United Airlines

Q4 2026 in detail (estimates)

Quarter by quarter: our capacity read against what United reported

Every quarter since Q1 2023, free. Where United is tracking in Q4 2026, before it reports, is in Pro+.

Demand index, month by month

Hubs in the index

From August 2023 to July 2026 the index tracked United's reported domestic passengers on all its flights (BTS T-100) with a correlation of 0.94, missing by 1.4 percentage points a month on average (bias -0.1 points) over 33 months. Each airport links to its airport page.

How it is measured

Demand Index

Each month's figure blends two reads of the airline's domestic passengers, year over year. Six tenths is the change in seats on all the airline's domestic flights (mainline plus its own regional brands), adjusted by the change in how full US domestic flights are nationally. Seats come from BTS T-100 for the months BTS has published; before that from BTS's on-time flight records and Passenger Index flight activity data (air traffic flight messages), with seats for each aircraft type from T-100. How full flights are is TSA's national daily checkpoint count against every airline's domestic seats, compared with the same month a year earlier and corrected by half its average miss against BTS over the latest 12 published months. Four tenths is the change in passengers screened at TSA checkpoints at the airline's hubs, from TSA's checkpoint throughput files (FOIA): where an airline has its own terminal, only that terminal's checkpoints are counted, elsewhere the whole airport is, and days a checkpoint reported only partly are dropped; hubs are weighted by the airline's domestic passengers boarding there in the prior full year. The actual figure is the airline's domestic boardings on all its flights from BTS T-100, which BTS publishes about three months after the month ends. The current month compares the days so far with the same weekdays a year earlier. The backtest uses T-100 seats for every month and the national estimate of how full flights were; the seat estimates used for the newest months matched T-100 within about half a point for most airlines when checked on July 2026. Until November 2026 the index read seats and TSA at the hubs only, compared with boardings at the hubs; the change tracks what airlines report better.

What the demand index misses

• Seats are capacity, not passengers. The seat side assumes the airline's planes fill like the industry's; the TSA side at its hubs is what shows an airline-specific change.
• TSA counts people starting a trip. Connecting passengers don't pass security again, and TSA can't tell domestic from international departures, while the official figure is domestic only.
• A month with no seat data yet is read from TSA alone until BTS posts its flight records, and is marked so.
• November has no reading in any year because of gaps in the TSA files.
• Checkpoint layouts change, so the airports and checkpoints behind each index are reviewed periodically.

Capacity

Seats

Each flight's seats are estimated from its aircraft type and the seats airlines fly on that type (BTS T-100, latest 12 months); seat-miles are seats times the great-circle distance. The share of flights without a seat estimate is shown with the figures.

Airline

Flights are counted with the airline that sells the seats: SkyWest, Republic, Envoy, PSA, Endeavor and the other regional partners count with United, Delta or American as they fly for them.

Scope

Domestic: flights between US airports, each once. To and from the US: domestic plus international flights departing or arriving at US airports; flying wholly outside the US is not included. The international part is marked provisional until it has been checked against BTS T-100 for the airline.

Last year

Each day is compared with the same weekday a year earlier: domestic flights from BTS On-Time with the same seat method, international seat-miles from BTS T-100 for that quarter, split by month in the airline's own T-100 pattern.

Q4 2026

Our flight activity starts on October 26, 2026. October 1 to 25 is estimated, for domestic flying only, from adsb.lol aircraft position reports: each airline's departures between US airports are counted from the position tracks and given seats from the same aircraft-type table, then its flights, seats and seat-miles are each divided by that airline's ratio of position-report counts to our flight activity over October 27 to 31. BTS On-Time replaces these days when it publishes October (about mid-December). International flying is not estimated, so seat-miles to and from the US start on October 26, and a call against guidance needs 30 days of our own flight activity. Airport figures do not use these estimates.

Passengers per seat

TSA screenings at the airline's hub checkpoints against the domestic seats departing those hubs, as an index: 100 is the same ratio as the same week last year. TSA does not see connecting passengers, so it is a trend, not a load factor.

Guidance

Each airline's own capacity guidance, quoted from its earnings release or 8-K with the date. Never consensus: we have no estimates data.

How accurate it is

Demand: the United Demand Index tracked United's domestic boardings on all its flights (BTS T-100) with a correlation of 0.94 over 33 months.

Seat-miles, flying to and from the US: rebuilt from BTS T-100 with regional partners assigned to United, our scope's growth matched United's reported growth with a correlation of 1.000 over 14 quarters (2023Q1 to 2026Q2); average gap -0.02 pts, standard deviation 0.09 pts, covering 99.9% of the reported figure over the last four quarters.

Seat-miles, domestic flying: rebuilt from BTS T-100 with regional partners assigned to United, our scope's growth matched United's reported growth with a correlation of 0.988 over 14 quarters (2023Q1 to 2026Q2); average gap -0.29 pts, standard deviation 0.69 pts, covering 100.1% of the reported figure over the last four quarters.

Last year's side: flights from BTS On-Time with our seat method came to 97.4% to 98.2% of T-100's domestic seat-miles in each quarter of 2025.

This proves the scope and last year's side. Our own seat estimates for this year are checked against BTS On-Time and T-100 as each month is published (October in mid-December).

Not real-time, not a load factor and not a forecast of earnings. Compared with company guidance only.

Cite as: Passenger Index, "United Airlines, Airline Portal", https://passengerindex.com/web/airlines/united/ (CC BY 4.0).