SAN JOSE — The Bay Area’s three airports kicked off 2026 in shaky fashion with the total number of passenger trips in January falling below the levels of a year ago for the aviation hubs.
All three airports handled fewer passenger trips during January compared with the same month in 2025, according to this news organization’s review of travel statistics posted by the travel complexes.
Compared with January 2025, passenger trips in January of this year fell by 16% at San Jose International Airport, by 10.3% at Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport, and by 0.6% at San Francisco International Airport.
Some longer-range measures of passenger trips, however, suggest that San Francisco Airport is performing better than both San Jose and San Francisco airports, a review of separate reports posted by the three airports shows.
San Jose Airport handled 10.55 million passengers over the 12 months that ended in January 2026, which was down 10.4% from the 11.77 million passengers the South Bay airport accommodated over the one-year period that ended in January 2025.
Oakland Airport accommodated 9.1 million passengers during the one-year period ending in January 2026, a decline of 14.7% from the 10.66 million passengers the East Bay airport handled over the 12 months that ended in January of last year.
San Francisco Airport handled 54.51 million passengers over the 12 months ending in January 2026, which was an increase of 3.4% over the 52.7 million passengers that SFO accommodated over the one-year period that ended in January 2025.
All three of the aviation hubs, however, remain below the altitudes they had reached in 2019, the final full year before the coronavirus-linked restrictions that hobbled the worldwide travel and hotel industries.
A comparison of the passenger trip totals for the most recent 12 months to the totals for 2019 shows passenger activity has plunged 32.6% at San Jose Airport, nosedived by 32% at Oakland Airport, and has dropped 5.2% at San Francisco Airport.