IN Brief:
- Heathrow handled £293bn of goods in 2025, more than a quarter of UK trade by value.
- More than 1.59 million tonnes moved through the airport, with imports and exports both heavily concentrated there.
- The figures sharpen the debate around bellyhold cargo dependence, hub concentration, and airfreight capacity in the UK market.
Heathrow Airport says the latest UK government trade data shows £293bn worth of goods moved through the airport in 2025, reinforcing its position as the country’s largest port by value and underlining how concentrated the nation’s high-value air trade remains. The figures place more than a quarter of all UK trade by value through Heathrow, with more than 1.59 million tonnes of cargo moving across those flows during the year.
The split between imports and exports shows just how central the airport remains to fast-moving, high-value supply chains. Around £166bn of goods arrived through Heathrow in 2025, while exports through the airport were valued at approximately £127bn. Heathrow says more than 90% of its trade by value is with non-EU markets, a reminder that its role extends far beyond short-haul European traffic and sits firmly inside long-haul, high-yield trade lanes linking the UK with North America, Asia, and other major production and consumption centres.
The composition of that freight matters as much as the headline number. A significant share of air cargo moving through Heathrow travels in the bellyhold of passenger aircraft and is concentrated in categories that depend on speed, frequency, and network reach rather than pure volume economics. Pharmaceuticals, temperature-sensitive healthcare products, electronics, fashion, perishables, and premium food exports all sit comfortably within that model. Heathrow’s data also points to the airport accounting for around three-quarters of UK air cargo by value, which puts it at the centre of decisions on gateway resilience as well as trade throughput.
That concentration brings advantages, but it also narrows the system. A large hub gives exporters and importers route choice, connection density, and daily frequency that smaller airports struggle to match. At the same time, it leaves a great deal of time-sensitive trade exposed to a single constrained node. Heathrow has been explicit in linking the latest figures to the argument for expansion, and whether or not that case gains political traction, the underlying operational point is harder to dismiss: the UK continues to run a large share of its premium airfreight economy through infrastructure that has little slack.
That matters more now because air cargo has become less about headline tonnage and more about the reliability of complex flows. Healthcare products need temperature control and predictable uplift. Electronics and advanced components depend on short lead times. Premium food and consumer goods require schedules that preserve shelf life and launch timing. When those supply chains are concentrated through one airport, every question about runway capacity, handler performance, landside access, and customs flow becomes a supply chain question as much as an aviation one.
The 2025 Heathrow figures therefore read as more than a trade milestone. They show the scale of the UK’s dependence on one gateway for high-value freight, and they arrive at a point when businesses are already reassessing resilience across transport modes and nodes. The airport’s dominance is not new, but the latest numbers make it difficult to treat it as background noise. In a market still shaped by capacity constraints, network concentration, and premium cargo demand, Heathrow remains both an enormous advantage and a point of strategic exposure.
