Dubai will close DXB by 2035 and move all traffic to Al Maktoum
DXB — the world’s busiest international airport with 95.2m passengers in 2025 — is to close by 2035. Al Maktoum, a $35bn project designed for 260m passengers, replaces it. The vacated land will be folded into the city.
Dubai has confirmed a plan that will redraw the city's geography: by 2035 Dubai International Airport (DXB) will close and all traffic will move to Al Maktoum International in the south of the emirate. This concerns the world's busiest operating international hub — in 2025 DXB set a record of 95.2 million passengers.
The scale of the replacement
- Al Maktoum: $35 billion of investment, works launched in April 2024.
- 260 million passengers a year at full capacity, 5 runways, 400 boarding gates, 70 sq km of territory.
- Phase one handles 150 million passengers, timed to the closure of DXB — both set for 2035.
- For scale: the world's largest airport today, Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta, serves about 104 million people a year.
A short history of DXB
The airport opened on 30 September 1960 and handled 242 000 passengers in 1970. Then: about 4.3 million in the late 1980s, 9.7 million in 1998, 70.5 million in 2014, 87 million in 2023, 92.3 million in 2024 and 95.2 million in 2025 — growth of more than 390-fold in 55 years. DXB today connects to roughly 291 destinations across 110 countries.
Two sides for the housing market
The south wins. Dubai South and the districts around Al Maktoum gain what has always moved prices hardest in Dubai: jobs and a transport anchor. An airport at that scale means tens of thousands of employees, logistics, hotels and services. Territory considered remote today becomes a second centre of gravity by the mid-2030s.
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The centre changes character. The 30-plus square kilometres freed up beside Deira and Garhoud are to be folded into the city fabric. That is an extraordinarily rare event — a site of this size inside an established city. For surrounding districts it means both new housing supply and the removal of constraints the airport imposed for decades: noise, and the ban on tall buildings under the flight path.
How to treat this now
Carefully. 2035 is ten years, over which plans get revised more than once. Buying an apartment today on the strength of a future DXB redevelopment is a bet on a very long horizon. But factoring the direction of travel into a north-versus-south decision is already sensible: the city has formally announced where it is growing.
Based on Dubai Airports data and official announcements on the Al Maktoum airport project.
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