KAREN MAZURKEWICH
Vice-president of stakeholder relations and communications, Toronto Pearson
Whenever airports are in the news – as they have frequently been lately – the Toronto Pearson media team gets asked about fees. We want to help reporters understand issues around affordability and competition. But misinformation still gets published, sometimes because of the topic’s complexity and sometimes because there are other narratives floating around.
Many of the questions have revolved around cost comparisons to other airports, using airport improvement fees as a proxy. Reporters often focus on improvement fees, which are self-funded in Canada in lieu of taxpayer funding.
First of all, air travel affordability is not being driven by these fees. Second, and more significantly, airport fees are the wrong metric for comparing airport costs. While individual fees are components of the overall cost, you cannot pluck a single fee and compare it across different sized airports, operating under different models, as a valid measure of efficiency or competitiveness.
To make valid cost comparisons between airports, the metric reporters should be using is cost per enplanement, or CPE. It reflects fees for operations and improvements and it’s the standard industry metric used by airports themselves, as well as by the airlines who look at cost comparisons when they’re planning routes and service. At Toronto Pearson, CPE declined to $29.98 in 2025, from $32.16 in 2022, when traffic volumes were still recovering from the pandemic. This is competitive with publicly funded U.S. airports and significantly less than competitors like La Guardia, JFK, LAX and Chicago O'Hare.
Infrastructure costs for airports are different around the world. Toronto Pearson and other big Canadian airports are run like not-for-profit malls. We build, maintain and operate the terminals, runways and other physical infrastructure required by our tenant airlines, agencies and retailers. In Canada, taxpayers don’t subsidize this infrastructure. After paying rent to government, we reinvest the revenues in operations, infrastructure and long-term improvements.
To balance the books, we rely on three revenue streams – non-aeronautical revenue (generated through streams like retail, parking fees and rent) plus two buckets of charges.
The first fee bucket is aeronautical fees, which we charge to airlines to operate in our facilities. Toronto Pearson has kept aeronautical fee increases below inflation for years, despite increasing costs. Ours are very much in line with competitor airports – in fact, they remained flat or decreased from 2007 to 2020. As of 2025, they remained at just 94 percent of their 2007 level.
The second fee bucket is airport improvement fees, which we charge to passengers to upkeep and rebuild our facilities. The airlines collect these on our behalf.
Canadian AIFs are higher than they are in the United States, where American taxpayers pay for airport infrastructure. In fact, during COVID, the U.S. federal government invested $40 billion into airports. Ottawa, by contrast, deferred our rent. Toronto Pearson offers some of the best flight connectivity of any airport in North America, and despite its user fee model, it is not even close to the world’s highest improvement fees. At London Heathrow, for example, the improvement fee is about $52 CAD, much higher than Toronto Pearson’s $40. (Heathrow’s business-class improvement fees are higher still, and more increases are expected there to fund upcoming capital projects.)
Improvement fees do tend to increase or decrease as an individual airport funds and completes its capital projects. But ideally, these increases get spread out. Pearson’s AIF has risen by an average of just $1 a year for two decades, and we are not proposing an increase for 2027.
Why are fees such a confusing topic for reporters? It's definitely a complicated subject. But there are also those who muddy the waters by lumping real airport fees in with other charges that airport authorities are not responsible for. According to Canadian Airports Council research, Canadian airport fees account for just 12 percent of the average Canadian airfare. The other 88 percent includes Nav Canada air traffic control fees, CATSA security screening fees, government sales taxes and airline base fares.
Passengers may also get charged a salad of airline ancillary fees, ranging from fuel surcharges to checked baggage fees, oversized baggage fees, online check-in fees, in-person check-in fees, seat selection fees or ticket change fees. These fees have become a significant revenue stream for the airlines, and they obscure the fact that airline fuel and labour inputs, plus new algorithmic pricing models, are what's actually driving aviation's affordability challenges. In 2024 alone, airline ancillary revenue grew 26 per cent to US$148.4B. One Canadian airline's ancillary revenues nearly doubled from 2013 to 2018. Another increased its change and cancellation fees from $29 to $74 (+155 per cent) in 2024.
In short, it’s not that airport fees are completely irrelevant – aeronautical fees and airport improvement fees are part of an airport’s cost basket. But the basket needs to be looked at in its entirety, and that basket is best reflected by cost per enplaned passenger.
Want more detail about airport fees at Toronto Pearson? See this FAQ: Airport Fees at Toronto Pearson: Understanding the Facts | Pearson Airport