Mitchell Air Traffic Dropped 7% in 2025

Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport. Photo by Graham Kilmer.

Air traffic at Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport declined in 2025 for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

The airport is reporting a 7% decline in the total number of passengers who traveled through the airport in 2025 compared to 2024. For the past four years, the airport has watched passengers steadily return after the pandemic temporarily shut down the skies and caused many to put off travel.

The dip in 2025 still doesn’t compare to the decline in 2020, when passenger traffic plummeted by approximately 62% at Milwaukee Mitchell.

Demand was steady throughout 2025, albeit lower than the previous year. The seasonal spikes in spring and summer didn’t reach the highs they did in 2024. The airport finished 2025 with 5,874,372 passengers traveling through. It was the first year since 2022 the airport didn’t clear more than six million passengers and represented a decline of 441,873 passengers from 2024.

In October last year, airport director Brian Dranzik said consumer demand for air travel was softening. “We have seen a slowdown in traffic due to a variety of different factors, and so we are reforecasting our [passenger] data going into the rest of this year and thereafter.”

In recent years, Milwaukee Mitchell has seen its heaviest traffic in March as demand picks up for spring break travel. Airline data show decisions by just a few carriers, whether responding to changing market conditions or not, are behind the passenger gap between March 2024 and March 2025.

JetBlue, for example, landed 64 planes at Milwaukee Mitchell in March 2024 and carried a total of 10,959 passengers. In 2025, the low-cost carrier landed only 2 planes and carried a total of 209 passengers.

Southwest Airlines, Milwaukee Mitchell’s largest carrier, landed 72 fewer planes at Milwaukee Mitchell in March 2025 than in 2024. The difference was 21,892 fewer passengers. Other carriers, including Spirit, Frontier and United Airlines, also saw passenger traffic dip.

Given Dranzik’s comments at the end of 2025, passenger traffic is not likely to pick back up this year. But if it does, it will be without any flights from Spirit Airlines, which ended service out of Milwaukee this year after filing for bankruptcy in 2025. The airline was already drawing down flights last year, landing fewer planes than it had in 2024. Owing creditors $8 billion, the airline is pulling back from regional airports across the country.