You’re paying $383 for a plane ticket. About $3.80 is profit for US airlines.
Now you see why they go so heavy on the ice in that in-flight ginger ale.
About 18.5 million passengers flew over the Fourth of July weekend, according to TSA estimates. At last year’s average fare price of $383, that means airlines raked in roughly $7.1 billion in holiday weekend ticket sales.
It’s likely that very little of that was profit for carriers.
An analysis of company reports and data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics shows that between 2021 and 2024, the big four US airlines — Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, American Airlines, and Southwest Airlines — earned approximately $5.51 in profit per passenger. That’s down sharply from the four years leading into the pandemic (2016 to 2019), when the companies’ profit per passenger averaged $19.26.
But in the first quarter this year, as airlines reeled from tariffs and a decline in travel spending, the figure dropped to just $0.55. (First quarters are also typically airlines’ least profitable.)
“The airline industry, over time, looks like the Alps in terms of profitability and loss,” Bill McGee, senior aviation fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project, said. “It’s hard to talk about this industry and lump the airlines all together. They could theoretically be losing money on some routes that they absolutely have to fly, or they could be making a ton of money because they have no competition there.”
That’s not to say there isn’t plenty of money to be made flying planes. Airlines’ bottom lines can vary dramatically from year to year owing to things like terminal construction costs, leases, fuel prices, and labor contracts. Case in point: in the first quarter of 2024, JetBlue paid $530 million in breakup fees to terminate its failed merger with Spirit.
But declining margins can shed light on why budget airlines have spent recent years un-budgeting themselves, adding premium seating categories, lounges, and, in Southwest’s case, ending some of their most popular cost-saving policies to rake in additional cash from fees.
Checked luggage charges totaled $7.27 billion last year among the country’s largest airlines — up more than 26%, or $1.5 billion, from 2019. It’s been a rapid ascent for the revenue category, which Spirit introduced in the US less than 20 years ago, in 2007.
As fares have largely plateaued, airlines have also heavily relied on selling points to credit card partners. Delta scored $2 billion from its American Express card in the first quarter alone, up 13% from the same period last year. Unlike the low-margin business of actually flying people around, airline credit card businesses’ have a profit margin of about 50%.
These newer revenue streams have driven profits for airlines in recent years and kept airfares relatively low when adjusted for inflation. But, McGee points out, it’s a little like comparing watermelons to grapes, since ticket costs used to include many of the services that are now add-on charges, separate from average fare calculations.
According to McGee, the current shift away from the budget model and larger lack of competition in the industry could soon drive real costs for consumers higher. Since 2007, only two new scheduled passenger airlines have launched in the US: Avelo and Breeze. That’s the longest stretch of time in US aviation history with only two new airlines.
“The only thing that disciplines pricing, that brings fares down for consumers in this country, are the small airlines,” McGee said. “If they all went away tomorrow — through bankruptcy, through merger, whatever — we'll be paying twice as much next Monday, guaranteed.”
