Love Field Outlists DFW 8.9 Times Over: Where to Find Empty Leg Flights in Texas

Updated September 29, 2026: counts now exclude exact duplicate copies of the same listing and deleted, withdrawn or cancelled listings. The figures below reflect that correction.

Ask where the empty legs are in Texas and the honest answer starts with a number that looks like a typo. Over the twelve months ending September 4, 2026, SkyAccess marketplace listings recorded 8,443 unique empty legs touching Dallas Love Field (KDAL) and 944 touching Dallas Fort Worth International (KDFW). That is 8.9 times as many at Love Field. Houston repeats the pattern even more sharply: William P. Hobby (KHOU) logged 7,467 unique legs against 683 at George Bush Intercontinental (KIAH), 10.9 times as many. In SkyAccess marketplace listings, Texas empty leg supply concentrates away from the giant hubs.

The state as a whole is enormous. Across the same window, 43,071 unique empty legs touched at least one Texas airport, and 13,541 of those flew entirely within the state. That volume makes Texas No. 3 nationally for empty leg activity, behind only Florida and California, as we documented in our ranking of all 50 states. Here is where that activity actually sits, airport by airport, corridor by corridor, and month by month.

The 13 busiest Texas airports for empty legs

One accounting note before the table, because we count carefully here: these figures are airport touches, not statewide totals. Each one counts the unique legs departing from or arriving at that airport, so a leg that touches two Texas airports, say a Dallas to Houston flight, counts once for each airport. The full arithmetic is in the methodology section.

Rank	Airport	Code	Unique legs
1	Dallas Love Field	KDAL	8,443
2	William P. Hobby	KHOU	7,467
3	Austin-Bergstrom	KAUS	7,060
4	San Antonio International	KSAT	5,781
5	El Paso International	KELP	3,851
6	Fort Worth Meacham	KFTW	3,509
7	Addison	KADS	2,075
8	Sugar Land Regional	KSGR	1,489
9	Midland International	KMAF	1,150
10	Dallas Fort Worth International	KDFW	944
11	Houston Executive	KTME	897
12	David Wayne Hooks	KDWH	842
13	Conroe-North Houston	KCXO	781

The top five combine for 32,602 touches, more than half of the statewide total of 56,573. And the pattern from the opening paragraph runs all the way down the list. In Dallas, the supply lives at Love Field, Fort Worth Meacham, and Addison, not at the giant international hub. In Houston, it lives at William P. Hobby, Sugar Land Regional, Houston Executive, David Wayne Hooks, and Conroe-North Houston, while George Bush Intercontinental, with 683 touches, does not crack the top 13 at all. If you are searching for empty legs in either metro, the biggest name on the map is, in our listings, the wrong place to look.

The Texas Triangle, measured

Of the 43,071 unique legs touching Texas, 13,541 had both ends inside the state. The busiest intra-Texas airport pairs, with both directions summed, form the familiar Triangle:

• Dallas (KDAL) and Houston (KHOU): 791 unique legs (388 outbound from Dallas, 403 from Houston)
• Dallas and Austin (KAUS): 664 unique legs (340 and 324)
• Austin and Houston: 585 unique legs (295 and 290)
• San Antonio (KSAT) and Austin: 552 unique legs (282 and 270)
• San Antonio and Houston: 547 unique legs (282 and 265)

Those five pairs total 3,139 unique legs, and the directional splits are strikingly even. No pair in the top five leans more than 17 legs in one direction, so whichever Triangle city you start from, the listings run close to an even split in each direction.

Where Texas empty legs go when they leave

Looking only at legs departing Texas for out-of-state destinations, grouped by the city each airport is listed under, Dallas dominates. Six of the top eight directional corridors originate there:

• El Paso to Scottsdale, Arizona: 117
• Dallas to Las Vegas: 112
• Dallas to Scottsdale: 111
• Houston to New Orleans: 106
• Dallas to Denver: 104
• Dallas to Van Nuys, California: 95
• Dallas to Aspen: 93
• Dallas to Tulsa, Oklahoma: 90

The two exceptions are notable in their own right. El Paso to Scottsdale, at 117 unique legs, is the busiest outbound corridor in the state. Houston to New Orleans, at 106, is Houston’s lone entry in the top eight. No international route makes the list; the busiest, El Paso to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, logged 70 unique legs.

Month by month: a March high, an August low

Counting complete months only, unique legs touching a Texas airport ran: October 2025, 3,196; November, 3,306; December, 3,714; January 2026, 3,371; February, 3,643; March, 4,892; April, 4,605; May, 4,809; June, 4,128; July, 2,552; August, 2,252.

Within this window, listings touching Texas peaked in March at 4,892, and March, April, and May were the three busiest months. They then fell to 2,552 in July and 2,252 in August, the lowest month in the window. That decline traces to one partner feed of listings that wound down from June 2026. Unique legs from every other source, taken together, were higher in August than in March: 2,211 against 1,836. With a change of sources inside the window, these monthly counts describe this window only, not a pattern that repeats every year.

What is on the board right now

When we re-measured this story on September 29, 2026, 426 unique empty legs touching a Texas airport with future departures were published on the SkyAccess marketplace; the SkyAccess empty leg board shows what is live at any moment. Marketplace-wide, SkyAccess carries 5,000+ live empty leg flights from 900+ FAA Part 135 (and international equivalent) certified charter operators. Apart from those two marketplace-wide figures and the live Texas count above, every figure in this story comes from SkyAccess marketplace listings over the twelve-month window. For the national picture updated monthly, see the Empty Leg Index. For Texas specifically, the airport pages for Dallas Love Field, William P. Hobby, Austin-Bergstrom, San Antonio International, and El Paso International show what is departing each field today.

Methodology

All figures except the live Texas count and the two marketplace-wide figures for live flights and certified operators cover SkyAccess marketplace listings with departure times in the twelve months ending September 4, 2026, from September 4, 2025 up to September 4, 2026. They were first pulled on September 4, 2026 and re-measured on September 29, 2026 from the SkyAccess marketplace database. A unique leg is one distinct combination of origin airport, destination airport, departure time, aircraft tail number, and aircraft model: exact duplicate copies of a listing are removed, and deleted, withdrawn, cancelled, and internal-only listings are excluded. Copies of the same flight recorded by two sources with different departure times are not merged. These are SkyAccess marketplace empty leg listings, not airport operations counts, not FAA traffic data, and not a census of all private aviation.

Unique legs versus touches: 43,071 unique legs touched at least one Texas airport. Airport-level figures count touches, so a leg between two Texas airports counts once at each. Because 13,541 legs had both ends in Texas, including 39 that departed from and returned to the same airport and count once there, touches across all 167 Texas airports with legs total 43,071 plus 13,541, less 39, or 56,573. Our state ranking covers a different twelve-month window, so its Texas totals differ from the figures in this story.

Monthly counts include complete months only. September 2025 and September 2026 sit at the edges of the window as partial months and are excluded. Texas Triangle figures are airport to airport and sum both directions. Out-of-state corridor figures are directional, count Texas departures only, and group airports by the city each one is listed under in our airport data, so Dallas includes Love Field and Addison, and Houston includes Hobby and Bush Intercontinental. The live count of 426 covers listings with published status and future departures at the moment of the September 29 re-measurement, excluding suppressed listings and listings from the partner feed described above.