Air passenger traffic by reporting country
- Eurostat dataset
- avia_paoc
- Reference period
- 2026-Q1
- Unit of measure
- passengers carried
Key estimates
- Highest value: Spain at 55 008 759 passengers carried; lowest: Slovenia at 293 408 passengers carried.
- Cross-country mean 9 299 916 passengers carried, standard deviation 14 647 339, coefficient of variation 157.5% across 22 reporting countries.
- Aggregate change 2026-01→2026-Q1: +220.2% on a constant panel of 22 countries.
How is European air traffic distributed and how far has it recovered? Eurostat dataset avia_paoc reports air passenger traffic by reporting country for 22 reporting countries, with 2026-Q1 as the most recent period carrying broad coverage. Air passenger counts are among the fastest-responding statistics to economic and geopolitical shocks.
The five highest values in 2026-Q1 are recorded by Spain (55 008 759), Germany (38 871 618), Italy (38 096 314), Netherlands (16 252 014), Poland (13 442 405), all expressed in passengers carried. At the opposite end of the distribution sit Slovenia (293 408), Estonia (722 246), Slovakia (794 810), North Macedonia (840 532), Luxembourg (1 076 175). The ratio between the highest and the lowest observation is 187.48, while the median country reports 2 166 990 passengers carried against a mean of 9 299 916 passengers carried.
Dispersion is wide: the standard deviation across countries is 14 647 339 passengers carried, giving a coefficient of variation of 157.5%. The mean sits above the median, which indicates that the distribution is pulled by the upper tail rather than being symmetric. Any European average quoted for this indicator therefore describes a synthetic country that few Member States resemble.
Between 2026-01 and 2026-Q1 the summed value across the 22 countries reporting in both periods moved by +220.2%. The largest relative increases are observed in Luxembourg (+249.3%), Malta (+247.8%), Slovakia (+241.9%); the largest decreases, or the smallest increases, in North Macedonia (+190.6%), Cyprus (+194.3%), Bulgaria (+202.9%). Because the panel is held constant, this change is not an artefact of countries entering or leaving the sample.
This indicator has no normatively preferred direction; its analytical value lies in the structure of the distribution and in how national positions move relative to each other over time. The estimates above are reproducible: the dataset identifier, filter dimensions and reference period are stated in the methodological note, and the series can be re-downloaded from the Eurostat dissemination API at any time.
Methodological note
Source: Eurostat, dataset avia_paoc ('Air passenger transport by type of schedule, transport coverage and country'), extracted from the Eurostat dissemination API (JSON-stat 2.0) on the dataset update of 2026-07-24. Filter dimensions: unit=PAS; tra_meas=PAS_CRD; tra_cov=TOTAL; schedule=TOTAL. Unit of measure: passengers carried. Reference period: 2026-Q1. Geographic perimeter: national reporting units with two-character geo codes (22 countries with a non-missing observation); European and euro-area aggregates are excluded from the cross-country statistics and reported separately. Descriptive statistics (mean, median, population standard deviation, coefficient of variation) are computed unweighted over reporting countries. Change over time is computed on a constant panel: only countries with a non-missing observation in both the base and the reference period enter the calculation, which removes composition effects but may differ from the officially published aggregate. No imputation, seasonal adjustment or re-scaling has been applied beyond what Eurostat performs at source. Flagged provisional and estimated observations are retained as published.
Source data
The underlying series can be inspected and re-downloaded from the Eurostat data browser.