LAX was the only one of America's four largest airports to lose passengers in 2024
Abstract
Passenger volume at large US airports recovered unevenly after 2020, and the recovery is usually reported as a single national figure. Airport-level enplanement counts are published annually by the Federal Aviation Administration, but they are distributed as flat files rather than as comparisons, so year-over-year movement at individual airports is rarely set side by side.
The open question is whether the largest airports moved together in 2024 or diverged. Here we show that they diverged sharply: of the ten busiest US airports by passenger boardings in 2024, eight grew and two declined, and the single largest decline was at Los Angeles International, which boarded 37.8 million passengers, down 7.8% from 2023. Every other airport in the top four grew between 3.1% and 7.9% over the same period. Charlotte grew fastest in the top ten at 10.1%.
That divergence matters because national recovery averages conceal it. A passenger, an airline planner, and a regulator reading "traffic is up" would each draw the wrong conclusion about Los Angeles. These are complete-census counts rather than survey estimates, so the divergence is not a sampling artifact.
Data
The Federal Aviation Administration publishes annual passenger boarding counts for all commercial-service US airports. Boardings, or enplanements, count passengers boarding an aircraft at that airport, so a connecting passenger is counted at both their origin and their connecting airport.
This analysis uses the calendar-year 2024 file and the year-over-year change the FAA reports against calendar-year 2023. The figures are a complete census of commercial boardings, not a sample, so there is no sampling error and no confidence interval to report. What error exists is reporting error at the airport level, not statistical uncertainty.
Coverage is limited to the ten busiest airports by 2024 boardings. Airports outside the top ten are excluded here, not because they are uninteresting, but because a top-ten cut was fixed before the year-over-year figures were examined.
Method
Airport enplanement records were read from the FAA calendar-year files, ranked by 2024
boardings, and paired with the reported change against 2023. No modeling, weighting, or
imputation was applied: every figure below is a published count or a published percentage
change. The exact query is data/models/marts/mart_airport_traffic.sql, and the analysis
is reproducible from the FAA file alone.
Presentation note: the source file carries raw integers such as 52511402. Those are rendered here as 52.5 million for readability. No magnitude was altered.
What the 2024 counts show
| Rank | Airport | 2024 boardings | Change vs 2023 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Atlanta (ATL) | 52.5M | up 3.1% |
| 2 | Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) | 42.4M | up 7.9% |
| 3 | Denver (DEN) | 40.0M | up 5.7% |
| 4 | Chicago O’Hare (ORD) | 38.6M | up 7.6% |
| 5 | Los Angeles (LAX) | 37.8M | down 7.8% |
| 6 | New York JFK | 31.5M | up 2.1% |
| 7 | Charlotte (CLT) | 28.5M | up 10.1% |
| 8 | Las Vegas (LAS) | 28.2M | up 1.3% |
| 9 | Orlando (MCO) | 27.9M | down 0.6% |
| 10 | Miami (MIA) | 26.6M | up 7.6% |
Los Angeles is the outlier, and the gap is wide
Los Angeles International boarded 37.8 million passengers in 2024, a decline of 7.8% against 2023. The next-largest movement in the other direction within the top ten was Charlotte at 10.1% growth. Orlando also declined, by 0.6%, which is small enough that it reads as flat rather than as a trend.
Set against its immediate peers the contrast is stark. Chicago O'Hare sits one rank above LAX at 38.6 million boardings against LAX's 37.8 million, a close enough gap that the two airports are effectively the same size, and O'Hare grew 7.6% over the same year. Dallas-Fort Worth grew 7.9%. Atlanta, which has held the top rank for decades, grew 3.1%.
The decline is not a one-year anomaly in departures
Enplanements measure passengers. Departures measure flights, and BTS reports them separately along with cancellation and delay rates. For Los Angeles the departure series tells a compatible story: LAX has not returned to its 2019 flight volume.
| Year | Departures | Cancelled | Left 15+ min late |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 219,952 | 1.29% | 17.3% |
| 2020 | 124,168 | 5.09% | 8.1% |
| 2021 | 174,318 | 1.25% | 17.0% |
| 2022 | 191,156 | 1.48% | 17.6% |
Departures fell to 124,168 in 2020, recovered to 174,318 in 2021 and 191,156 in 2022, and had still not reached the 219,952 of 2019. The 2020 figures are worth reading carefully in both directions: the cancellation rate rose to 5.09%, roughly four times its 2019 level, while the share of departures leaving 15 or more minutes late fell to 8.1%, its lowest in the series. An airport running far below capacity runs closer to schedule. Punctuality improving is not the same as service improving.
Set against that, a 7.8% enplanement decline in 2024 reads less like a single bad year and more like the continuation of a slower recovery at this airport than at its peers.
Why this table stops at 2019 and does not reach back further. Row30 holds LAX reliability figures going back to 1987, and it would be easy to draw a thirty-year line through them. We do not, because the reporting basis changed. On 1 January 2018 the DOT threshold for a reporting carrier moved from 1% of domestic scheduled passenger revenue to half of one percent, and reportable flights moved to the marketing-carrier basis, meaning regional flights sold under a mainline code are now attributed differently. Figures either side of that line describe different populations of flights. Comparing them is not directly comparable, so this table stays entirely on one side of the break.
The fastest growth is happening outside the top ten
Ranking by size hides where the movement is. Four airports well outside the top ten grew faster in 2024 than all but one airport inside it.
| Rank | Airport | 2024 boardings | Change vs 2023 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 21 | Philadelphia (PHL) | 15.1M | up 10.6% |
| 43 | Fort Myers (RSW) | 5.4M | up 9.3% |
| 39 | San Juan (SJU) | 6.5M | up 8.4% |
| 46 | Indianapolis (IND) | 5.2M | up 8.2% |
Philadelphia boarded 15.1 million passengers, up 10.6%, marginally faster in percentage terms than Charlotte's 10.1% on 28.5 million and faster than every other airport in the top ten. Fort Myers boarded 5.4 million, up 9.3%. San Juan boarded 6.5 million, up 8.4%. Indianapolis boarded 5.2 million, up 8.2%. Each of those percentages exceeds Dallas-Fort Worth's 7.9% on 42.4 million, the strongest growth rate among the four largest airports.
The caution here is arithmetic and it matters: percentage growth on a smaller base is easier. Indianapolis adding 8.2% to 5.2 million boardings is a much smaller absolute movement than Atlanta adding 3.1% to 52.5 million. These four are presented to show that growth is not confined to the largest airports, not to rank them against the majors.
This selection is also deliberately partial. Four airports were chosen to illustrate the point; they are not the complete set of fast-growing US airports in 2024, and a reader should not infer that they are the fastest.
Is the slow recovery operational, or is it demand?
The obvious next question is whether LAX is recovering slowly because it cannot run the flights or because fewer people want them. The departure data does not settle it, but it does rule out one explanation. If LAX were struggling operationally, we would expect its cancellation and delay rates to be worse than its peers. They are better.
| Airport | Departures | Cancelled | Left 15+ min late |
|---|---|---|---|
| Atlanta (ATL) | 317,926 | 1.57% | 18.1% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) | 276,708 | 2.86% | 23.6% |
| Denver (DEN) | 271,467 | 2.58% | 25.9% |
| Chicago O’Hare (ORD) | 260,571 | 2.75% | 21.0% |
| Los Angeles (LAX) | 191,156 | 1.48% | 17.6% |
In 2022 LAX had the lowest cancellation rate of the five at 1.48% and the lowest late- departure share at 17.6%. Denver, which grew 5.7% in 2024, cancelled 2.58% of departures and had 25.9% of them leave late. Dallas-Fort Worth, which grew 7.9%, cancelled 2.86% and had 23.6% leave late.
So the airports gaining passengers were, on these two measures, running less reliably than the airport losing them. That is the opposite of what an operational-constraint explanation predicts, and it is worth stating plainly because it is the intuitive story and the data does not support it.
It does not follow that demand is the explanation. The comparison carries a real caveat that cuts against reading too much into it: cancellation rates are not comparable between airports, because the regional weather mix differs, and the source data says so explicitly. Denver and Chicago face winter conditions Los Angeles does not. A fair operational comparison would need weather-adjusted figures, which this dataset does not provide.
What the table supports is narrow and worth having anyway: LAX's slower recovery is not accompanied by worse reliability, so an explanation resting on the airport failing to operate its schedule needs evidence this data does not contain.
What this does not explain
This analysis identifies a divergence. It does not identify a reason for it. Enplanement counts alone cannot distinguish among the plausible explanations, which include route and schedule changes by the carriers operating at each airport, a shift of connecting traffic to other hubs, construction or capacity constraints, and changes in origin-destination demand for the Los Angeles market specifically. Testing any of those requires route-level and carrier-level data that is not in this dataset.
Nor should a one-year movement be read as a trend. A single year of decline at one airport is a data point, and the honest description of it is a data point.
Limitations
Two different measures. Enplanements count passengers, departures count flights, and the two series come from different federal collections with different coverage rules. They are presented here as compatible evidence, not as one metric. A change in one does not mechanically imply a change in the other: an airline can carry fewer passengers on the same number of flights, or the same passengers on fewer, larger aircraft.
The reporting break. The departure, cancellation and delay figures come from the BTS reporting-carrier collection, whose threshold and attribution basis both changed on 1 January 2018. Nothing in this article compares across that line. The reporting-carrier set is also not fixed: carriers enter and leave it as their revenue share crosses the threshold, and some report voluntarily.
Cancellation rates are not comparable between airports. The regional weather mix differs, and the source data says so. A higher cancellation rate at one airport than another is not evidence of worse management.
The out-of-top-ten selection is illustrative, not exhaustive. Four airports were picked to demonstrate that growth exists outside the largest ten. We did not scan for the fastest growing airport nationally, and we are not claiming these are it.
Boardings are not the same as passengers served: a connecting passenger is counted at more than one airport, so the counts cannot be summed to a national passenger total. The top-ten cut excludes airports where the same divergence may be present. The FAA reports a calendar-year figure, so any within-year seasonality is invisible here. And because these are census counts rather than estimates, the absence of a confidence interval should not be read as precision about the underlying causes: the counts are exact, the explanations are not tested.
Data availability
The underlying figures come from the
FAA passenger boarding data
for calendar year 2024, published as flat files, and from the
BTS airport departure detail for the
departure, cancellation and delay figures. Row30's derived tables are
mart_airport_traffic and mart_airport_report_cards, and each figure in this article
carries an identifier in our statistics database, listed at the foot of the page.
Source: Federal Aviation Administration passenger boarding data; analysis by Row30. Source: U.S. DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics; analysis by Row30.
How to cite this
Row30 Data Desk (2026). LAX was the only one of America's four largest airports to lose passengers in 2024. Row30. https://row30.com/research/airport-traffic-2024
Our sourcing and statistical standards are on our editorial guidelines page, the arithmetic behind every derived figure we publish is on our methodology page, and any correction to this article will appear in the public corrections log.