The busiest travel day of the year: the Sunday after Thanksgiving, flight by flight

Why the Sunday after Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving falls on the fourth Thursday of November. Travel to it is spread over several days, but the way home is squeezed into fewer: a great many people fly back on the Sunday, ready for work on Monday. That makes the Sunday after Thanksgiving the busiest day of the year at US airports.

On Sunday 30 November 2025 the TSA screened 3,133,924 people at its checkpoints, the highest number in its history. Eight of its ten busiest days ever came in 2025, all of them above three million.

In 2026, Thanksgiving is on Thursday 26 November, so the big Sunday is 29 November.

What it looked like in the sky

We counted every departure at the five busiest US hubs, from the same flight records our prints are drawn from, on the days around Thanksgiving 2025. Each count runs from midnight to midnight in the airport's own time zone. (Thanksgiving Day itself is missing from our flight database, so it is not in the table.)

More people, not many more planes

The record day for passengers was not a record day for flights. At Atlanta, Dallas Fort Worth, Denver and Los Angeles we counted about 4 to 6% more departures on the Sunday after Thanksgiving than on the Sunday before, and at most of them the Wednesday before Thanksgiving was nearly as busy as the Sunday after.

Airlines have only so many aircraft and crews, and most of them fly every day anyway, so the extra travellers mostly filled seats on flights that were flying already. The busiest travel day of the year is a day of full planes more than of extra ones.

A week later the holiday was over. On Sunday 7 December, Atlanta had 901 departures, 23% fewer than on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, as the early-December lull set in.

Chicago's snowstorm

O'Hare is the exception in the table. On Saturday 29 November 2025 it had 8.4 inches of snow, the most it has ever recorded on a single November day, and hundreds of flights were cancelled that weekend, about 350 of them on the Sunday. We counted 1,087 departures from O'Hare that day, about 13% fewer than the Sunday before, on the busiest travel day of the year.

A day to keep

For anyone who flew home that weekend, or worked it at the gate, on the ramp or in the tower, the day is worth keeping. We draw every take-off of one day at one airport into a poster, and the Sunday after Thanksgiving makes a dense one: 1,168 lines leaving Atlanta on 30 November 2025.

Every day in our calendar since late September 2025 can be printed, at any of our 385 airports, with a line of your own under the airport's name. How a day of flights becomes a print explains how the lines are drawn.