The world’s 11th-busiest airport with capacity for 109 million — Delhi’s gateway is built for the decade India is about to have.
Indira Gandhi International is the only Indian airport in the world’s top twenty — and it is built for twice the traffic it carries: the quietest over-capacity story in global aviation is happening in reverse here.
78.15 million passengers in calendar 2025 (+0.4%), 11th worldwide per ACI — ahead of Incheon (74.1M), Los Angeles (73.7M) and Paris CDG (72.0M). The record financial year FY2024–25 closed at 79.2 million, the highest in the airport’s history.
Capacity is the headline: with Terminal 1 rebuilt (40M) and Terminal 3 at 45M, DEL joined the 100-million-plus capacity club at 109 million — one of six airports on Earth with that headroom, and alongside Haneda the only one in Asia.
The international layer: 21.5 million international passengers in FY2025–26 — more than a quarter of the airport’s traffic — on a route map spanning North America, Europe, Asia and the Gulf.
Operations kept modernizing through 2025: the redeveloped Terminal 1 reopened with its signature guitar-neck pier, Terminal 2 came back online after a full revamp, and T3’s international capacity is programmed to grow 50%.
India’s system context: the country now runs 162 operational airports, up from 74 in 2014, and Delhi is the hub the entire expansion feeds.
Delhi’s airport story is the opposite of Heathrow’s: capacity built ahead of demand, terminals rebuilt before they broke, and a growth curve that has barely paused since 2009. The 78-million figure understates the machine — at 109 million of capacity, DEL has a third of its ceiling still to fill, in a country where aviation grows by double digits in a normal year. Watch the international share: every point it rises, Delhi looks less like a national gateway and more like what it is becoming — the Gulf-free corridor between the West and the subcontinent.
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