Atlanta hit TSA record in 2025 with 30 million passengers
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport screened a record 30.1 million passengers through Transportation Security Administration checkpoints last year.
The figures have been steadily climbing. 2025 was the first time the airport passed the 30 million mark, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis.
The airport also is in the process of upgrading all its body scanner machines with new models that promise to speed up screening times.
The world’s busiest airport hasn’t yet released its total passenger numbers for 2025, but in 2024 it saw more than 108 million passengers.
TSA spokesperson Daniel Velez told the AJC that Atlanta does “a fantastic job.”
Compared to the nation’s other busy airports, “here they’re processing more people than some of those … but yet their numbers are better.”
He said Atlanta’s screening times are among the best in the country.
The airport has roughly 1,200 TSA officers.
TSA’s Georgia state director, Mike Donnelly, said Atlanta has a “very tight-knit community” between the agency, airport leadership and Delta Air Lines.
“And they’re looking to always: ‘How can we make improvements?’” he said.
Indeed, Atlanta is often a proving ground for new airport technologies.
“In most cases where the federal government is considering some innovation, ATL is going to be a candidate, because we’re the busiest, highest profile airport in the world,” airport General Manager Ricky Smith told the AJC’s Editorial Board last summer.
But Atlanta is also a place where pressure on TSA is high.
High passenger volumes can quickly devolve into hours-long lines at Hartsfield-Jackson when staffing issues or unexpected flight schedule changes occur.
According to an AJC analysis of minute-to-minute airport data, for the last two months across all Domestic terminal checkpoints, wait times were longer than 10 minutes just 14.5% of the time.
That includes both PreCheck and regular screening lanes, between 5 a.m. and 11 p.m.
Meet ATL’s new body scanners
The latest improvements in Atlanta promise to speed up wait times, and have been operational since December: new body scanners by Rohde & Schwarz designed to lower false alarm rates and speed up processing.
The machines take milliseconds to scan using two panels that passengers stand between with arms positioned down, as opposed to existing scanners that require arms to be above the head.
The German manufacturer won a multimillion-dollar contract to deliver new artificial intelligence-based millimeter wave screening technology to the U.S.’s FIFA World Cup host cities, it announced last week.
Atlanta has 17 in place and 12 more to install by the end of March, Donnelly said.
The agency is “looking at how to continuously make improvements, not only from a security standpoint, making upgrades with the technology, but also considering the fact that air travel is continuing to grow,” he said.
The new machines operate faster and “make adjustments to algorithms” over time, he said, which can reduce false alarm rates.
Other new technology at the Atlanta airport includes two new e-gates in use at the security checkpoint at the international terminal, he said.
Those e-gates alleviate officer workloads and are something TSA is looking to implement more broadly, he said.
CLEAR launched its own e-gates at some of its Atlanta airport lanes last spring.
Further enhancements to speed up screening are in the works, Donnelly said.
Could that someday be a return to a faster, more pre-9/11 security experience with less friction, as some have predicted in the industry?
“That’s something that I know our headquarters has certainly talked about, is moving towards a process where it’s seamless to the passenger, where you can process through at pace,” Donnelly said.
Smith said last summer that TSA realizes “you can’t continue to push more people through the infrastructure that they have … so I think you’ll find in the future some relaxation of some of the screening techniques that they use.”
The agency last summer lifted a shoe removal requirement.
TSA also has to build capacity in ways other than hiring more people, he said, given government funding constraints.
“I think you will see a progressive dependence on private sector investment and private sector partnerships,” he predicted, involving companies like CLEAR.
“That is certainly something that we would be interested in, because we’ve got to find new age approaches to expanding processes,” he said.
About the Authors
As a business reporter, Emma Hurt leads coverage of the Atlanta airport, Delta Air Lines, UPS, Norfolk Southern and other travel and logistics companies. Prior to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution she worked as an editor and Atlanta reporter for Axios, a politics reporter for WABE News and a business reporter for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
