Dubai International Airport is set to close in 2032 as all of its services move to Al Maktoum International Airport, ending the run of the world’s busiest international airport and shifting the emirate’s main aviation hub south to a new site.
Paul Griffiths, the chief executive of Dubai Airports, said the move would happen once enough capacity had been built at Al Maktoum to handle the transfer. He said Dubai had little reason to keep two major hubs operating within 70 kilometers of each other, and added that by the time the switch comes, every asset at DXB will be near the end of its useful life. The Al Maktoum project is expected to cost about £25.8 billion, or Dhs128 billion, and is designed to make the airport the world’s largest by capacity, with room for 260 million passengers a year.
Griffiths said last year, at the Dubai Airshow, that DXB would pass the 100 million passenger mark within two years and reach 114 million people by 2031. He repeated the transition timeline this year at the Arabian Travel Market, saying the current plan is to move every single service from DXB to DWC, the airport’s other name, once the new capacity is ready. That puts the end of DXB on a clear runway: operations are expected to begin moving in 2032, with closure following the transfer.
The scale of the plan is why the timeline stretches far beyond the date of the handover. The full Al Maktoum project is not expected to be completed until around 2057, making it one of Dubai’s longest-running megaprojects. What happens to the DXB site after closure has not been confirmed, leaving the future of a vast piece of aviation real estate undecided even as the city prepares for the shift.
For travelers, the immediate fact is simpler than the engineering behind it: Dubai is preparing to concentrate all of its airport traffic in one place. The question now is not whether DXB will close, but how smoothly the move to Al Maktoum can be managed in a city that has built its global connectivity around a single airport for decades.
