İstanbul's two airports moved 63.4 million passengers in six months

İstanbul's two airports handled 63.45 million passengers in the first half of 2026, according to State Airports Authority (DHMİ) figures released by Transport and Infrastructure Minister Abdulkadir Uraloğlu. The count runs from January through June and covers both sides of the city, the European and the Asian.

İstanbul Airport carried the larger share, 39.92 million passengers, of whom 31.69 million flew international routes and 8.24 million flew domestic. Traffic controllers logged 262,271 aircraft movements there over the six months, roughly 1,450 takeoffs and landings a day. The split tells its own story: nearly four in five passengers at İstanbul Airport were flying to or from another country, the mark of a hub built to connect continents rather than serve a single city.

Across the Bosphorus, Sabiha Gökçen International Airport served 23.53 million passengers, 12.67 million of them international and 10.85 million domestic, with 135,535 aircraft movements. The Asian-side airport carries a heavier domestic load, and its balance has long made it the workhorse for travel within Türkiye while İstanbul Airport anchors the long-haul network.

The İstanbul totals sit inside a busy national picture. Türkiye's airports as a whole moved 111.96 million passengers in the first six months of the year, up 2.6 percent from the same period in 2025, the ministry said. İstanbul's pair accounted for well over half of that traffic.

The half-year numbers land as İstanbul Airport keeps trading places with London Heathrow at the top of Europe's rankings. The aviation-data firm OAG reported that İstanbul Airport was Europe's busiest by scheduled seat capacity in July 2026, offering 4.69 million seats against Heathrow's 4.49 million, even as its own capacity slipped about 1 percent year on year. İstanbul Airport served roughly 84 million passengers across all of 2025, a figure that placed it among the busiest hubs anywhere.

Türkiye has spent the better part of a decade building toward these numbers, moving İstanbul Airport's operation off the old Atatürk site in 2019 and folding both airports into the flag carrier's transfer model. The first half of 2026 shows the strategy holding: a single city, two airports, and a passenger count that outruns the population of most countries in the region.