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 least used, Tulcea, 8,173. And for 8.0 million people living in Romania, the nearest airport with over 5 million passengers is in another country: Budapest, Belgrade, Sofia or Chișinău.
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
The airport nearest to home, in a straight line, splits the country into 16 areas. Bucharest's two airports, 7.6 km apart, form one.
Bucharest gathers 442 lights: 4.42 million people, 23% of the country's residents. Craiova collects 196, Bacău 169, Brașov 133.
Bucharest: 23% of residents, 62% of 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 handles charter flights 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.
The nearest big airport may be in another country
Romania has one airport with more than 5 million passengers a year: Otopeni. In neighbouring countries there are four: Budapest (19.6 million), Belgrade (8.9 million), Sofia (8.4 million) and Chișinău (6.1 million).
For 7.98 million people, 42% of residents, the nearest of the five is across the border: Chișinău for 3.95 million, Belgrade for 1.91 million, Budapest for 1.49 million, Sofia for 632,953. Otopeni stays nearest for 11.07 million. On the map: 1,099 lights at Otopeni, 399 at Chișinău, 196 at Belgrade, 148 at Budapest, 63 at Sofia.
Kilometres are not the whole story. Hungary and Bulgaria, like Romania since 2025, are in the Schengen area, so the road to Budapest or Sofia has no border checks. Serbia and Moldova are not: the way to Belgrade or Chișinău goes through border control. Even if Cluj (3.58 million) counted as a big airport, 5.2 million residents would still live closer to one abroad.
Why Timișoara's airport has fallen behind
On the map the circles share one scale: Timișoara, with 87 lights for the 866,826 people in its area, sits between Belgrade and Budapest, airports 6 and 13 times its size. The dotted outline is its 2017 peak.
In 2017 Timișoara had 1,621,529 passengers, its record. In 2025 it had 1,458,098: 10.2% more than in 2024, but still 8.6% below 2019. Over the same years the country's traffic grew by 22.9%, Cluj's by 23% and Iași's by 71%. Iași has overtaken Timișoara.
2006: 753,934; 2007: 836,574; 2008: 890,704; 2009: 973,873; 2010: 1,138,431; 2011: 1,200,762; 2012: 1,035,929; 2013: 757,069; 2014: 734,568; 2015: 923,570; 2016: 1,160,167; 2017: 1,621,529; 2018: 1,517,309; 2019: 1,595,012; 2020: 470,486; 2021: 639,532; 2022: 1,193,923; 2023: 1,354,859; 2024: 1,323,690; 2025: 1,458,098
From Timișoara's airport, Belgrade is 136 km away, Budapest 240 km, Otopeni 398 km. Belgrade handled 8.9 million passengers in 2025; Budapest 19.6 million, 21% above 2019.
Ryanair closed its Timișoara base in March 2018, citing poor commercial performance. The airport's director, Daniel Stamatovici, gave two reasons for the 2024 dip: many passengers from western Romania choose the airports in Serbia and Hungary, and demand is higher in Cluj, with its cultural and sporting events and a strong IT industry. Several firms in Timișoara and Arad drive travellers to Budapest and Belgrade airports every day. Routes from Timișoara Airport, year by year: the departures board.
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.