Airport traffic bounces back: Sunday's 2.75 million screenings beat last year by 4.5%

The dip we flagged last week has mostly closed. Adding up the daily numbers on TSA's checkpoint travel numbers page and comparing each day with the same weekday 364 days earlier on the 2025 page, the Transportation Security Administration screened 16,574,630 people from November 3 to November 9. The same seven days a year ago drew 16,728,043. That is 153,413 fewer, or 0.9% lower, against a 4.1% shortfall in the week to November 5 that we reported on November 8.

What changed in four days

TSA added November 6 to 9 to its table. The new days:

Together those four days came to 9,890,491 screenings against 9,845,817 a year earlier, up 0.45%. The first two days were still soft. Sunday's 2,749,897 was the highest count of the past week and the biggest gain over the matching day of 2025 of any day since October 1 in our comparison. Nobody should read a two-day gain as a turn: weekend counts swing widely, as the 16.9% Halloween gap showed.

The six weeks side by side

The pattern across six weeks is volume running slightly under last year, between 0.3% and 4.1% lower, with no sustained slide. The 4.1% week was the outlier, and about 343,000 of its 668,000 gap came from one day, Saturday, October 31. TSA does not publish reasons for daily swings, and we have not found a verified explanation, so the cause of any single day's gap is unknown.

What it means if you are booking

• Thanksgiving travelers: Thanksgiving is November 26. Last year TSA's busiest days around the holiday were Sunday, November 30 (3,134,613) and the Wednesday before it (2,753,036), and Thanksgiving Day itself was the quietest at 1,559,165. A softer-than-last-year 2026 would still mean those same days are the crowded ones. If your dates are flexible, Thanksgiving Day and the Tuesday before (2,675,261 last year) were the lighter options.
• Waiting for fares to fall: a 0.9% gap is not the kind of demand shortfall that forces airlines to discount, and these figures cannot tell us what fares will do. Earlier Chronicle reports covered Thanksgiving fares up 31% in Hopper data as quoted by CNBC. If your dates are fixed, compare today's fare with a price alert and book when you can live with it. Our cheap flights guide explains tracking and the 24-hour cancellation rule.
• Companies with travel budgets: the national count is a rough check against your own trip volume, not a forecast for it. A 1% to 4% swing in checkpoint traffic is invisible in one firm's bookings.

What to watch

TSA updates its page Monday to Friday by 9 a.m., and holiday-week updates can be slightly delayed. The week to November 12 is next, and then the run-up to Thanksgiving, where the year-ago peaks above are the benchmark. If the Sunday after Thanksgiving, November 29, comes in under last year's 3.13 million, the softer trend will have reached the holiday itself. If it stays near it, the dip of early November will look like noise.

Sources: TSA checkpoint travel numbers, 2026 and 2025, read November 10, 2026 (the 2026 page ran through November 9). Weekly totals, percentage changes and the Halloween observation are our own arithmetic, comparing each day with the day 364 days earlier. TSA numbers count checkpoint screenings, not tickets sold or flights flown. This is market information, not investment advice.