The lowest airport in the world sits 386 metres below sea level, on the shore of the Dead Sea, and it is not the airport most lists mention. Ask for airports below sea level and almost every page on the web hands you the same two examples: Amsterdam's Schiphol, because it is famous, and occasionally Rotterdam next door. Both are real, and both are near the bottom of this list, not the top. Our dataset carries 4,563 airport records with a three-letter IATA code, filtered to large and medium airports, and running the elevation field for anything under zero returns a set most pages never show: fourteen airports, five countries beyond the two everyone names, and a gap of more than a hundred metres between the lowest entry and the next one down.
The full list, lowest to highest
Every row below comes from our own airport dataset, sourced from OurAirports, filtered to airports with a three-letter IATA code and a large or medium classification. Elevation is in metres, negative meaning below sea level. Counts as of 2026-09-23.
| Airport | IATA | City | Country | Elevation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bar Yehuda Airfield | MTZ | Masada | Israel | -386 m |
| Jacqueline Cochran Regional Airport | TRM | Palm Springs | United States | -35 m |
| Atyrau International Airport | GUW | Atyrau | Kazakhstan | -22 m |
| Ramsar Airport | RZR | Ramsar | Iran | -21 m |
| Astrakhan Narimanovo Airport | ASF | Astrakhan | Russia | -20 m |
| Nowshahr Airport | NSH | Nowshahr | Iran | -19 m |
| Imperial County Airport | IPL | Imperial | United States | -16 m |
| El Centro NAF Airport | NJK | El Centro | United States | -13 m |
| Sardar-e-Jangal Airport | RAS | Rasht | Iran | -12 m |
| Balkanabat International Airport | BKN | Balkanabat | Turkmenistan | -8 m |
| Gorgan Airport | GBT | Gorgan | Iran | -7 m |
| Rotterdam The Hague Airport | RTM | Rotterdam | Netherlands | -5 m |
| Lelystad Airport | LEY | Lelystad | Netherlands | -4 m |
| Amsterdam Airport Schiphol | AMS | Amsterdam | Netherlands | -3 m |
Fourteen airports, in seven countries: Israel, the United States (three), Kazakhstan, Iran (four), Russia, Turkmenistan and the Netherlands (three). Every one of them has its own page in our airport directory, with the code, name and location for that specific airport.
Why Bar Yehuda is in its own category
The gap between first and second place on this list is not a rounding difference. Bar Yehuda, near the Dead Sea in Israel, sits 386 metres below sea level. The next entry, Jacqueline Cochran Regional Airport in Palm Springs, California, sits 35 metres below sea level. That is a gap of 351 metres, more than ten times the depth of the number-two airport, because Bar Yehuda is not just a low airport, it is an airport built next to the lowest point of dry land on Earth. The Dead Sea shoreline itself is the lowest point of dry land on Earth and keeps dropping as the sea shrinks, and any airstrip built on that shore inherits the elevation of the ground under it.
The cluster around Iran's Caspian coast
Four of the fourteen airports on this list, Ramsar, Nowshahr, Sardar-e-Jangal and Gorgan, sit on or near Iran's Caspian Sea coastline, each a few metres below sea level for the same reason: the Caspian's surface itself sits well below global sea level, and low-lying land around it inherits that elevation. It is the same pattern as the Netherlands entries at the other end of the list, just with a different sea setting the baseline.
Why the Netherlands shows up three times
Rotterdam The Hague, Lelystad and Schiphol are all in the single-digit-metres range, and all three sit on land the Netherlands has spent centuries reclaiming and draining below the level of the North Sea. Schiphol itself is built on the bed of a lake, Haarlemmermeer, drained in the 19th century. That history is why the Netherlands is the only country with three entries on a fourteen-airport list: a large share of the country's low-lying land sits below sea level by design, held back by dikes and pumps, and any airport built on that land inherits the same elevation as the fields and towns around it.
The two Palm Springs-area airports, without the mountains
Jacqueline Cochran Regional and Imperial County, along with El Centro NAF nearby, sit in and around the Coachella and Imperial Valleys in Southern California and Baja Mexico's Salton Trough, a basin that dips below sea level even though it sits inland, hours from any coast and surrounded by mountains. It is a reminder that "below sea level" is a statement about elevation, not about proximity to an ocean; the Salton Sea itself sits well below sea level, and airports on the valley floor around it inherit that depression the same way an airport on a coastal polder does.
What this list leaves out
This is airports with a three-letter IATA code, classed large or medium, in our OurAirports-sourced dataset as of 2026-09-23. Small grass strips, private airfields and airports without an assigned IATA code are filtered out before this list is built, the same filter behind every other airport page on the site, so a handful of smaller below-sea-level airstrips that exist in the world will not appear in this fourteen-airport set. OurAirports releases this dataset to the public domain, and our build process downloads it directly at build time rather than through a third-party mirror, which is why every airport named here also carries its own page in our directory, built from that same download.
A shorter list would miss the pattern this one shows: below-sea-level airports cluster in a handful of specific kinds of place, a rift valley shore, an inland sea coastline, a drained polder, a basin ringed by mountains, rather than scattering randomly across the map. Seeing all fourteen side by side, sorted by depth, is what makes that pattern visible in a way that the usual two-airport version of this list never does.
How TrackMyWings helps
TrackMyWings™ is a live flight-tracking platform in development, built for the person waiting on a flight as much as the person flying it. A private beta shipped on 2026-08-24, Android only, on the Play internal testing track. Public launch has no fixed date; it depends on trade-mark clearance and on the app being good enough to earn the download. Every airport named on this list, from Bar Yehuda to Schiphol, has its own page in our airport directory, the same directory a future live version of the app builds on.
Questions people ask
What is the lowest airport in the world? By elevation in our dataset, Bar Yehuda Airfield (MTZ) near the Dead Sea in Israel, at 386 metres below sea level.
Is Schiphol the lowest airport below sea level? No. Amsterdam Airport Schiphol is on this list at 3 metres below sea level, the shallowest of the fourteen, not the deepest. Bar Yehuda is 383 metres deeper.
How many airports in the world sit below sea level? Fourteen, in our own dataset of 4,563 airport records filtered to a three-letter IATA code and a large or medium classification, as of 2026-09-23. A dataset with no such filter, or one covering smaller airstrips, could return a different count.
Why are three of the fourteen in the Netherlands? Because a large share of Dutch low-lying land sits below the level of the North Sea by design, reclaimed and drained over centuries and held there by dikes and pumps. Rotterdam The Hague, Lelystad and Schiphol all sit on that kind of land.
Where does the elevation data come from? OurAirports, a public-domain dataset of the world's airports, filtered at build time to airports with a three-letter IATA code and a large or medium classification.
Sources
- OurAirports, "Data," https://ourairports.com/data/, captured 2026-09-23
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