Ongoing growth in international travel helped propel Dulles International Airport to a record-setting year in 2025.
Officials with the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) will not have confirmed final passenger counts until late February or March, but the authority’s president and CEO, Jack Potter, said the expectation is for a 6% increase from the record year in 2024.
The 2024 passenger count at Dulles was 27,254,087, up 8.4% from 2023 and the highest since its opening in 1962.
The airport is benefiting from United Airlines expanding service, as well as by the arrival of new domestic and international carriers.
“New airlines continue to join the Dulles family,” Potter told members of the MWAA board of directors on Jan. 21.
Among them is Boliviana de Aviación, a carrier owned by the government of Bolivia that on Dec. 16 began twice-weekly service between Dulles and Santa Cruz, Bolivia, with an intermediate fuel stop in Panama.
The service is designed to capitalize on the large Bolivian expatriate community in the D.C. region. The inaugural flight was sold out, said Chryssa Westerlund, MWAA’s executive vice president and chief revenue officer.
On the horizon, Air Premia plans to start service four days per week between Dulles and Incheon, South Korea, on April 24.
It will be the first Korean airline to launch service to the D.C. region since 1995. Korea, like Bolivia, has a large expatriate community in the area, Westerlund said.
Enticing new service to and from Asia has been a strategic focus of the authority since travel restrictions were loosened following the worst of the Covid pandemic.
Growth also is occurring in other global areas. More than 10 million Dulles passengers in 2025 were traveling to or from international destinations.
While Dulles expects to post a new record, Reagan National Airport is likely to post a 5% decline in passenger activity when year-end 2025 figures are reported.
The airport saw 26,290,722 passengers in 2024, an increase of 3.3% from a year before. But it’s still reeling from a deadly aircraft-helicopter collision over the Potomac River in January that led to temporary reductions in flight levels. Federal government downsizing and the seven-week government shutdown also impacted passenger totals.
Despite the decline at National, MWAA officials expect the combined passenger total at both airports to set a new record that will also bring record non-airline revenue, concession sales and parking revenue, Westerlund said.
The authority is banking on an influx of travelers to the D.C. region in spring and summer, as events related to the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence hit their stride.
The anniversary will be “a major event … especially here in the national capital region,” Potter said.
Specialty signage at the airports will be installed to mark the national birthday bash.
“We’re making sure our airports are dressed for the occasion,” Potter said.
