Charleston's Airport Just Beat Every Mid-Sized Airport In America

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Charleston International didn't just do well in its first year of eligibility for J.D. Power's mid-sized airport rankings. It won outright.

The 2026 North American Airport Satisfaction Study put Charleston at the top of the mid-sized category, ahead of 14 competitors including Indianapolis and Ontario. The airport scored 712 out of 1,000 possible points, built on responses from nearly 25,000 passengers rating everything from security lines to how easy it was to find a parking spot.

J.D. Power's Michael Taylor called mid-sized the "toughest category to win," he told the Post & Courier, and that tracks: these are the airports big enough to have real crowds and real logistics, small enough that one bad renovation or one understaffed shift shows up in the numbers immediately. Charleston cleared it on the first attempt.

Where it actually separated itself: staff. Charleston posted the highest staff-friendliness score of every airport in the entire study, not just its category, and took the top spot for accessibility too. It landed in the top two nationally for both terminal facilities and overall trustworthiness.

CEO Elliott Summey's read on it: "an airport can be more than a place you pass through, it can be part of the destination experience." That's the kind of line that sounds like a press release until you look at the numbers backing it up.

The bigger context here is a little counterintuitive. Air travel volumes are at record highs across the board this year, the kind of surge that usually tanks satisfaction scores everywhere. Instead, mid-sized airports posted the largest satisfaction gains of any category nationally, Charleston leading the pack.

For a city that spends a lot of energy worrying about what growth is doing to it, this is a rare instance of Charleston handling more people better, not worse. Whether that holds as the terminal gets busier is the actual test. For now, the trophy's earned.

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