Syracuse Hancock lost ground in 2025 while Buffalo and Rochester grew, and the Rochester gap closed 80 percent

Syracuse Hancock International Airport handled 2,859,212 passengers in calendar year 2025. That is not a record. It is 145,725 fewer than 2024, a 4.9 percent drop from the busiest year in the airport’s history, and it happened in a year when both of the upstate airports Syracuse measures itself against grew.

The figure comes from page 13 of the Syracuse Regional Airport Authority’s 2025 Annual Report, released at the State of the Airport event on February 6, 2026. A separate federal count, the FAA’s passenger boarding data, puts SYR at 1,415,346 enplanements for 2025, down 4.79 percent from 1,486,554 in 2024. Enplanements count only passengers getting on a plane, so the federal number runs at roughly half the Authority’s total. Both measures point the same direction.

Here is what is happening at SYR, and what the two upstate comparisons actually show once both sides of each comparison are measured the same way.

The basic numbers

Syracuse Hancock sits five miles north of downtown Syracuse, off Interstate 81 near the village of Mattydale. Half of the airport’s footprint is in the Town of DeWitt, with portions in Salina and Cicero. The airfield has two intersecting asphalt runways: 10/28 at 9,014 feet long and 15/33 at 7,500 feet long. The 9,014-foot main runway is long enough to handle wide-body international diversions and full-fuel transcontinental departures. SYR is owned and operated by the Syracuse Regional Airport Authority, an independent public benefit corporation chartered by New York State, not by Onondaga County or the City of Syracuse directly.

Hancock is named for Clarence E. Hancock, the area’s congressman in the 1930s. The current airport opened on September 17, 1949, replacing Amboy Airport in the Town of Camillus, which proved too small for postwar military and civilian needs. The Army Air Forces had built Syracuse Army Air Base on the same Mattydale site during World War II.

Hancock airport at a glance, 2025

Who flies, and where

As of the FAA April 2026 carrier filings, seven scheduled passenger airlines operate from SYR. American Airlines flies to Charlotte, Chicago O’Hare, Dallas/Fort Worth, Philadelphia, and Washington National year-round, with seasonal service to Miami and Phoenix. Delta Air Lines and Delta Connection together cover Atlanta, Detroit, New York JFK, New York LaGuardia, and seasonal Minneapolis/St. Paul. United Airlines connects Syracuse to Chicago O’Hare, Newark, and Washington Dulles, with seasonal Denver service. JetBlue runs the Boston, Fort Lauderdale, JFK, and seasonal Orlando flights. Allegiant Air handles leisure service to Florida and the Carolinas. Frontier offers Orlando year-round plus seasonal Atlanta, Fort Myers, and Raleigh/Durham. Sun Country flies seasonal Minneapolis/St. Paul.

The 2024 exit of Southwest Airlines was the airport’s biggest single carrier change in a decade. Southwest entered the market in 2021 after the Airport Authority waived $1.5 million in landing fees and provided $150,000 in marketing assistance, breaking a long stretch in which Syracuse was the only major upstate New York airport that Southwest did not serve. Southwest exited on August 4, 2024, citing post-pandemic pilot and aircraft constraints across its national route network. The exit removed nonstop Syracuse service to Baltimore, Nashville, and Las Vegas. Allegiant added partial service replacement on the Florida and Carolina leisure routes.

How SYR compares to BUF and ROC, measured the same way

Most published comparisons of these three airports are not comparisons at all. They put Buffalo and Rochester’s total passenger counts next to Syracuse’s enplanement count, which is roughly half of a total, and Syracuse comes out looking about half its actual size. There is one series that counts all three identically: the FAA’s passenger boarding data, which reports enplanements for every US commercial airport on the same definition in the same file. Preliminary CY2025 figures posted July 8, 2026.

Buffalo Niagara enplaned 2,533,180 in 2025, up 1.36 percent, and ranks 63rd nationally as a medium hub. Syracuse enplaned 1,415,346, ranked 90th, a small hub. Rochester enplaned 1,385,078, ranked 94th. Buffalo is 1.79 times the size of Syracuse.

The number worth staring at is the last one. In 2024 Syracuse was 154,717 enplanements ahead of Rochester, an 11.6 percent lead. In 2025 that lead is 30,268, or 2.19 percent. The gap between the two closed by 80.4 percent in a single year, because Syracuse fell 4.79 percent while Rochester rose 4.00 percent. Rochester’s own airport authority reports a sixth consecutive year of growth and 2,797,112 total passengers for 2025, up 128,651.

On current rates, Rochester passes Syracuse in 2026. That would be the first time since before the pandemic that Syracuse was not the second-busiest commercial airport in upstate New York.

Where 2026 stands so far

The Authority reports on a July-to-June fiscal year, which makes calendar-year tracking a subtraction exercise. For fiscal 2026, July 1, 2025 through June 30, 2026, SYR handled 2,865,562 total passengers, split 1,433,314 boarding and 1,432,248 arriving.

Netting the monthly reports out to a calendar basis gives roughly 1,364,800 passengers for January through June 2026 against 1,357,853 for the same six months of 2025, a gain of about 6,900 passengers or 0.5 percent. That is a CNY Signal calculation from the Authority’s monthly airline reports rather than a published figure, and the method was checked by reproducing the Authority’s own 2024 press release total of 3,004,747 exactly from the same arithmetic. Read plainly: the decline has stopped, and the recovery has not started.

The fiscal 2026 carrier split shows how concentrated the market is. American carried 839,575 passengers, 29.3 percent of the total. Delta carried 785,053, 27.4 percent. United carried 501,338, 17.5 percent. Those three are 74.2 percent of everyone who moved through the building. JetBlue was 321,580, Allegiant 245,745, Breeze 118,293, Frontier 45,548 and Sun Country 8,430.

Two schedule changes land in 2026. Delta added a fourth daily nonstop to Atlanta beginning June 7, 2026, flown with an Airbus A321, and upgauged the Minneapolis-St. Paul route from a CRJ900 to an Airbus A319 for summer 2026, roughly a 75 percent increase in seats on that route. SYR served 29 nonstop destinations as of the February 2026 State of the Airport.

What is being built right now

The Syracuse Regional Airport Authority closed out a $62 million terminal renovation in November 2018. That project widened the windows, raised the ceiling, opened a centralized post-security checkpoint that consolidated A and B concourses, added an aviation history display, and reworked airline check-in counters. Eight months of construction.

The current capital program is the parking and ground transportation overhaul. The existing parking garage has reached effective capacity during summer peaks. The Authority is rebuilding it into two new garages, adding surface lots, and constructing a consolidated rental car facility. When complete, all rental car operations will move out of the terminal building. The Authority has not published a final cost figure or completion date for the parking project on its public meeting agendas as of April 2026.

The airport’s air traffic control tower is operated by the FAA. There is no current published replacement plan for the tower itself, though the FAA’s nationwide tower modernization program covers SYR equipment refreshes through fiscal year 2028.

Snow, the actual operational challenge

Syracuse Hancock receives an average of 124 inches of snow per year, more than any other major commercial airport in the United States. The Airport Authority operates a fleet of high-capacity snow plows, runway brooms, and chemical deicers that allow SYR to maintain regularly scheduled departures during snow events that would close most other airports. The 2024 to 2025 winter season produced 152.4 inches of snow at the official Syracuse measurement station at Hancock, above the 30-year normal. Despite this, the FAA reported zero full-day operational closures at SYR for the entire winter.

The airport’s snow operations have become a recurring research subject for FAA winter operations training. Teams from other northern airports periodically visit Syracuse to study its plowing patterns, deicing chemical mixes, and rapid runway-switching procedures.

What the numbers say about Syracuse’s air market

The full Authority series, all on the same total-passenger basis, runs: 2,007,854 in 2015, 2,004,066 in 2016, 2,074,878 in 2017, 2,315,933 in 2018, 2,583,193 in 2019, then 888,007 in the pandemic year of 2020. Recovery ran 1,695,268 in 2021, 2,529,558 in 2022, 2,856,038 in 2023 and 3,004,937 in 2024, the record. Then 2,859,212 in 2025.

From the 2020 trough to the 2024 peak, traffic rose 238 percent. Against the 2019 pre-pandemic baseline, 2025 is still 10.7 percent ahead, so the airport has not fallen back below where it started. What it has done is give back a year of gains, and the most plausible cause is on the record: Southwest Airlines left on August 4, 2024, which means 2025 was the first full calendar year without it. Southwest had entered the market in 2021 after the Airport Authority waived $1.5 million in landing fees and put up $150,000 in marketing support.

One caution on any Syracuse passenger figure. The Authority’s own 2025 Annual Report chart shows 3,004,937 for 2024 while its January 14, 2025 press release shows 3,004,747, a difference of 190 passengers. This article uses the annual report figure for the chart series and flags the discrepancy rather than quietly picking one.

The airport publishes monthly statistics, board meeting agendas, and capital project status updates at syrairport.org. FAA passenger and operations data is available at faa.gov.