The Most & Least Expensive Airports in the U.S.

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Everyone will agree that when you travel by air – whether it’s personal or business travel – your hotel and airfare are probably the most expensive parts of the trip. Sure, you can use an ultra-low-cost carrier like Breeze (we did. It wasn’t that bad, actually), Spirit (did that one, too) or even Frontier (yep, that one too. Even snagged an exit row seat for free). And you can even stay at a cheap place like Motel 6 (well, except this Motel 6 – it’s not cheap). Even then, those costs will likely be higher than nearly everything else on your trip.

That being said, if you decide to spend money at the airport, say, on food, drink, or those cool headphones at Brookstone, chances are you’re going to spend a chunk of change there, too. And it makes sense – there are plenty of reasons why things cost more at airports. But if you travel enough, you’ll probably notice that SOME airports charge significantly more than even OTHER airports.

Casino.ca, a Canadian-based website that compares the best online casinos in Canada, noticed this as well. So they decided to rank the most and least affordable airports in North America. They based their research on prices for airport hotels, parking and pints of beer.

Here’s how they said they did it:

Data collected June 2025.

We used Wikipedia’s list of the 50 busiest North America airports and manually gathered price data for beer pricing, parking and hotels to establish the ranking.

• Prices for beer were gathered from three different drink menus offered by each airport, these were then averaged together. A 20oz Budweiser was used as standard.
• For airport hotels, we used Booking.com. Hotels were filtered by their ‘distance from the airport’ and we averaged the prices of the three closest in proximity. 
• Airport parking pricing was gathered from each airport website, where available – economy parking was selected. 

Airports were ranked from most to least expensive based on the average cost of a visit to each airport (1 night parking, 1 night hotel and 1 pint of beer).

The data gathered for both hotels and parking were based on the same date to ensure continuity.

The 3 most expensive airports in North America

These are the three most expensive airports in North America, in terms of the combined cost of beer, parking, and hotel. Not surprisingly, all of them are located in large cities.

We must admit that we’re pleasantly surprised by the $12.41 beer at LGA, considering it was just a few years ago that there was a big brouhaha about inflated beer prices at the NYC area airports. $12 and change is a NICE change from what prices were back then.

The 3 least expensive airports in North America

2 of the 3 least expensive airports are actually in Mexico (but yay for HOU for being up there, too!). And one of those two – Cancún Int’l, actually, has one of the highest beer prices of all the airports used in the study. But their average price was still low enough to put them in the top (well, low) three.

So, the three cheapest airports in North America cost less than half of the three most expensive airports in North America. Crazy, huh?

Comparing the Highs and Lows

Casino.ca studied the 50 busiest airports in North America and listed the 10 that were the most and least expensive. You can see the rest of the highs and lows on this page of their website.

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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary