Iceland Airport Arrivals

The figures on this page count passengers departing Iceland through Keflavík International Airport, broken down by nationality. The Icelandic Tourist Board counts departures at the airport and Statistics Iceland publishes the series monthly. Keflavík handles almost all of Iceland's international air traffic, so foreign departures are the standard proxy for how many tourists visited. Cruise passengers and the Norröna ferry to the East Fjords are not included, and neither are people passing through in transit without entering the country.

In Aug 2026, 314,180 foreign passengers passed through Keflavík, up 0.4% on Aug 2025. Over the trailing twelve months (Sep 2025 - Aug 2026) the total was 2,251,282, down 3.0% on the twelve months before that. The largest source market is United States with 29.3% of foreign arrivals, followed by United Kingdom (10.9%) and Other Nationalities (8.7%). The fastest-growing market in absolute terms was China (+15.3%), while Other Nationalities saw the largest decline.

Iceland's tourism is strongly seasonal. July and August typically bring two and a half to three times as many foreign passengers as January or February. The winter season has grown faster than summer since the mid-2010s, driven by northern lights, ice caves and the Blue Lagoon, which is why the gap between peak and trough has narrowed from the extremes seen a decade ago. Because of this seasonality, the most useful comparison for any month is the same month a year earlier, which is how the year-over-year figures above are calculated. The trailing twelve-month total removes seasonality altogether and is the best single indicator of the underlying trend.

The long-run picture is one of extraordinary growth followed by a plateau. Around half a million foreign visitors came in 2010, the year the Eyjafjallajökull eruption put Iceland on every news bulletin. Arrivals then grew by roughly twenty percent a year to a peak of about 2.3 million in 2018. The collapse of WOW air in 2019 cut capacity and arrivals fell by fourteen percent, before the pandemic reduced 2020 to under half a million. Recovery was rapid once borders reopened, and since 2023 the market has settled at a little over 2.2 million foreign visitors a year, with Americans accounting for more than a quarter of the total.

A few caveats when reading the data. Nationality is recorded by passport, so an Icelandic citizen living abroad counts as Icelandic and a foreign resident of Iceland counts as foreign. The counts include business travellers and people visiting friends and family, not only leisure tourists. Monthly figures are occasionally revised by Statistics Iceland when later data arrives, and this dashboard always reflects the latest published version.