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Mardi Gras by the Numbers
Planes, taxis, hotel rooms and police calls: what the public records actually say about a city that quadruples its party for two weeks. Every figure is sourced, and the gaps are marked.
Up in the air
Who lands, who leaves
Louis Armstrong New Orleans International (MSY) publishes passengers by month. Arrivals are "deplaned" passengers, departures are "enplaned". Months where Fat Tuesday fell are marked in gold.
| Month | Arrivals | Departures | One arrival every |
|---|---|---|---|
| February 2022 | 418,336 | 405,344 | 5.8 seconds |
| March 2022Fat Tuesday | 529,251 | 520,063 | 5.1 seconds |
| February 2023Fat Tuesday | 510,754 | 506,952 | 4.7 seconds |
| March 2023 | 580,237 | 568,990 | 4.6 seconds |
| February 2024Fat Tuesday | 541,970 | 538,594 | 4.6 seconds |
| March 2024 | 609,213 | 615,901 | 4.4 seconds |
| February 2025 | 522,567 | 504,199 | 4.6 seconds |
| March 2025Fat Tuesday | 598,672 | 614,666 | 4.5 seconds |
| February 2026Fat Tuesday | 502,048 | 494,593 | 4.8 seconds |
| March 2026 | 542,992 | 544,613 | 4.9 seconds |
- The honest read: at monthly resolution, MSY can not tell Mardi Gras from spring break. March is bigger than February every single year, whether or not Fat Tuesday landed in it.
- February 2025, with no Fat Tuesday in it, out-landed February 2026, which had one. A likely culprit is the Super Bowl, played in New Orleans on Feb 9, 2025: the biggest thing in town is not always Mardi Gras.
Source: Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, monthly Airline Statistics (enplaned and deplaned passengers). Passengers per day and the arrival interval are our arithmetic on those totals. We did not find daily or hourly airport counts, or earlier months in the same format.
On the ground
Taxis, Uber, Lyft and the streetcar that takes a vacation
The city published monthly taxi trips for 2013 to 2015, which happens to cover three Carnivals and the moment Uber arrived. It is the best official ride data we could find.
Taxi trips per day in February, when Fat Tuesday fell (7,618), versus a sleepy August (5,743).
Taxi trips per day in March, when Fat Tuesday fell (9,942), versus a sleepy August (6,646).
Taxi trips per day in February, when Fat Tuesday fell (9,329), versus a sleepy August (5,980).
- About 57% of taxi rides in 2015 started in the CBD or French Quarter. Only 40% of Uber and Lyft rides did: rideshare spread the rides across the whole city.
- Rideshare went live in April 2015 and logged 1,246,807 trips by December: roughly 38% of all regulated rides that period. Taxi trips for April to December fell 8% compared with 2014.
- Airport pickups were 8.78% of taxi trips in 2015 (247,091 rides). Uber had geofenced the airport at the time; that has since changed, so do not assume the old rules.
- On Uber's own Mardi Gras 2022 guide, the busiest ride-request days were the last stretch from Friday through Fat Tuesday. In 2026 the RTA suspended St. Charles and Canal streetcars from Thursday, Feb 12 to the end of Fat Tuesday, running 24-hour buses on those routes instead.
What does not exist (publicly)
Uber and Lyft do not publish trip counts for New Orleans by day, and we found no city taxi or rideshare data after 2015. So you will not find a number here for "rides on Fat Tuesday". Surge prices of 3x to 10x get quoted online, but we could not trace them to any published source, so we are not repeating them. The practical advice stands: on parade days the closed streets are the bottleneck, not the apps.
Sources: City of New Orleans Taxicab & For-Hire Vehicles Bureau, "Analysis of Taxicab and TNC Ridership Data 2013-2015" (Feb 22, 2016); Uber: Mardi Gras 2022 rider and driver guide; WWL-TV: RTA Mardi Gras 2026 transit changes.
Heads on pillows
How full the hotels get
Across about 26,000 downtown and French Quarter rooms, occupancy over the final Carnival stretch:
Source: New Orleans & Company figures, reported by Hotel Online. Short-term rentals (about 6,000 units citywide) are not counted, so real occupancy was higher. Visitor-count claims for Mardi Gras vary wildly by source, so we do not headline one.
Calls to the police
What changes on a parade day
NOPD publishes every call for service. We counted them for each Carnival from 2013 to 2026 and compared the busiest of the last four days with a normal pre-parade day that same year. These are calls, not confirmed crimes, and the city's call volumes shift over the years, so each season is only compared with itself.
Busiest day of the last four, as a multiple of a normal day
Even the peak day rarely tops about 1.5 times a normal day: a city this crowded does not run at triple speed. 2021, the year with no parades, makes a handy control: those same four days ran only 1.08x a normal day. So the lift is the parades, not just the weekend.
What people actually call about (last four days vs a normal day, all seasons pooled)
- The champion is lost property and missing-person calls: phones, wallets and friends all wander off in a crowd. Keep a meeting spot and a charged phone.
- Medical and mental-health calls roughly double, which plausibly fits long days outdoors in crowds, in whatever weather February serves up.
- Thefts and vehicle break-ins run about 1.5 times normal: crowds are pickpocket weather, and cars left near the route are a favorite target. Crashes and traffic calls rise only about 20%, perhaps because so many streets are closed to cars.
- Fight and assault calls roughly double, but from a small base: a few dozen calls a day, even at the peak.
Source: City of New Orleans open data: NOPD Calls for Service (2013-2026). Our grouping of call types is approximate. "Normal day" is the median day from Jan 10 until three weeks before Fat Tuesday. 2021 is left out of the pooled categories because there were no parades.
What we looked for and could not find
- Daily Uber and Lyft trip counts, and any post-2015 city taxi data.
- Daily airport passengers or TSA lines by hour for Carnival days.
- Day-by-day road traffic counts on I-10 and Canal Street during parades.
- A trustworthy crowd count for any single parade or day.
If you know where any of these are published, tell us at the footer link and we will add them. We would rather show a gap than invent a number.