Thanksgiving is 18 days away — but the year’s most quoted travel forecast does not exist yet. AAA, the auto club whose annual Thanksgiving forecast sets the tone for the holiday, has not published its 2026 numbers.
AAA published its 2025 forecast on November 17, 2025, and its 2024 forecast on November 18, 2024 — so a mid-November release is the pattern, and the 2026 forecast is not yet due. TripPrimer checked AAA’s newsroom on November 5 and found no 2026 forecast; the newest post that day was a gas-price update. FreshCalendars reached the same finding on October 24.
That matters because a figure is already circulating as if it were the 2026 forecast. Several sites are republishing 81.8 million travellers as the 2026 number — but that is the 2025 forecast, not this year’s. It should not be presented as a 2026 figure.
What last year looked like
The 2025 AAA forecast, for November 25 to December 1, 2025, counted 81.8 million Americans travelling at least 50 miles from home — a record, and 1.6 million more than the year before. About 73 million of them drove, about 90% of all travellers, while about 6 million flew domestically, up 2%, and nearly 2.5 million travelled by bus, train or cruise, up 8.5%. A round-trip domestic flight averaged $700, unchanged year on year.
The pattern of the week is well established. The busiest days to fly are the Tuesday and Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and the Sunday after is the busiest of all: the Transportation Security Administration screened 3,134,613 people on the Sunday after Thanksgiving last year, the highest single day in its history, against 1,559,165 on Thanksgiving Day itself — the quietest day of the week.
What is confirmed for 2026
Amtrak has posted its 2026 plan: extra railcars and two additional Northeast Regional round trips between Washington and New York from November 20 to 30, on top of the 1.2 million trips it carried over Thanksgiving in 2025, up nearly 6% on 2024. The railroad says it expects another record this year.
For drivers, the news is better than it has been in weeks: petrol is $4.02 a gallon on Sunday, down for a 15th straight day, and analysts expect it to fall below $4 next week. For flyers, the picture is less clear: no 2026 forecast has been published by AAA, the TSA or the FAA, and no 2026 airfare average has been confirmed. The forecast, when it lands in mid-November, will be the number to watch.
