Every South African airport, properly explained

Twenty-two airports have an IATA code and scheduled passenger flights. Nine of them are run by Airports Company South Africa and file monthly passenger returns; the rest are operated privately, by provincial authorities or, in the case of Skukuza, by SANParks inside the Kruger National Park.

O. R. Tambo International in Johannesburg, by a wide margin. It handled 20,083,399 passengers in FY2025/26 — roughly as many as Cape Town and King Shaka combined — and it is the busiest airport on the African continent.

Only three of the nine state-operated airports carried international passengers in FY2025/26: O. R. Tambo, Cape Town and King Shaka. Chief Dawid Stuurman in Gqeberha recorded 70 international passengers for the entire year, and the other five recorded none at all. If your flight is intercontinental, you are landing in Johannesburg or Cape Town.

Citizens of around 75 countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan and most of the European Union, may enter visa-free for up to 90 days. Everyone needs a passport valid for 30 days beyond their departure date with at least two blank facing pages. Check the Department of Home Affairs list for your nationality before booking.

Goods to the value of R5,000, plus 2 litres of wine, 1 litre in total of spirits and other alcohol, 200 cigarettes and 20 cigars and 250 g of tobacco, 50 ml of perfume and 250 ml of eau de toilette. The tobacco limits are separate allowances, not alternatives. The goods allowance can be claimed once in any thirty days, and not after an absence of under forty-eight hours.

At one airport only. The Gautrain runs from O. R. Tambo to Sandton in about fifteen minutes, continuing to Rosebank, Midrand, Centurion, Pretoria and Hatfield. Cape Town, Durban and every other South African airport have no rail link: it is a shuttle, a metered taxi from the official rank, or an e-hailing app.

International to international, within Terminal A, ninety minutes is workable and two hours comfortable. International to domestic means clearing immigration and customs, collecting your bag and checking it in again in Terminal B, an eight-to-ten minute walk away — allow two hours, and treat sixty minutes as a missed connection.

There is no month when the airports empty out. December is the busiest at 4,013,840 passengers and June the quietest at 3,008,907 — a spread of only 33 per cent across the whole network. June is quiet at the airports and excellent in the Kruger, which is an unusually good combination. October is the second-busiest month of the year, which surprises most people.

The standard international rule: containers of no more than 100 ml, in one transparent resealable bag of about a litre, one bag per passenger. Laptops and large electronics come out of your bag at every South African airport — the scanners that let you leave them in are not in general use here.

The ACSA airports give you free Wi-Fi with a data cap rather than a time limit. Bring an adapter: South Africa uses the large three-pin Type M socket, which almost no other country uses, at 230 V and 50 Hz. Newer buildings add Type C and the slim Type N, but the terminals are not consistent.

At O. R. Tambo and Cape Town, yes — both landside, charged per item per day. Everywhere else, effectively no. If a bag you checked has not arrived, the claim is with the airline and must be filed before you leave the baggage hall; items left in the terminal itself go to the airport lost-property office, which is a separate department.

From the monthly passenger-movement statements Airports Company South Africa publishes for each of its nine airports, split by international, regional, domestic and unscheduled traffic. We parse every month of every financial year and check that the four categories add up to the printed total before we publish anything. Lanseria and Kruger Mpumalanga are privately run and file no public monthly returns, so we leave those cells empty rather than estimate.