Kentucky already has two Buc-ee’s locations, but the next one is going to take much, much longer than fans expected.
Buc-ee’s official location list currently shows two Kentucky stores: Richmond at 1013 Buc-ee’s Boulevard and Smiths Grove at 4001 Smiths Grove-Scottsville Road. That gives the state a pair of major travel centers along important interstate corridors and makes Kentucky one of Buc-ee’s established non-Texas growth markets.
The Richmond store serves I-75 traffic south of Lexington, which is perfect Buc-ee’s territory. It catches drivers moving between Cincinnati, Lexington, Knoxville, and the Southeast.
The Smiths Grove store gives the chain a major presence near Bowling Green and I-65, pulling from travelers between Louisville, Nashville, and south-central Kentucky. When it opened in June 2024, Smiths Grove became the smallest town in America to host a Buc-ee’s, with a population of about 750.
Together, those two stores already give Kentucky a strong Buc-ee’s footprint.
But the third location is the one many fans are watching — and it has become one of the longest-running waits in the entire Buc-ee’s expansion map.
Buc-ee’s has been planning a store at the southeast corner of I-24 and Pembroke-Oak Grove Road, near Exit 89 in Oak Grove — “The Hometown of Fort Campbell,” located right along the Tennessee state line. That location would serve a completely different part of Kentucky and could pull from Clarksville, Fort Campbell, Hopkinsville, Nashville-area drivers, and traffic moving between western Kentucky and Tennessee.
The problem is the project has barely moved.
Buc-ee’s first started talking about landing a store in this region back in March 2022. The original site was supposed to be just across the state line in Clarksville, Tennessee, but that deal fell through. The Oak Grove location was officially announced in September 2024, with Buc-ee’s Director of Real Estate Stan Beard saying construction would begin in the first quarter of 2025 and the store would be open in the first half of 2026.
That has not happened.
More than 18 months after the announcement, the site still has not broken ground. Buc-ee’s own estimated opening list now puts Oak Grove in 2029 — the third time the timeline has been pushed back and more than four years later than the company’s original goal.
The reason is infrastructure, and the list is long.
Before construction can begin in full, the city of Oak Grove and the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet need to deliver a new bridge over the interstate, re-routed and widened roads off Exit 89, a new water tower, major water line expansion, a new roundabout, and stormwater basins to prevent flooding. That work has been the bottleneck since shortly after the announcement, and it explains why a store that was supposed to be open by now is still years away.
That is common with Buc-ee’s projects, but Oak Grove is an extreme case.
The stores are so large that they do not just require land. They require traffic planning, interchange improvements, utility capacity, water infrastructure, and local coordination. A 74,000-square-foot travel center with more than 100 pumps can change how an entire highway exit functions. Roughly 200 jobs and significant local tax revenue have also been waiting in the wings the entire time.
In the meantime, Kentuckians have other options. Beyond the two open Kentucky locations, the Huber Heights, Ohio Buc-ee’s opened in April 2026, giving travelers in northern Kentucky a closer alternative while Oak Grove sits in infrastructure limbo.
For Kentucky, the current situation is straightforward.
Richmond is open. Smiths Grove is open. Oak Grove is announced, agreed to, and planned — but stuck.
The third store still appears to be on the map, but it is not close.
If the 2029 timeline holds, Kentucky drivers will be waiting until the end of the decade before the state becomes a three-Buc-ee’s market.
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