29 Million Passengers: US Carriers Gird for Busiest Thanksgiving Since Pandemic

US airlines expect to carry nearly 29 million passengers over the Thanksgiving travel weekend, with the peak crush landing on November 29 as travelers fly home from family gatherings. American Airlines alone has scheduled 7,021 flights for that day — its busiest single day since the pandemic — and United Airlines projects roughly 600,000 passengers on the same date.

The numbers frame an 11-day travel window running from November 20, with trade group Airlines for America (A4A) flagging November 29 and 30 as the two heaviest days. To absorb the surge, US carriers have loaded an average of 38,000 more seats per day than they offered over the same holiday period last year, according to A4A.

What did last year's peak look like?

The record books already took a beating. The Sunday after Thanksgiving in 2025 — November 30 — was the busiest day the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) had ever recorded, with more than 3.13 million people screened at US airport checkpoints. That is more than double the 1.56 million who passed through security on Thanksgiving Day itself. Nearly 2.9 million more travelers cleared checkpoints on December 1.

Checkpoint traffic concentrated at the biggest hubs during the seven days around Thanksgiving. Los Angeles International (LAX) led with roughly 689,000 screenings, according to TSA figures. New York's John F. Kennedy International (JFK) followed with 647,000, then Atlanta (ATL) at 603,000 and Chicago O'Hare (ORD) at 598,000.

How are the majors deploying capacity?

American and its regional partners expect more than 8 million passengers across nearly 85,000 flights between November 19 and December 1 — a schedule that includes 4% more flights than last Thanksgiving. The operational peak comes at midday on November 29, when American anticipates having 1,130 aircraft in the air simultaneously, a figure that compresses air traffic control, ramp and hub-bank timing into a single hour-by-hour test.

United's outbound rush peaks earlier than most travelers might guess. The carrier forecasts more than 540,000 passengers on Friday, November 20 — six days before Thanksgiving itself — as travelers front-load their departures. Its November 29 forecast adds another 60,000 people on the trip home, bringing United's expected total to more than 6.6 million passengers across the same 13-day span.

What will passengers pay?

Booking platform Hopper put the average domestic round-trip fare for travelers returning on November 29 at $604 — a hefty premium over the same itineraries at quieter points in the year. That pricing gap is the market's clearest signal of where the capacity squeeze sits: demand on the return leg now outruns even the 38,000 daily seats carriers have added.

For airlines, the holiday stress-tests the systems that failed or buckled during past surges — crew scheduling, aircraft rotation and hub connectivity — under the highest passenger volumes since 2019-era peaks. For airports and the TSA, it repeats the screening loads that produced last year's all-time record of 3.13 million. The Thanksgiving numbers will land as US carriers continue trimming unprofitable capacity elsewhere in their networks, meaning the holiday spike runs on schedules built leaner than in previous years, and how November 29 performs will offer the clearest read yet on whether the system can absorb a return to record demand.