Gatwick northern runway: what has been approved and what it means for passengers

Gatwick has had two runways for decades, but it only uses one at a time. The northern runway is a standby: it handles taxiing aircraft and takes over when the main runway is closed for maintenance or an incident, but the two strips sit too close together to be used at the same time under international safety rules. That is why Gatwick, uniquely among big airports, runs almost all of its traffic on a single runway, and why it is the busiest single-runway airport in the world.

The project changes that by moving the northern runway's centreline 12 metres north. That small shift opens the gap between the two runways to 210 metres, the minimum separation international standards require for two runways to operate independently at the same time. Once the work is done, both run together: every arriving aircraft uses the main runway, and departures are shared between the main and northern runways. Runway capacity rises from 55 to 69 aircraft movements an hour.

The language matters here, because "second runway" is the phrase everyone reaches for and it is not quite right. Gatwick is not building a new runway on new land, as Heathrow has long proposed; it is bringing an existing strip into fuller use. That is the reason the scheme is comparatively cheap and quick at £2.2 billion of private money, with no public funding, and it is the reason it could move ahead while a new London runway elsewhere stays stuck.

Because it is a nationally significant piece of infrastructure, the northern runway was decided not by the local council but by the Secretary of State for Transport, through a Development Consent Order. Gatwick submitted its application in July 2023; a six-month public examination ran through 2024; the government issued a "minded to approve" letter in February 2025; and after Gatwick accepted a tightened set of conditions on noise and transport, the Secretary of State granted consent on 21 September 2025, as the Gatwick Airport (Northern Runway Project) Development Consent Order 2025.

That approval was challenged. Local resident Peter Barclay, who chairs the Gatwick Area Conservation Campaign, and the group Communities Against Gatwick Noise Emissions took the decision to the High Court on grounds spanning noise, climate and the way the case was assessed. In June 2026 the court dismissed both claims, so the consent stands. Legal positions can still move, so for the current state of play the airport's own Northern Runway project page and the Planning Inspectorate record are the sources to check rather than any snapshot printed here.

The runway is the headline, but it comes with a wider rebuild. Both terminals are set to grow: the North Terminal and the South Terminal buildings are both expanded, a new pier is added, more aircraft stands are built, and around 18,500 extra car parking spaces come with the scheme. The taxiway network is reconfigured to feed two working runways instead of one. This is why the works run for years beyond the runway itself.

The point of all of it is capacity. Gatwick's single runway is designed for roughly 46 million passengers a year; its busiest year so far was 2019, at 46.6 million, and it handled about 43 million in 2024. The project lifts the ceiling to up to 80 million a year, with about 60,000 more flights. That extra room is what lets the airline base grow, so the route map, already past 220 destinations, is expected to widen further, and both the two terminals get the space to handle the extra passengers.

This is a long build, not a switch that flips. Construction runs through the late 2020s, and the runway is expected to enter routine use around 2030, with government and industry figures pointing to 2029 or 2030. Wider airport works, the terminal extensions and stands, continue to roughly 2038. The airport's own shorthand is that the runway will be ready "by the turn of the decade".

For a passenger flying this year or next, the practical answer is that nothing changes yet. The single runway, the two terminals and the current layout all keep working exactly as they do now for several more years. The value in knowing about the project today is context: it explains the construction you may see around the airfield, and it is the backdrop to Gatwick's growing airline and destination list.

Consent came with strings, and they are binding rather than aspirational. The largest is a transport target: Gatwick must get 54% of its passengers using public transport before the northern runway can enter use, which includes reinstating the full Gatwick Express service. If that mode share is not reached, an alternative cap on the number of cars on the road applies instead; and if neither the public-transport target nor the traffic cap is met, use of the runway is delayed until £350 million of road improvements are complete.

Alongside the transport conditions sits a noise insulation scheme for homes most affected, part of the package the government required before it would approve the plan. These conditions are a large part of why the decision took years and arrived in two stages, the "minded to approve" letter first and the full consent months later, after Gatwick had signed up to them.

In the near term, nothing. Your flight, your terminal and your route through the airport are unaffected, and the terminal your airline uses is set the same way it always has been. If you are flying from Gatwick in the next few years, the project is background, not something to plan around.

Over the longer run, the airport gets busier and bigger: more flights and destinations, larger terminals, more parking, and, as a condition of it all, better rail into London. Set against that, more flights mean more noise for communities under the approach and departure paths, which is the heart of the opposition. Supporters point to about 14,000 new jobs and £1 billion a year for the regional economy; opponents point to noise and carbon. What is settled is the decision itself: the runway is approved, the challenge to it has failed, and Gatwick is now cleared to build. The rest, how full the extra capacity gets and how fast, will play out over the decade. Today's flying, meanwhile, is still on the live boards and flight pages.