Romania's airports, 2025
Romania has 17 airports. One of them handled almost 60% of all passengers.
The busiest, Otopeni, counted 17,001,578 passengers in 2025; the quietest, Tulcea, 8,173. One of the 17 is the nearest to you.
Keep going: on the map, each light will stand for 10,000 people, then for 10,000 passengers.
Data: Romanian Airports Association, 2025; 2021 census.
Why some lists say 15 or 16
The annual table of the Romanian Airports Association has 17 rows. Two of them are missing from many older lists: Brașov-Ghimbav, where flights began on 15 June 2023, and Băneasa in Bucharest, left without low-cost flights from 2012 until January 2025, when Wizz Air returned.
Momondo's list of Romania's “operational airports”, for one, has 15 and leaves out both.
Airfields used for sport or utility flying are not counted: none of them appears in the passenger statistics.
Otopeni, bigger than the other 16 combined
Each circle's area matches its passengers in 2025. Otopeni, Bucharest's main airport, counted 17,001,578, or 59.6% of the total: more than the other 16 airports combined (11,545,478).
Next come Cluj (3.58 million), Iași (2.24 million) and Timișoara (1.46 million). At the bottom, Arad and Tulcea each had fewer than 10,000 passengers. Otopeni had 2,080 times as many as Tulcea.
Sibiu (694,805) finished ahead of Băneasa (694,718) by 87 passengers.
Where people live
Each light stands for 10,000 residents, placed in their commune or town as counted by the 2021 census: 1,905 lights for 19,053,815 people.
Bucharest is the brightest spot, but most of the lights are scattered across the rest of the country.
Everyone beside their nearest airport
Each light moves to the airport nearest to home, in a straight line. Bucharest's two airports, 7.6 km apart, count as one.
Bucharest gathers 442 lights: 4.42 million people, 23% of the country's residents. Craiova collects 196, Bacău 169, Brașov 133.
Then the lights become passengers
This time each light stands for 10,000 passengers counted in 2025. In Bucharest, 442 lights become 1,770: 62% of the country's traffic, for 23% of its residents.
Only three other piles grow: Cluj (from 97 to 358), Iași (from 87 to 224) and Timișoara (from 87 to 146). All the others shrink. In Tulcea, 78 lights become one.
Passengers are not the area's residents. An airport counts everyone who boards or leaves a plane, so a return trip counts twice, and foreign visitors are counted too. The comparison shows where traffic gathers, not where each person sets off from.
778,771 people live nearest to Tulcea
Galați and Brăila are 67 and 63 km from Tulcea's airport, closer than to any other. Counting both cities, 778,771 people live nearer to Tulcea than to any other airport.
Tulcea counted 8,173 passengers in 2025. It has no scheduled flights: it takes charters and general aviation, on request. An airport for Galați and Brăila, discussed for years, was still at the study stage in early 2026.
From Galați, the nearest airport with more than 50,000 passengers a year is Constanța, 124 km away; Otopeni is 181 km. Arad's airport is in a similar position: no scheduled flights since 2015, but Timișoara is only 41 km away.
Your airport
Type the name of your town or village. The map draws a line to the nearest airport and, if that one has little traffic, to the nearest airport with more than 50,000 passengers a year.
Distances are in a straight line from the centre of the locality.