What time do planes start and stop flying?

There is no standard time when planes stop. Each airport's hours are set by its government, its planning permission or its own rules, and they range from a strict night-time closure to none at all. Even at the same airport, the answer differs for take-offs and landings, for weekdays and weekends, and for flights that are running late.

Three kinds of airport

• Airports with a night ban. No scheduled flights for a set part of the night: six hours at Frankfurt, seven at Sydney. Zurich and London City work this way too, and Munich comes close.
• Airports with night limits. Flights are allowed, but the number of flights, or the total noise, is capped over a season or a year. This is the system at Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted, set by the UK government.
• Airports that never close. Cargo hubs, and airports in the US, where the FAA leaves flight times to the industry and a new curfew needs its approval.

In the UK, night means 23:00 to 07:00, but the government's strictest limits cover a shorter core, from 23:30 to 06:00. How these rules are set and enforced is explained in night flights: how curfews, quotas and bans work.

Airport hours compared

The official rules, and what they look like in practice: the longest stretch with no landing or take-off at all on a typical night, from our recordings of sample days across the last year.

The UK limits are for the rules that run from October 2025 to October 2028. Heathrow's 5,800 is split into 3,250 flights in the summer season and 2,550 in the winter.

Airports with a night ban

Frankfurt has no scheduled take-offs or landings from 23:00 to 05:00. In the hour either side, from 22:00 to 23:00 and 05:00 to 06:00, it may have no more than 133 flights a night, averaged over the year. In our recordings, a typical night falls silent at about 23:15 and the first flights come at 05:00.

Zurich operates from 06:00 to 23:30, with the last half hour kept for flights that are running late. Outside those hours, every flight needs a special permit.

Munich allows only mail flights and air traffic control survey flights, as a rule, from midnight to 05:00. From 22:00 to midnight and from 05:00 to 06:00, only aircraft on a government list of quieter types may fly, and a yearly noise quota caps the total.

Sydney has its curfew written into law, in the Sydney Airport Curfew Act 1995: no take-offs or landings from 23:00 to 06:00, except for propeller planes and jets under 34 tonnes that meet noise standards, a few freight aircraft, emergencies and some approved international flights in the first and last hour, which must use set runways.

London City is closed from 22:30 to 06:30 on weekdays, and at weekends from Saturday afternoon until Sunday lunchtime. The last 30 minutes of each day are for delayed flights only.

Airports with night limits

The UK government sets the night rules at Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted. They limit the number of flights and the total noise between 23:30 and 06:00, season by season, rather than banning flights outright.

Heathrow adds its own voluntary limits on top: no departures are scheduled between 23:00 and 06:00, and flights due between 04:30 and 06:00 may not land before 04:30. About four in five of its night flights land in that early window, around 16 a day. In our recordings, a typical night at Heathrow has no flights from about 23:30 to 04:35, and by 06:00 to 07:00 there are almost 60 an hour, close to the daytime level. See the Heathrow airport page for which runways are used at night.

Gatwick has never had a ban on flights at any time of night, and its summer allowance is more than three times its winter one. In our recordings, the longest gap on a typical night is about 100 minutes, roughly 03:00 to 04:45.

Airports that never close

Cargo hubs work through the night. Leipzig/Halle in Germany, one of Europe's largest, offers round-the-clock operations for cargo flights.

In the US, the FAA leaves flight times to the industry, and an airport that wants to ban today's jets at night needs the FAA's approval under the Airport Noise and Capacity Act of 1990. That approval is hard to get: in 2009 the FAA turned down Burbank's application for a curfew from 22:00 to 06:59. Older rules, such as John Wayne Airport's in California, which go back to the 1980s, still apply.

Other large airports have flights through most of the night too. In our recordings, the longest gap on a typical night is about an hour and three-quarters at Schiphol, an hour and a half at Manchester, about an hour at Dublin and Luton, and under an hour at Brussels.

Late, early and exempt flights

Even a strict ban has gaps. Emergencies and planes that need to land for safety reasons are allowed at any hour, and Frankfurt and Munich also allow rescue and relief flights. Delays are handled differently at each airport: Frankfurt accepts landings that were scheduled before 23:00 until midnight, after which they must divert, while Zurich and London City keep their last half hour for late flights.

The morning start matters as much as the evening finish. Long-haul flights fly through the night and arrive early in the morning, and Heathrow says time differences make it hard to schedule them any other way. For people under an approach, the first landings at 04:30 or 05:00 can matter more than the last flight at 23:00.

How to check your airport

• Our airport pages give each airport's official night rules, the hours with no flights in our recordings and how many planes land and take off each hour.
• The airport's own website. Look for a page on night flights or noise, which gives the official times and limits and any voluntary rules the airport adds.
• Which runway is used at night. Some airports use particular runways at night; Heathrow, for example, rotates them on a four-week cycle, so the early flights may pass over your street in some weeks and not in others.
• Watch a night. Our free flight map replays a whole day, including the night, with every landing and take-off.

What matters for sleep is not the airport's opening hours but how many loud planes pass over your bedroom between 23:00 and 07:00, and when the first one comes. A Flight Noise report counts the loud planes at night for one address, from a full year of recorded flights.

If night flights are already keeping you awake, aircraft noise and sleep covers what the research says about how many is too many.