How busy an airport is before you leave for it — worked out from public flight schedules, for airports worldwide.
We take publicly published departure schedules and estimate how many people are likely to be in a terminal at a given time, then compare that with how that airport usually is. The result is shown as a relative level — quiet through to peak — rather than a waiting time in minutes.
A wait in minutes needs to know how many security lanes are open and how fast each one moves. That is knowable for a few dozen airports in the world and for none of the rest, which is why published minute figures for the same terminal at the same moment routinely disagree with each other several times over.
A level measured against the airport's own history is a number that is actually true everywhere, from one feed. It answers the question you have — is now worse than usual — without pretending to know something we cannot.
Flight schedules, airport details and place names come from third-party data providers. We check what we reasonably can, but errors in those sources will appear here too, and we cannot guarantee any of it is complete or current. If you spot something wrong, please tell us.
Timezone information is derived from OpenStreetMap data, © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence.
This site is free to use. We earn money when readers buy travel products and services we link to. Some of those are operated by the same people who run this site, and we will say so where that is the case. That commercial relationship never changes the busyness figures, which are produced from flight schedules by the method described above, and we do not accept payment to make an airport look quieter or busier than our data says.
We are setting up a contact address for this site. Until it is published here, corrections can be sent through eSIM-Now, which publishes it.