NRL-SSC is a tenant at NASA's Stennis Space Center, located in the southwest corner of Mississippi about 50 miles northeast of New Orleans, Louisiana, and 30 miles from the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

NRL-SSC occupies over 200,000 square feet of research, computation, laboratory, administrative, warehouse, and other facilities at SSC. Facilities include a number of large antennas to receive available oceanographic and meteorological satellite data, a Map Data Formatting Facility, a water-wave channel, and numerous laboratories for acoustic and oceanographic computation, instrumentation, analysis, and testing.

Other Navy tenants include the Naval Meteorology & Oceanography Command, and the Naval Oceanographic Office, who are major operational users of the oceanographic and atmospheric research and development performed by NRL. This unique concentration of operational and research oceanographers makes SSC the center of naval oceanography and the largest such grouping in the world.