On June 25, 2026, crews working twenty feet beneath the Salt Lake Temple began removing more than 1,500 bolts. The bolts held 392 steel plates that had kept 98 base isolators clamped in position while the weight of the building was transferred onto them. When the last plate came off, the temple was no longer resting on the ground. It was resting on the isolators, which are built to slide.
"The temple is set free," Jacobsen Construction general superintendent Brad Bohne said in the church's announcement.
Russell M. Nelson had been dead nearly nine months.
Nelson announced the renovation on April 19, 2019, said the building would close on December 29 that year, and put the job at roughly four years. The church expected to reopen it in 2024. On February 14, 2025, exactly 172 years after the groundbreaking, Nelson announced the actual dates: April to October 2027. Six months. Somewhere in between, he changed what the thing was called.
Richard Sutton, a senior director in the church's Temple Department, said on a July 21 episode of the Church News podcast that the shift from open house to celebration came at Nelson's direction.
That word did the work of a budget line. An open house is a queue and a docent. A celebration is projections on the Tabernacle dome, a hired performance troupe, nightly lighting, new exhibits in six buildings around Temple Square, and a secured perimeter with ten gates in it.
Nelson died on September 27, 2025, at 101. Dallin H. Oaks was set apart as president of the church on October 14 and was sustained in a solemn assembly on April 4, 2026. Jeffrey R. Holland, named president of the Quorum of the Twelve the same day Oaks was set apart, died that December. The leadership chart changed twice while the exhibits were being fabricated.
The church's schedule of dedications and rededications, updated July 6, still lists no date for the Salt Lake Temple. Whoever presides over it, the man who ordered the work will not be in the room.
What they built
Each of the 98 isolators weighs 18,000 pounds and carries eight million. Together they let a building of roughly 185 million pounds shift five feet in any horizontal direction during an earthquake, enough to ride out a magnitude 7.3 event, the maximum expected in the Salt Lake Valley. Crews jacked 96 horizontal steel pipes under the foundation to spread the load, and a 100,000-square-foot addition went up on the north side to hold a second baptistry. A tunnel now runs beneath North Temple from the Conference Center to the building.
That tunnel is how visitors will get in. The tour starts in the Conference Center with a short film, drops underground, and runs 60 to 80 minutes, according to KSL.
Much of what they walk through is a restoration of what an earlier generation of church leaders took out. The building has been renovated repeatedly since 1893, and the church acknowledges that the 1962 to 1966 project painted over or removed many historic elements. This time, researchers went looking for the Victorian patterns original to the temple and put them back into the carpets, draperies, paint, and trim.
The celestial room is the center of that work. Its ceiling and wall finishes were carefully restored, and chandeliers modeled after fixtures from the late 1800s were installed in the sealing rooms first. By April of this year, crews were hanging them in the celestial room itself. Carpet went down there in June, and more chandeliers now hang over the east baptismal font, where the twelve original cast-iron oxen have been reinstalled. In the bride's suite, new chandeliers and wall sconces went in beneath painted ceiling medallions copied from the room's original appearance. The Tiffany glass windows and the original doorknobs were restored. The four stone spiral staircases in the corner towers survived, and crews used lasers to strip old varnish off their paneling.
The most exposed piece of the restoration is on the outside. Above the east center tower, below the angel Moroni, sits the panel reading "Holiness to the Lord: The House of the Lord." John Rowe Moyle carved it. Moyle was an English convert who walked twenty-two miles from Alpine to the temple site each week, and who went back to work after losing a leg and building himself a wooden one. Weather had ruined the plaque. Anne Domenech, a conservator with EverGreene, cleaned the stone and laid new gold leaf into Moyle's letters last August, working against sun and shifting humidity that changed how the leaf dried. She has described the job as almost holy.
Free timed tickets open September 1 at TempleSquare.org.
The church has never said what any of this cost. Engineering News-Record reported in June that church officials would not reveal the figure and that industry experts put it at around $2 billion. That is an outside estimate, not a church number, and should be read as one. A figure near $125 million circulates online. It appears on an AI-generated aggregator with no sourcing and is worthless.
What it took from the city
In 1893, the church did not have to ask Salt Lake City for anything. The building went up over forty years. Outsiders got one day. On April 5, the day before the dedication, church leaders walked local and national reporters and non-member dignitaries through the finished temple. Wilford Woodruff dedicated it the next morning, and the sessions ran until April 24. Members with recommends toured the building before each of the thirty-one services.
In 2026, the church asked, and paid.
Mayor Erin Mendenhall sent the request to the City Council in January. The council held a hearing on March 10, where business owners and residents pushed back and asked for accommodations as small as letting bicycles cross the closure zone. Mendenhall called those concerns very reasonable. Council Member Chris Wharton said the closures would complicate his own family's routine and voted for them anyway. The Council approved the ordinance on March 24. The vote was unanimous.
It shuts down North Temple between Main and West Temple, and West Temple between North and South Temple, with partial lane closures on three additional segments from March through October 2027. By the city's own accounting, the church pays roughly $2.3 million to lease the roadway, and the mayor's office said in January that the church would also reimburse the city for incremental police and traffic costs. Temple Square and the adjacent church property sit behind a perimeter with ten screened entrances, and a main gate on the west, per Deseret News. The church is providing free UTA passes to ticket holders and to its own employees, and a donated 2,000-space lot on North Temple feeds shuttles every eight minutes.
The number
The church told the Downtown Alliance and Visit Salt Lake to expect three to five million visits. The city, working with UDOT and the church, settled on 3.6 million, or better than 20,000 people a day, which matches the nightly crowd at the Medals Plaza during the 2002 Olympics.
The Downtown Alliance took four million, multiplied by an average of about $80 per person drawn from its 2024 downtown sample, and got $320 million in additional spending.
The $80 came from people who came downtown to eat and see a show. A free temple ticket does not sort for that. General Conference already runs the experiment twice a year, filling the Conference Center with more than 100,000 people over five sessions, most of whom arrive from elsewhere in Utah and go home the same day. Downtown restaurants know what that weekend does to their receipts. Nobody has published the comparison, and the city is budgeting against a single blended figure.
Natalie Randall of the Utah Office of Tourism has called the event a six-month trial run for the Olympics. If 2027 is the rehearsal, the estimate is part of what gets tested.
The staffing is another part. Applications for what the church calls the Rejoice Team closed July 15. Volunteers must be 16 or older and commit to at least eight weeks of shifts, most of them spent standing. The church will call special missionaries as docents. The only paid tier is a performance troupe of 18-to-35-year-olds hired at $900 a week from February through October.
Outsiders
Sutton asked people curious about the temple to come with an open mind. Elder Brent H. Nielson, an emeritus General Authority Seventy and the celebration's coordinator, said he hopes people outside the faith get inside and arrive with questions.
They are inviting a different city than the one that built the place. By 2018, church membership rolls accounted for 49 percent of Salt Lake County residents, the lowest share since at least the 1930s, according to figures the church provided to the Salt Lake Tribune. Tribune reporting three years later put it at 46.89 percent.
Nelson set six months against that. In 1893, the strangers got a single day, by invitation.
Article edited by Clint Betts. What are we missing? What did this piece get wrong? Email the editor at clint@utahn.com.
