ACI World reports that global airports carried a record 9.8bn passengers in 2025, with Director General Justin Erbacci warning that “more capacity will be needed” as growth slows sharply into 2026.
ACI World’s 2026 Annual World Airport Traffic Report (WATR), published on 23 September 2026, confirms global airports carried a record 9.8bn passengers in 2025. The report draws on data from 2,817 commercial airports across more than 185 countries, ACI World’s largest dataset to date, capturing an estimated 97% of scheduled global passenger traffic.
Air cargo also set a record at 131.2 million tonnes, up 3.3% on the year, while aircraft movements rose 2.0% to 103.1 million. International travel drove passenger growth, up 6.1% against domestic growth of just 1.7%, a gap that shows long-haul and connecting hubs recovering faster than short-haul domestic networks.
“The 2025 results confirm what this industry has shown year after year: long-term demand for air travel remains strong, and more capacity will be needed,” Erbacci said. “Meeting that demand means expanding capacity while getting far more out of the infrastructure we already have.”
Regional growth, 2025
| Region | Passenger traffic growth, 2025 |
|---|---|
| Africa | +9.0% |
| Middle East | +6.5% |
| Asia-Pacific | +5.1% |
| Latin America and the Caribbean | +4.5% |
| Europe | +4.2% |
| North America | -0.7% |
Source: ACI World, 2026 Annual World Airport Traffic Report, 23 September 2026.
North America was the only region to shrink in 2025, a softer picture than the capital spending underway at hubs such as Philadelphia, which has doubled its capital spend to $301m within a $2bn programme, suggesting operators there are building for a demand recovery rather than reacting to current traffic.
2026: the slowdown behind the headline number
The report’s warning is about what comes next rather than what already happened. Global passenger traffic reached approximately 4.7bn in the first half of 2026, up just 0.6% on the same period in 2025, a sharp deceleration from last year’s pace. Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia-Pacific kept growing, and North America was largely flat, but the Middle East recorded a 21% fall in traffic as geopolitical tension and airspace disruption hit the region.
That regional divergence matters for anyone planning capital programmes on the back of last year’s numbers. Middle East capacity investment has continued regardless of the near-term traffic dip, with Jeddah’s $31bn King Abdulaziz International Airport expansion moving ahead through six contracts for 2026-28, and Türkiye’s Istanbul Airport opening a sixth runway alongside an €890m Phase 2 build. Both programmes are betting on the report’s underlying message: that population growth, rising incomes and connectivity demand remain intact even where a single year’s traffic line dips.
Who this helps, and who it does not
The figures give capacity planners in Africa, Asia-Pacific and Europe a strong evidence base to take into 2027 budget rounds, since their growth held up in both 2025 and the first half of 2026. Middle East operators face a harder argument: strong 2025 growth (6.5%) followed by a 21% first-half fall makes the case for continued capital spend less straightforward to sell to boards and lenders, even where underlying long-term drivers remain in the report’s own account.
North American operators sit in the toughest spot: traffic fell in 2025 and stayed flat into 2026, which weakens the near-term traffic case even as infrastructure ages. The report’s broader argument, that regulation should enable investment rather than block it, is aimed squarely at that audience, alongside the slot and airspace capacity questions ACI-NA’s AirportNEXT study of 320 airport executives has already flagged as priorities for the region.
For a head of planning or commercial director, the practical move is to pull the full country and airport rankings from ACI World’s WATR before finalising 2027 capacity or concession budgets, and to weight any Middle East-linked forecast against the first-half 2026 figures rather than last year’s headline growth alone.
