It took nearly two decades, but last year delivered a new record passenger count to Dulles International Airport.
Just over 27.25 million passengers traveled through the airport in 2024, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) announced in late February.
That’s up 5.8% from 2023 and tops the previous all-time record, set in 2005 during the brief period when the now-defunct, low-cost airline Independence Air was challenging United Airlines at Dulles.
The 2024 passenger total also put Dulles on top among the region’s three commercial airports for the year. A year before, it had been third.
“In addition to the new airlines at Dulles, United and other incumbent carriers also expanded service [in 2024],” noted the airports authority, which runs Dulles and Reagan Washington National Airport. Both facilities are owned by the federal government.
Airlines that started serving Dulles in 2024 included Aeromexico, Avelo, Breeze, Frontier, Sun Country and Swiss International. A total of 17 new service routes were added during the year, some from new entrants, but mostly from United, which long has been the airport’s dominant carrier.
International passenger traffic at Dulles set a new record of 10.38 million passengers, up 11% from a year before. The airport has shown strength in almost all regions of the globe except for China, which continues to lag in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
One challenge in rebuilding China service is the current inability to use Russian airspace, restricting nonstop capabilities from the U.S. East Coast. Other parts of Asia are performing well, and MWAA has embarked on efforts to continue growing Dulles’s footprint there.
During 2024, Lufthansa upgauged its Munich-to-Dulles service from an Airbus A340 aircraft to an Airbus A380, the world’s largest commercial jetliner but one that is less often seen in the skies as it is being phased out by some international carriers.
Reagan National also set a new record in 2024 with 26.29 million passengers, up 3.3% from 2023.
“Demand for travel to and from the region and increased airline seat capacity at the airport led to this increase,” MWAA officials said.
As of the end of 2024, National Airport had eight airlines serving 97 destinations.
The combined 53.54 million passengers traveling through the two airports in 2024 represented a year-over-year increase of 5.8%.
Baltimore’s Thurgood Marshall International Airport, which is owned and operated by the Maryland state government, reported a year-end passenger count of 27.06 million. That’s up 3.3% from 2023 and was just shy of the all-time record, set in 2018.
According to the trade organization Airlines for America, scheduled annual passenger seats from 2017 to 2024 rose 4% at BWI, 9% at Reagan National and 17% at Dulles.
Nationally, the overall 2024 passenger count through November was 1.01 billion, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. December’s passenger total will push 2024 past the previous all-time high of 1.05 billion recorded in 2023 — slightly edging out the total reported in 2019.
Federal officials won’t report airport rankings based on 2024 passenger counts until mid-summer. For 2023, BWI ranked 23rd in terms of passengers, National 24th and Dulles 26th. The top three in the ranking were Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson, Dallas-Fort Worth and Denver International.
Members of the MWAA’s board of directors will have the opportunity to parse the data at their next meeting, scheduled for Wednesday, March 19.
That will also be the board’s first formal meeting since the Jan. 29 midair collision between a U.S. Army helicopter and a regional jet that crashed into the Potomac River near National Airport, killing 67 people.
