Screened passenger traffic at Canadian airports, January 2025

Passengers screened for transborder (to the United States) flights at the eight largest Canadian airports represented 26.1% of the total screened passengers in 2023 and 27.4% of such passengers in 2024.

Transborder traffic is typically concentrated at the four largest airports: Toronto/Lester B. Pearson International, Vancouver International, Montréal/Pierre Elliott Trudeau International, and Calgary International. While these four airports account for about 83% of all screened passenger traffic each year, they represent more than 90% of all transborder traffic.

In January 2025, the number of Canadian residents returning from trips to the United States by automobile declined by 0.9% compared with the same month one year earlier, the first such decline since March 2021 (see Leading indicator of international arrivals to Canada, January 2025).

Statistics Canada will continue to monitor for similar changes in screened passenger airline traffic between Canada and the United States.

Data for this release are derived from the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority (CATSA) Boarding Pass Security System and include screened traffic at pre-board security screening checkpoints at the eight largest airports in Canada.

Due to the implementation of a system upgrade, passenger traffic data was not collected for approximately nine hours on Tuesday, January 14, 2025. As a result, total counts of screened passengers for January 2025 can be expected to be understated by about 1% to 2%. Users are advised to exercise caution when making comparisons with data from other reference periods.

The eight largest airports in Canada are Halifax/Robert L. Stanfield International, Montréal/Pierre Elliott Trudeau International, Ottawa/Macdonald-Cartier International, Toronto/Lester B. Pearson International, Winnipeg/James Armstrong Richardson International, Calgary International, Edmonton International and Vancouver International.

Screened passenger traffic includes air travellers required to go through pre-board security screening and excludes aircrew and airport employees. This data series represents a different measure of traffic than the counts of enplaned or deplaned passengers published in Statistics Canada's annual Airport activity report or produced by the individual airports. For example, the screened passenger data will not account for passengers with connecting flights who did not pass through security. For more information, please refer to the "Related information" tab (Definitions, data sources and methods) for this release.

Users interested in accessing daily counts of screened traffic at Canada's major airports can obtain them from the CATSA website.

Data table: 23-10-0312-01.

• Note: some data tables may best be viewed on desktop.

Definitions, data sources and methods: survey number 5404.

Previous release: Screened passenger traffic at Canadian airports, December 2024.