TSA’s busiest day ever was Sunday, November 30, 2025, when it screened 3,133,924 travelers at airport security checkpoints across the United States, the highest single-day total in the agency’s history.
The record came as millions of Americans flew home after Thanksgiving. Airlines for America (A4A), the U.S. airline trade group, had forecast that U.S. airlines would carry more than 31 million passengers over that holiday travel period, an all-time high. All 10 of TSA’s busiest days on record have topped 3 million people screened, and eight of them happened in 2025. The 2025 record still stood in late October 2026: TSA’s published daily checkpoint numbers show that the busiest day of 2026 through October 27 was Thursday, June 18, with 2,988,204 people screened, and no day this year had reached 3 million.
Source: Airlines for America, “A4A Applauds TSA for Record Thanksgiving”; 2026 figures from TSA checkpoint travel numbers
Image: TSA security checkpoint at New Orleans airport, Tony Webster, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.