Throughout 2025, London Stansted saw a record high number of passengers travelling through the airport, totalling at 30 million and marking it as the busiest year in its history.
London Stansted Hits 30 Million Milestone
Due to a host of new route launches and seat capacity increases, London Stansted managed to hit its 30 million milestone of passengers in 2025. December was a particularly busy month, driven by the rise in festive period travellers, and ultimately handling 2.26 million passengers across the month. Compared to 2024, this was a 1.6% increase.
London Stansted’s Managing Director, Gareth Powell, commented on the milestone:
“It was a really successful year for London Stansted in 2025, the busiest year in our history as we welcomed a record-breaking 30 million passengers in a 12-month period for the very first time.”
With more than 200 destinations on offer, Dublin and Istanbul ended up as the most popular destinations this year, chosen by nearly 1 million passengers.
Key Events Over 2025
It appears this record high number is set to only increase, as last month London Stansted secured the planning permission to increase its annual passenger limit. With this expansion, up to 51 million passengers will be able to fly through the airport across the year.
Gareth Powell added:
“As we look to the future, we were delighted to last month receive the green light to increase our annual passenger limit to 51 million, which paves the way for us to make best use of the existing single runway and grow passenger volumes towards the new limit over the next two decades.”
Additionally, various key investment projects made huge leaps in 2025, such as the rollout of a multi-million pound programme that will allow passengers to leave large electrical items and liquid bags in hand baggage. These projects hope to make going through security quicker for passengers, as well as introducing an on-site solar farm to support the airport’s goal of making operations net zero carbon.
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