The busiest airports in the U.S. and the world

The 10 busiest airports in the world (2025)

Total passengers (arriving + departing), calendar year 2025, per ACI World's preliminary rankings released April 14, 2026 — final figures are due in July 2026. The 2024 column shows each airport's final rank the year before.

• ACI counts each departure and arrival, so airport traffic figures run roughly double IATA/ICAO unique-passenger counts. Global airport traffic passed 9.4 billion in 2024 (+8.4%) and reached roughly 9.8 billion in 2025 (+3.6%, preliminary).
• In 2024's final rankings, Atlanta posted 108,067,766 passengers — its highest recent count — with Dubai second at 92,331,506 and Dallas Fort Worth third at 87,817,864.
• Delhi (DEL), 9th in 2024 with 77,820,834 passengers, dropped out of the preliminary 2025 top 10 as Shanghai and Guangzhou climbed.

Atlanta's reign, and who's climbing

Atlanta has been the world's busiest airport every year since 1998 except 2020, when COVID-19 grounded U.S. travel and Guangzhou briefly led; ATL reclaimed #1 in 2021 and has held it through 2025. The gap is not close — Atlanta finished 2025 about 11 million passengers ahead of second-place Dubai.

The growth stories are Chinese: Shanghai Pudong (PVG) jumped from 21st in 2023 to 10th in 2024 to 5th in 2025, and Guangzhou (CAN) climbed to 9th from 57th as recently as 2022. Meanwhile North American traffic grew 4.5% in 2024 (domestic +3.8%, international +8.7%), collectively surpassing pre-pandemic volumes.

Passenger count is only one ranking. By aircraft movements, Chicago O'Hare was the world's busiest in 2025 with 860,015 takeoffs and landings, ahead of Atlanta (807,625) and Dallas Fort Worth (743,394). By cargo, Hong Kong led with 5,070,256 tonnes, followed by Shanghai Pudong (4,096,016 t) and Anchorage (3,854,614 t) — which overtook Memphis for third. All 2025 figures are ACI preliminary.

The 15 busiest airports in the US (FAA data)

FAA enplanements count passenger boardingsonly — roughly half of an ACI total-passenger figure, so don't mix the two. Calendar year 2024, per the FAA's ACAIS commercial-service report (published September 2025). Every airport links to its live security-wait page.

• Charlotte (+10.15%), Dallas/Fort Worth (+7.91%), and O'Hare (+7.62%) grew fastest among the top 15 in 2024.
• Los Angeles was the only top-five airport to shrink (−7.80% vs 2023), sliding behind O'Hare into 5th.

Busiest ≠ slowest: security waits at the US top 10

Here is the angle raw rankings miss: passenger volume tells you how big an airport is, not how long you'll stand in its security line. We cross-referenced the 10 busiest U.S. airports with our Wait Index — our forecasting model's ranking of 32 large U.S. airports by modeled average and peak standard-lane waits (rank 1 = shortest waits). All wait figures are modeled estimates from tsawaittimes.app's own forecasting model, not TSA measurements.

*Modeled typical-day estimates, standard lanes, computed 2026-07-03. 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.

The pattern: the four biggest airports — Atlanta, Dallas/Fort Worth, Denver, and O'Hare — all model average waits of 16–20 minutes, mid-pack or better in our index. Their checkpoint capacity is sized to their volume. The longer modeled waits in the top 10 belong to Los Angeles (23-minute average, the busiest airport with the slowest modeled line) and Miami and Denver on peak hours. If you fly the giants, the volume headlines shouldn't scare you — see how early to arrive at the airport for how to convert a wait estimate into a departure time, and what you can bring through security so the line is the only thing that slows you down.

What is the busiest airport in the world?

Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International (ATL) is the busiest airport in the world, with 106.3 million passengers in 2025 per ACI's preliminary rankings (108.1 million in 2024, final). Atlanta has held the #1 spot every year since 1998 except 2020, when COVID-19 briefly put Guangzhou on top. Dubai (DXB, 95.2 million) and Tokyo Haneda (HND, 91.7 million) round out the 2025 top three.

What is the busiest airport in the US?

Atlanta (ATL) is the busiest U.S. airport by every measure: 106.3 million total passengers in 2025 (ACI, preliminary) and 52.5 million FAA enplanements in 2024 — about 10 million boardings ahead of second-place Dallas/Fort Worth (42.4 million). Denver, Chicago O'Hare, and Los Angeles complete the U.S. top five by enplanements.

How many US airports are in the world's top 10?

Four U.S. airports made the world top 10 for 2025: Atlanta (1st), Dallas Fort Worth (4th), Chicago O'Hare (6th), and Denver (10th). No other country placed more than one airport in the top 10.

Is the busiest airport also the slowest for security?

Not according to our forecasting model. Atlanta, the world's busiest airport, models a 19-minute average standard-lane wait — mid-pack among the 32 large U.S. airports we track, and faster than far smaller airports like Honolulu or Austin. Big hubs run dozens of screening lanes sized to their volume, so throughput, not raw passenger count, decides your wait. These are modeled estimates from our own wait model, not TSA measurements.

Cite or share this data

Source line for journalists and researchers: Source: tsawaittimes.app — The busiest airports in the U.S. and the world, 2026. The tables and charts on this page are free to republish with a link to this page (CC BY 4.0). Third-party figures originate from ACI World and the FAA as cited below; wait figures are our own modeled estimates.