The year 2025 was the best ever in terms of consolidated economics results for the air transportation industry according to IATA (International Air Transport Association). Last June 2026 they presented their report “Global Outlook for Air Transport” which is released every six months.
Some key figures to retain:
- 38.9 million flights in 2025
- 9,520 billion RPK (revenue passenger kilometre)
- 4,966 million passenger-segments
- 1,065 bn$ revenues
- 45.0bn$ net profit
See the charts they published with the complete figures:
Recently I read about the results of some major airlines and wondered what proportion of the consolidated results shown by IATA come from the top 20 airlines.
IATA represents over 370 airlines which account for ~85% of the global traffic. For their reports, IATA extrapolates the figures to cover for the non members to produce figures of the overall industry.
The top 20 airlines make up for ~5% of the airlines however they achieve ~70% of the cumulative 2025 net profits, according to the chart below I asked Grok to compute.
The Blog by Javier 