Biggest Airport
I'll bet it's O'Hare.
For many years, when I got into a discussion (or argument) about which airport was the biggest, it would go like this: Someone would say “I heard that Orlando is the biggest airport now, because of Disney World.” And I would say, “It’s O’Hare. No contest.” And we would look it up. (We couldn’t Google it back then.) And I’d be right.
That is, I’d be right if we were talking anytime between 1963 and 1998. During that time, O’Hare had more passenger traffic than any other airport. But I was surprised to hear that it was dethroned in 1999 by Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport. Since then, Atlanta has held the title pretty consistently.
In 2024, here are the busiest airports, along with the number of passengers they handled:
1. Atlanta, USA (ATL) – 108.1 million
2. Dubai, United Arab Emirates (DXB) – 92.3 million
3. Dallas/Fort Worth, USA (DFW) – 87.8 million
4. Tokyo, Japan (HND) – 85.9 million
5. London, U.K. (LHR) – 83.9 million
6. Denver, U.S. (DEN) – 82.4 million
7. Istanbul, Turkey (IST) – 80.1 million
8. Chicago, U.S. (ORD) – 80 million
9. New Delhi, India (DEL) – 77.8 million
10. Shanghai, China (PVG) – 76.8 million
11. Los Angeles, U.S. (LAX) – 76.6 million
12. Guangzhou, China (CAN) – 76.4 million
13. Incheon, Korea (ICN) – 71.2 million
14. Paris, France (CDG) – 70.3 million
15. Singapore (SIN) – 67.7 million
(Airports Council International (ACI) data)
This chart shows how much traffic has changed year to year.
We can see that Atlanta stays pretty much on top, while other airports pop in or drop out of the top 10, and O’Hare has fallen quite a bit. But this doesn’t really tell the whole story.
But wait …
When we talk about largest, are we talking about passenger volume, or land area?
The largest airport in the world by physical land area is King Fahd International Airport (DMM), in Dammam, Saudi Arabia. It sits on 776 square kilometers, or about 300 square miles of land. That makes it bigger than the entire city of Chicago.
By comparison, here are some other large airports, but they don’t even come close to the same size:
Denver International Airport (DEN), USA – ~135 km²
Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport (DFW), USA – ~70 km²
Orlando International Airport (MCO), USA – ~54 km²
We can also look at terminal size. Dubai International Airport is the largest in the world, with 1.7 million square meters under the roof. I can’t even imagine having to catch a flight that was leaving from the far end of that place. It has four main buildings.
By one definition, my first answer is still right. O’Hare has 8 runways, the most of any airport. You can look it up.
