How many passenger airplanes are there in the world?

Boeing and Airbus each publish an annual market forecast report based on a detailed count of the world's active fleet, aircraft by aircraft, drawn from registration records and each airline's operating bases. In these reports the figure is around 25,000 commercial passenger aircraft with capacity above about thirty seats (2023 data), not counting business aviation or dedicated cargo aircraft, which are counted separately because they respond to different demand. The figure also excludes retired aircraft stored in desert aircraft boneyards awaiting scrapping or possible reactivation, a stock that grew sharply after the pandemic and still hasn't fully cleared despite the recovery in air traffic.

Despite the constant retirement of older models, the world fleet keeps growing: every year more new aircraft enter service than are retired, because air traffic grows faster than the efficiency gains of each individual aircraft. Boeing and Airbus agree that the current figure will more than double by 2042, driven mainly by aviation growth in Asia-Pacific and by the replacement of aging fleets in mature markets such as Europe and North America. Much of that growth isn't simply new traffic: it also replaces single-aisle jets from earlier generations with more fuel-efficient versions, such as the Airbus A320neo or the Boeing 737 MAX, which cut cost per seat even without greatly increasing total capacity.