SAS growth scenario at Copenhagen Airport

SAS serves as a crucial link between Scandinavia and the world economy, ensuring the region’s mobility and fostering economic integration in Northern Europe. This analysis forecasts the airline’s impact on employment and GDP.

This scenario analysis has a narrower scope than SEO (2025), as it focuses on Copenhagen Airport and the impact on the greater Copenhagen region, thereby including parts of Sweden. The starting point of both analyses is based on 2024 data that takes the entire SAS network into consideration. For the scenario analysis, we start from the connectivity of SAS at CPH in 2024. SAS connectivity at CPH has an economic impact on Swedish region in close proximity. For example, labour sourcing from the airline and the airport but also purchase of intermediate goods as well as business travellers using CPH as access point to southern Sweden. These linkages between these two economies are here addressed through a back on the envelope calculation.

The economic impact analysis is based on Leontief’s widely recognized Input-Output model, which measures how spending and investment in one sector—such as aviation—ripple through the wider economy. By mapping interconnections between industries with OECD Input-Output tables, the model shows how airline and airport activities generate a “snowball effect” on GDP and employment.

The impact of SAS connectivity growth of 62% at Copenhagen Airport is associated with €3.4 billion to the Danish economy in 2030 overall. Directly this growth would require 2,000 jobs at SAS and 3,000 jobs in supporting roles at the airport. The largest economic contribution is expected through the catalytic impact from increase in business activity.