Air travel statistics: how America flies

How many people fly per day

• 2,484,208 passengers per day were screened at TSA checkpoints on average in 2025 — the all-time annual record. (TSA daily checkpoint data)
• More than 3 million airline passengers per day move through the U.S. system by the FAA's count, across more than 29 million square miles of airspace. (FAA, FY2024)
• 12.8 million people fly per day worldwide — ICAO counted 4.7 billion passengers carried on scheduled services in 2024, up 7.9% on 2023. (ICAO; per-day figure derived)
• ~5.0 billion passengers flew globally in 2025 — a record year with a record 83.6% load factor — and IATA forecasts 5.2 billion for 2026. (IATA)
• More than half of U.S. adults took at least one airline trip in 2024 — a first in the A4A/Ipsos survey's history; nearly 90% have flown at some point. (A4A/Ipsos, fielded Jan 2025)

TSA passengers screened by year, 2019–2026

The core dataset. TSA publishes daily checkpoint counts, not an annual table — these totals are summed from the official daily data at tsa.gov and reproduce exactly if you re-add the year pages. 2026 covers January 1 through July 1 (182 days).

The trend line: air travel collapsed to 339.8 million in 2020, passed its 2019 pre-pandemic benchmark in 2023, and has set a new record every year since. The single busiest day ever screened was 3,134,613 passengers on Sunday, November 30, 2025 — the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Our companion study on the busiest travel days of the year breaks down all ten 3-million days on record.

How many flights per day

• 16,191,379 flights were handled by the FAA in fiscal year 2024 — 9,802,886 scheduled plus 6,388,493 unscheduled, or about 44,200 flights per day. (FAA; per-day figure derived)
• 7,736,770 scheduled domestic flights were flown by U.S. marketing carriers in 2025, up 2.5% from 7,546,988 in 2024. (DOT/BTS)
• 37.4 million scheduled departures worldwide in 2024 (+5.1%) — roughly 102,000 flights per day globally. (ICAO; per-day figure derived)
• 14,264 certified air traffic controllers kept it moving in FY2024, up 2.9% year over year. (FAA)

U.S. airline passengers: the annual totals

• 982.7 million passengers flew on U.S. carriers in 2024 — the all-time high; June 2024 (89.7 million) remains the record month. (BTS monthly table, summed)
• 972.0 million passengers flew in 2025, about 1.0% below 2024's record. (BTS monthly table, summed; BTS may revise)
• 3,287 public-use airports make up the U.S. national system; about 502 have scheduled airline service, and 92% of Americans live within 30 miles of a primary airport. (FAA NPIAS 2025–2029)

On-time performance and cancellations

• 76.42% of U.S. flights arrived on time in 2025, down from 78.1% in 2024 — the worst on-time year since 2014. (DOT Air Travel Consumer Report; U.S. PIRG analysis)
• 1 in 12 non-cancelled flights arrived 60+ minutes late in 2025, and 1 in 9 arrived 45+ minutes late; domestic 3-hour tarmac delays rose 63% versus 2024. (U.S. PIRG Education Fund, from DOT/BTS data)
• 1.53% of scheduled flights were cancelled in 2025 — 118,168 of 7,736,770. (DOT ATCR Table 6B)

Cancellation rate of scheduled U.S. domestic flights, marketing carriers (DOT/BTS). For airline-by-airline and airport-by-airport breakdowns — including why flights are late — see our full flight delay and cancellation statistics study.

What flying costs

• $387 — the average U.S. domestic airfare in 2025 (round-trip-equivalent itinerary fare), down 1.8% from 2024 and, inflation-adjusted, 39.0% below the 2000 peak of $634. (BTS)
• Quarterly fares fell through 2025: $397 in Q1, $386 in Q2, $370 in Q3. (BTS)
• $7.27 billion in checked-bag fees was collected by U.S. airlines in 2024 — then a record — and more than $7.4 billion in 2025. (BTS)
• $148.4 billion in global ancillary revenue in 2024, projected at $157 billion for 2025 — 15.7% of airline revenue, up from 9.1% in 2016. (IdeaWorksCompany/CarTrawler)
• $6.0 billion net profit for U.S. airlines in 2025, down from 2024. (BTS)

Fee-by-fee airline comparisons live in our airline baggage fees guide; if you're optimizing the fare itself, see the cheapest day to fly.

Expedited screening: PreCheck, Global Entry, CLEAR

• 20+ million active TSA PreCheck members as of August 2024 — the latest official milestone; 3.3 million new members enrolled and 2.1 million renewed in 2024 alone. (TSA)
• 99% of PreCheck passengers wait under 10 minutes in PreCheck lanes, per TSA's standing claim (restated April 2026). TSA publishes no equivalent statistic for standard lanes.
• Nearly 13 million Global Entry members as of May 2025; the program costs $120 for 5 years and includes PreCheck. (CBP)
• 8.2 million active CLEAR+ members (+13.0% year over year) as of March 31, 2026, across 60 CLEAR+ airports. (Clear Secure SEC 8-K)

Deciding between them? Start with PreCheck vs CLEAR vs Global Entry.

The busiest airports, in one line each

• Atlanta (ATL) is the world's busiest airport — 106,302,208 passengers in 2025 (ACI preliminary), a title it has held every year since 1998 except 2020. Check live security waits at ATL.
• 52,511,402 enplanements at ATL in 2024 made it the busiest U.S. airport by FAA count, ahead of Dallas/Fort Worth (42.4M) and Denver (40.0M). (FAA ACAIS)
• Four U.S. airports rank in the world top 10 for 2025: Atlanta (1st), Dallas Fort Worth (4th), Chicago O'Hare (6th), and Denver (10th). (ACI preliminary)

Full world and U.S. rankings — with the wait-time overlay showing that busiest rarely means slowest — are in our busiest airports study.

Security waits: what our model shows

The figures in this section are modeled estimates from tsawaittimes.app's own forecasting model — not TSA measurements. Across the 32 largest U.S. airports on a typical day, the model's national curve is a double hump: waits peak at 29 minutes around 8 AM and 30 minutes around 6 PM, with the quietest reasonable hour at 5 AM (10 minutes). Per-airport tables, the hour-by-hour curve, and the full method are in our TSA wait times study.

All wait figures are FIRST-PARTY MODELED ESTIMATES produced by tsawaittimes.app’s own forecasting model (the same Tier-B model that powers the live site), computed 2026-07-03 for the launch set of 32 large U.S. airports. They are not TSA or government measurements. For this snapshot every airport was computed via the model’s deterministic typical-day curve (an overnight lull with ~8 AM and ~6 PM peaks) scaled per airport, clamped to 4–75 minutes; the flight-schedule-density input was unavailable at run time. The national hour-by-hour shape is the model’s real typical-day curve, but per-airport differences come from the model’s seeded scaling — treat per-airport rows as “our model’s typical-day estimate,” never as a measured ranking of airports. Averages weight operating hours (4 AM–10 PM) at 1.0 and overnight hours at 0.25. Standard lanes only; 11 of the 32 airports also have live Tier-A checkpoint feeds (marked “live”). No day-of-week or seasonal term is included. Values rounded to whole minutes.

How many people fly per day in the United States?

TSA screened an average of 2,484,208 passengers per day in 2025 — a record 906,735,976 for the full year. The FAA puts the daily figure at more than 3 million airline passengers per day when you count everyone moving through the system. Worldwide, ICAO counted 4.7 billion passengers carried in 2024, roughly 12.8 million people flying per day.

How many flights take off each day?

The FAA handled 16,191,379 flights in fiscal year 2024 — about 44,200 per day across more than 29 million square miles of airspace. Worldwide, ICAO counted 37.4 million scheduled departures in 2024, roughly 102,000 flights per day.

What percentage of flights are on time or cancelled?

In 2025, 76.42% of U.S. flights arrived on time and 1.53% were cancelled (118,168 of 7,736,770 scheduled flights), per DOT data. That was the worst on-time performance since 2014 — a U.S. PIRG analysis found 1 in 12 non-cancelled flights arrived 60 or more minutes late. 2024 was better: 78.1% on time and 1.36% cancelled.

What is the average cost of a domestic flight?

The average U.S. domestic itinerary fare was $387 in 2025 (round-trip equivalent), down 1.8% from 2024, per the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Adjusted for inflation, that is 39.0% below the 2000 peak of $634 — flying is historically cheap even as fees have grown.

Cite or share this data

Journalists, researchers, and bloggers are welcome to republish any chart or table on this page with a link to it — everything here is licensed CC BY 4.0. Suggested citation:

Source: tsawaittimes.app — Air travel statistics: how America flies, 2026

Third-party figures (TSA, FAA, DOT/BTS, ICAO, IATA, ACI, CBP) remain credited to their original publishers, all linked in the sources below.