Cairo leads Africa’s busiest airports

Keypoints:

Cairo leads with 1.79m scheduled seats
North Africa claims five top-10 airports
Lagos records 24.1 percent growth

AFRICA’S busiest airports by scheduled seat capacity remain heavily tilted towards the north in September, with Cairo retaining the continental lead as North African cities occupy half of the top 10 places in OAG’s latest ranking.

Data from aviation intelligence company OAG shows Cairo International Airport offering 1.79m scheduled seats in September 2026, up 11.2 percent from a year earlier. The ranking highlights both North Africa’s concentration of major aviation hubs and rapid growth elsewhere on the continent.

North Africa claims five places

Five of Africa’s 10 largest airports by scheduled capacity are in North Africa — Cairo, Casablanca, Algiers, Marrakech and Tunis.

Cairo stands well ahead of its rivals. Addis Ababa ranks second with 1.19m seats, while Johannesburg is close behind in third with 1.16m.

That leaves a gap of about 600,000 scheduled seats between Cairo and its nearest challenger, reinforcing the Egyptian capital’s position as Africa’s dominant airport by airline capacity.

Casablanca ranks fourth with 730,000 seats after year-on-year growth of 13.5 percent. Cape Town follows with 590,000 seats, narrowly ahead of Algiers at 580,000.

OAG says Egypt is Africa’s largest country market with 3.1m scheduled seats, while Morocco ranks among the continent’s three largest.

The wider expansion comes as African airlines continue to add capacity even as global demand growth moderates, reinforcing the importance of the continent’s major hubs.

Marrakech breaks into top 10

Morocco and South Africa are the only countries with two airports in the continental top 10.

Morocco is represented by Casablanca in fourth place and Marrakech in seventh, while South Africa has Johannesburg in third and Cape Town in fifth.

Marrakech has entered the ranking with 530,000 scheduled seats, up 10.5 percent from September 2025. Its arrival displaces Egypt’s Hurghada from the top 10.

Nairobi follows in eighth place with 520,000 seats after growth of 11.9 percent, while Tunis completes the ranking with 460,000.

Lagos records fastest growth

Lagos is the only West African airport in the top 10, ranking ninth with 470,000 scheduled seats.

Its position, however, masks the pace of expansion. OAG says Lagos recorded the fastest year-on-year growth among the 10 largest African airports, with capacity jumping 24.1 percent — equivalent to 90,600 additional seats.

Nigeria’s total scheduled capacity rose 37.4 percent year on year to 1.19m seats, making it the fastest-growing market among Africa’s 10 largest aviation countries.

Africa Briefing reported earlier this month that Air Peace recorded the fastest capacity growth among Africa’s 10 largest airlines, with scheduled seats increasing 54.7 percent.

The expansion at Lagos also comes against a persistent connectivity gap across the continent. An Embraer study identified 55 potentially viable intra-African routes without direct services, showing that rising airport capacity has not yet translated into seamless connectivity.

What the ranking really measures

The OAG ranking should not be confused with confirmed passenger traffic through airport terminals.

Its figures measure scheduled airline seat capacity — the number of seats airlines plan to operate — rather than the number of passengers who actually travel through each airport.

That distinction is particularly important for September because final passenger totals are not yet available.

Scheduled capacity nevertheless provides an important measure of where airlines are deploying aircraft and where they expect demand to support additional services.

Across Africa, airlines have scheduled 25.8m seats for September, up 9.4 percent from the same month in 2025. International capacity accounts for 78 percent of the total.

Cairo’s commanding lead and North Africa’s five top-10 airports show where much of the continent’s aviation scale remains concentrated. But the rapid expansion of Lagos, alongside growth in Nairobi and other hubs, points to an increasingly competitive airport hierarchy.