How Many Airports Are in the United States of America?

Depends what you mean by "airport." The FAA tracks close to 20,000 landing facilities across the country, but only a small slice of those are places you could actually fly into on a commercial ticket. The gap between those two numbers is the whole story.

The short answer

The FAA counts roughly 20,000 total airports, heliports, and seaplane bases in the United States. Of those, about 5,179 are public-use — open to anyone, not just the owner or a private club. Around 3,292 of the public-use airports are significant enough to the national system to sit in the FAA's National Plan of Integrated Airport Systems (NPIAS). Only about 520 are certificated to handle scheduled airline flights, and just 31 are classified as large hubs — the airports that move most of the country's passengers.

How the FAA actually counts airports

The FAA's count includes every kind of landing facility: paved runways, grass strips, heliports, and seaplane bases. It splits them into two buckets:

• Private-use — closed to the public, restricted to the owner or invited pilots. This is the largest group, around 14,850 facilities, and includes ranch strips, corporate helipads, and personal airstrips you'll never see on a flight itinerary.
• Public-use — open to any pilot without prior permission. About 5,179 facilities fall here, and this is the group that actually matters for travelers.

Most public-use airports are small general aviation fields with no scheduled airline service at all — flight schools, charter operations, private pilots. The number that most people actually mean when they ask "how many airports are there" is much smaller than either of the totals above.

US airports, by category

So when someone says the US has "20,000 airports," that's technically true and mostly unhelpful — for travel purposes, the number that matters is closer to 520 commercial-service airports, and within that, a handful of large hubs carry most of the traffic.

What "large hub," "medium hub," "small hub," and "nonhub" mean

The FAA classifies every commercial-service airport by its share of the nation's annual passenger enplanements (boardings):

• Large hub — 1% or more of total US enplanements. Think Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Denver, Chicago O'Hare, LAX.
• Medium hub — 0.25% to 1% of enplanements.
• Small hub — 0.05% to 0.25% of enplanements.
• Nonhub primary — under 0.05% of enplanements but still more than 10,000 annual boardings.

This classification is also what determines federal funding formulas and is separate from an airport's size in acres or runway count — a large hub is defined purely by how many passengers board there each year.

Which US airport is busiest?

Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International (ATL) has held the top spot for years. In CY2024 it logged over 52.5 million enplanements — more than 10 million ahead of the second-place airport, Dallas-Fort Worth International. Denver, Chicago O'Hare, and Los Angeles International round out the next tier.

If you're connecting through one of these large hubs, budget more time than the printed layover — see what a layover actually is and how much buffer big airports really need, and brush up on how to navigate an airport once you land, since gate-to-gate walks at a large hub can run 20 minutes or more.

Why the number keeps moving

Airports open, close, lose their Part 139 certificate, or get added to or dropped from the NPIAS every year, so any "total" is a snapshot, not a fixed fact. If you're researching a specific airport — including facilities outside the mainland, like the airports in Puerto Rico — or planning a trip through a smaller regional field near a destination such as the closest airport to the Grand Canyon, confirm current status directly with the FAA before you rely on it.