There are some airports you dread because you know it’s always going to be crowded—there aren’t any seats at your gate or even near it, or you aren’t able to get food because the lines are so long—and then there are some that actually make you like traveling.
In that happy category is an international airport just across the bay from San Francisco, the San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport. Oakland’s airport is the #5 least crowded one in the U.S., according to a study by LendingTree. The ranking is based on travel travel data from 2023, when Oakland had 7,280,367 seats on flights available to passengers and only 5,390,797 takers for those seats—or 74 percent. That means there was a little cushiness built in.
(Side note: In May, the airport made news by announcing a name change from Oakland International Airport to incorporate the wording “San Francisco Bay,” spurring the city of San Francisco to file a lawsuit against it. The airport’s call letters remain OAK and its website is still oaklandairport.com.)
For comparison purposes, the #1 least crowded airport is Kahului Airport in Hawai’i, with 70.6 percent of its 5,110,609 seats taken. It’s interesting to note that the four least-crowded airports are all relatively small ones—so really, it’s like Oakland actually won. Oakland’s airport is all one level, so it boasts easy drop-off and pick-up. And depending on traffic, it’s just as close to downtown San Francisco as San Francisco International Airport (SFO). We did a quick test, plugging in the estimated travel time by car from both airports to downtown Civic Center. Although it’s 19.8 miles from OAK and 13.7 from SFO, Oakland’s drive time only added one minute over San Francisco’s 43 minutes on a Thursday early evening (plus you would get to enjoy the beautiful upper deck of the Bay Bridge).
On the opposite end of the list, San Francisco International was the 14th most crowded airport, filling 83.1 percent of its 24,209,185 airline seats last year.
You’re probably wondering what the most crowded airport is: It’s St. Pete-Clearwater International in Florida. That’s a little wild given that Atlanta-Hartsfield Jackson International is widely regarded as the world’s absolute busiest airport for the last few years and according to up-to-date data as of September 2024 from global travel data provider OAG. But busy doesn’t necessarily equal crowded.
The study used data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics for domestic and international travel departing out of the top 100 U.S. airports in terms of the most available seats in 2023.
Here are the top five least crowded airports in the U.S.:
1. Kahului Airport, Maui, Hawai’i
2. Hollywood Burbank Airport, California
3. Lihue Airport, Kauaʻi, Hawai’i
4. Ellison Onizuka Kona International Airport at Keahole, Island of Hawai’i, Hawai’i
5. San Francisco Bay Oakland International, California