What is an IATA airport code?

It is a three-letter code assigned by the International Air Transport Association to identify an airport, such as LHR for London Heathrow or JFK for New York Kennedy. These are the codes printed on boarding passes and luggage tags and used in booking systems.

How is an IATA code different from an ICAO code?

IATA codes are three letters used commercially for tickets and baggage. ICAO codes are four letters used by air traffic control and aviation operations, with the first letter or two indicating the region, for example EGLL for Heathrow. Each airport typically has both.

Why might a code not be found here?

This tool ships with an offline database of the world's busiest and best-known airports rather than every one of the thousands of IATA codes in existence. A missing small regional airport does not mean its code is invalid, only that it is outside this curated set.

Can two airports share a code?

No. IATA airport codes are unique, so each three-letter code maps to exactly one airport. City codes are a separate concept: a metropolitan code like LON covers all of London's airports, while LHR, LGW, and STN identify the individual airports.

Are these codes case-sensitive?

IATA codes are conventionally written in uppercase, but they are not case-sensitive when you look them up. This tool accepts lower or mixed case and matches LHR, lhr, or Lhr equally.

IATA Airport Code Lookup

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What this tool does

This lookup turns a three-letter IATA airport code into a readable airport identity — full name, city, country, and the matching four-letter ICAO code — and works the other way too: type a city or country and see its airports. It runs entirely in your browser against a built-in database of the world’s busiest airports, so there is no network call and no API key.

How it works

IATA assigns each commercial airport a unique three-letter code (LHR, JFK, DXB) used across booking, ticketing, and baggage systems. ICAO assigns a separate four-letter code (EGLL, KJFK, OMDB) used in flight operations and air traffic control, where the leading letters encode the region. The tool indexes each airport by code, name, city, and country, then filters as you type, matching any of those fields case-insensitively.

Tips and notes

Codes are unique per airport, so a three-letter query returns at most one airport. Do not confuse an airport code (LHR) with a city code (LON), which groups several airports in one metropolitan area. ICAO’s first letters map to regions — K for the contiguous US, EG for the UK, OM for the UAE — a handy sanity check when you have an ICAO code but not the IATA one. This curated set covers major hubs; very small airports may not appear.