027 academic year and may change as work progresses.