Just five months after Florida’s fourth temple groundbreaking, ground will be broken for the fifth.
The Jacksonville Florida Temple’s groundbreaking ceremony will be held Saturday, Jan. 24, 2026. It is currently planned as the first of the year.
Elder Massimo De Feo — a General Authority Seventy and first counselor in the United States Southeast Area presidency — will preside over the invitation-only event.
The First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced this groundbreaking, according to a Nov. 10 news release on ChurchofJesusChrist.org.
Planned as a single-story structure, the Jacksonville temple will be approximately 29,000 square feet. It will be built on a 6.6-acre site at 3323 Loretto Road, Jacksonville, Florida.
This temple and the Church in Florida
On Oct. 2, 2022, then-Church President Russell M. Nelson announced a temple for Jacksonville, Florida. It was one of 18 temple locations he identified during October 2022 general conference.
The Jacksonville temple is one of five houses of the Lord operating, under construction or announced in Florida.
Three temples have been dedicated in Florida: the Orlando Florida Temple (1994), Fort Lauderdale Florida Temple (2014) and Tallahassee Florida Temple (2024). The Orlando temple was temporarily closed in July 2024 for renovations.
A fourth house of the Lord, the Tampa Florida Temple, is under construction. Elder Neil L. Andersen of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles presided over the Aug. 23 groundbreaking earlier this year, offering a prayer dedicating the temple site and construction process.
“We are humbled as we consider Thy noble and devoted disciples of past years who worked and prayed and lived their lives so that this day might come,” Elder Andersen said in his prayer. “We are so grateful for those upon whose shoulders we stand.”
After missionaries first arrived in Florida in 1845, growth of the Church started slowly in the state. Florida’s first Latter-day Saint branch, the Hassell Branch, was created on May 9, 1897, in Jefferson County. By 1904, the state had 1,230 Church members.
In 1947, Florida’s first stake was organized in Jacksonville. It was also the first stake organized in the South.
Today, Florida is home to nearly 180,000 Latter-day Saints in about 280 congregations.
