London Heathrow retained its place as Europe’s busiest airport in 2025 with a total of 52.1 million departing seats, which was just ahead of Istanbul with 51.5 million seats, according to aviation data firm OAG.
The UK hub ranked as the fourth busiest airport globally – behind Atlanta (63.1 million seats), Dubai (62.4 million seats) and Tokyo Haneda (55.4 million) in OAG's 2025 World's Busiest Airports report, which was released last week.
Heathrow and Istanbul in fifth place were the only European gateways to feature in the top 10 global list.
All of the top 10 busiest airports globally were at or above 2019 capacity levels in 2025, with Heathrow’s capacity up by 4 per cent on the pre-Covid year and Istanbul’s total seats rising by 22 per cent over the same period.
Three other US airports featured in the top 10 list behind first-place Atlanta, with Dallas Fort Worth in sixth place, Chicago O’Hare in eighth position and Denver in tenth.
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Paris Charles de Gaulle was the third busiest European airport with a capacity of 43.2 million departing seats in 2025. While this was a 3 per cent increase on 2024, it was still 4 per cent below 2019 levels, despite what OAG called a “steady annual recovery”.
Amsterdam Schiphol was in fourth place with 41.34 million seats, which put it just fractionally down on 2019’s figure of 41.36 million.
The German hubs of Frankfurt and Munich were ranked as Europe’s fifth and tenth busiest airports with 40.7 million and 28.1 million seats respectively in 2025. Although, they both remain well below pre-Covid levels – Frankfurt’s capacity is 10 per cent lower than in 2019 and Munich’s is 12 per cent lower.