Cheap Flights to London: $405 to $957, the Widest Gap in Europe

London is the 29th-cheapest of the 40 European cities we price, which makes it sound expensive, and Orlando paid $405 for a one-week round trip to it on the same day Dallas paid $957. Both statements are true, and the second explains the first. London has the widest spread between US gateways of any city in our grid, $552 from the best airport to the worst, and a median is the wrong number for a city that is really two markets sold under one name.

I use London more than any other European city, and mostly not to visit it. It is the door: a cheap transatlantic into Gatwick or Stansted, then a European low-cost carrier onward for less than the difference. This page is the fare side of that habit, priced properly. Every figure below comes from our grid of 1,037 round trips, all collected on August 30, 2026 in one sitting, plus the carrier grid's fixed-week comparison of who sells London and for how much.

$771

Median observed economy floor across priced US gateways

#29 of 40

Rank among European cities, cheapest first

$405

Cheapest fare found, from Orlando

$552

Spread between the best and worst US gateway, 1st widest of 40

Every US gateway to London

• Orlando$405
• New York$526
• Boston$574
• Miami$584
• Los Angeles$610
• Washington DC$620
• Seattle$646
• Chicago$650
• Atlanta$674
• San Francisco$674
• Denver$699
• Minneapolis$735
• Las Vegas$760
• Philadelphia$782
• Tampa$786
• Portland$793
• Nashville$801
• Raleigh$833
• San Diego$842
• Charlotte$860
• Houston$873
• Austin$879
• Detroit$880
• Salt Lake City$880
• Phoenix$884
• Dallas$957

The shape of that chart is the whole argument. The cheap end is not a list of the biggest hubs; it is a list of cities with a low-cost nonstop into Gatwick. Orlando at $405, New York at $526, Boston at $574 and Miami at $584 are the four cheapest, and each has Norse Atlantic or a leisure carrier in the schedule. The expensive end is Texas and the interior: Dallas at $957, Phoenix at $884, Detroit and Salt Lake City at $880, Houston at $873. From those cities London is a connection on a legacy carrier, and it is priced like one.

This is the market finding that runs through the whole site, in its sharpest form. Across all 26 gateways, how many European airlines sell your airport predicts its fares better than its size or its distance from Europe, and for London specifically the question is narrower still: does anyone sell you a Gatwick nonstop? Where the answer is yes, London is one of the cheapest cities in Europe to reach. Where it is no, London costs more than Rome.

If you are in the expensive half of the chart, the Alternate Airport Checker prices the drive or the positioning flight for your city. From Dallas, the gap to Orlando is the price of a domestic round trip and then some.

Two Londons: Gatwick and Heathrow

London has four airports in our arrival data, and from the US they behave like two. Heathrow is where the legacy carriers land, British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, American, Delta and United, and it is the best-connected airport in Europe for onward flights. Gatwick is where the low-cost transatlantic operators land, and it is the reason the cheap half of the chart above exists.

Airport	Cheapest round trip	Premium	Routing	Cheapest nonstop
LGW Gatwick	$526	cheapest	Nonstop, Norse Atlantic UK · 7h 00m	$526 Norse Atlantic UK
LHR Heathrow	$779	+$253	Nonstop, British Airways · 6h 55m	$779 British Airways
STN Stansted	$900	+$374	1 stop, Royal Air Maroc · 14h 30m	none

From New York the two Londons are $526 into Gatwick on a Norse Atlantic nonstop and $779 into Heathrow on British Airways, both nonstop, both the same week. That is the low-cost premium in reverse: the same city, forty minutes apart by train, priced as two different destinations.

Airport	Cheapest round trip	Premium	Routing	Cheapest nonstop
LHR Heathrow	$608	cheapest	1 stop, SAS · 19h 55m	$795 British Airways
LGW Gatwick	$667	+$59	1 stop, TAP Air Portugal · 12h 35m	none
STN Stansted	$844	+$236	1 stop, Turkish Airlines · 15h 20m	none
LTN Luton	no service	—	Not sold from Boston	none

From Boston the order flips. There is no low-cost Gatwick nonstop in the Boston schedule we priced, so the cheapest way into London was a SAS connection through Copenhagen into Heathrow at $608, with TAP through Lisbon into Gatwick at $667 behind it. Stansted appears in both tables at a price no one should pay from the US: it is a low-cost airport for flights within Europe, and from here it is a connection with a budget-airline brand attached. Luton had no US itinerary at all from Boston, which the table shows as absent rather than expensive.

The practical rule: price Gatwick and Heathrow as separate destinations, then pick by total trip. Gatwick to central London is about thirty minutes by train, Heathrow about fifteen on the Elizabeth line or forty-five on the Underground. Neither transfer is worth more than a few tens of dollars of fare difference, so the airfare decides it, and the airfare usually says Gatwick where a nonstop exists.

Who actually sells London cheapest

Airline	From	Routing	Round trip	Observed
TAP Air Portugal	JFK	via LIS to LGW	$621	August 31, 2026
SAS	BOS	via CPH to LHR	$636	August 31, 2026
TAP Air Portugal	IAD	via LIS to LHR	$647	September 1, 2026
Royal Air Maroc	LAX	via CMN to LGW	$653	August 31, 2026
SAS	JFK	via CPH to LHR	$664	August 31, 2026
TAP Air Portugal	JFK	via LIS to LHR	$670	August 31, 2026
TAP Air Portugal	BOS	via OPO to LGW	$677	August 31, 2026
SAS	MIA	via CPH to LHR	$682	September 1, 2026
Icelandair	BOS	via KEF to LHR	$683	August 31, 2026
TAP Air Portugal	IAD	via LIS to LGW	$685	September 1, 2026
Royal Air Maroc	LAX	via CMN to LHR	$692	August 31, 2026
Icelandair	IAD	via KEF to LHR	$692	September 1, 2026

The carrier grid holds the travel week fixed, so the rows above compare airlines rather than dates, and the result is the same one that appears for Paris and Amsterdam: the cheapest way into a European capital is often through a different European capital. TAP Air Portugal through Lisbon was cheapest into London at $621 from New York. SAS through Copenhagen was cheapest from Boston at $636. Icelandair through Keflavik was $683 from Boston. 21 airlines sold London in our grid, more than any city but a handful, and the British ones were not the cheap ones.

That is not a criticism of British Airways. Heathrow is the single biggest connecting hub in our data, the airport through which more cheapest-fare itineraries route than any other:

Connect at	Routes won	Median winning fare	Cheapest	Whose hub
LHR	144	$908	$695	British Airways
IST	102	$849	$702	Turkish Airlines
KEF	88	$693	$474	Icelandair
CPH	77	$721	$422	SAS
FRA	57	$872	$540	Condor, Discover Airlines, Lufthansa
LIS	55	$676	$530	TAP Air Portugal

BA's job is to sell you Heathrow as the way to everywhere else, and for Texas in particular it is how the state reaches Europe at all. But a hub carrier prices its hub as a hub. If London is your destination rather than your connection, the carriers that treat it as a spoke, TAP, SAS and Icelandair, sold it for less in the week we checked, at the cost of a stop.

London as the door to Europe

This is the part I actually use. A cheap transatlantic into Gatwick or Stansted, then a separate ticket onward on easyJet, Ryanair or Wizz Air, all three of which I have flown in economy more times than I can count. The arithmetic works when the London fare from your airport is far enough under your real destination's fare to cover the onward flight and a night, and the London chart above tells you whether it does: from Orlando or New York it very often does, from Dallas it almost never does.

Three rules, learned the expensive way. Separate tickets mean the connection is yours to protect, so leave a real buffer, ideally a night, and never book the onward leg on the same day as an arrival that crosses an ocean. Changing London airports costs time: Gatwick to Stansted is two hours by the time you have cleared arrivals, and a Ryanair flight from Stansted booked against a Gatwick arrival is a bet, not a plan. Bags are the hidden fare: the low-cost carriers price them separately and the transatlantic fare you paid does not carry them through. Price the whole trip, not the headline.

When the numbers do work, London beats every other door in Europe on one dimension: frequency. There are more onward flights to more places from London's four airports than from anywhere else in the grid, which is why the swap we price against London, Manchester by train, saves nothing; London is already the cheap one.

Business class to London

The business grid tells the same story from the front of the aircraft. The cheapest business fare into London we priced was Icelandair through Keflavik at $2,338 from New York and $2,443 from Washington. The nonstop carriers were all above it, in some cases by more than the price of an economy ticket, and the seat on Icelandair's narrowbodies is a recliner rather than a flat bed. The Business Class Value Finder shows the multiple over economy for every gateway, with a lie-flat-only view for readers who will not take the recliner. Our British Airways review covers the seat you are paying the premium for.

What counts as a deal to London

Use the Fare Deal Checker with your own airport, because a national threshold means nothing for a city with a $552 spread: $526 is ordinary from New York and would be one of the cheapest London fares ever seen from Dallas. The Deal Alert Setup Wizard prints those lines for your airport before the alerts start. Anything at or below $405 beats every gateway we priced.

For the head-to-head against the other city Americans book most, see London or Paris, and for the country version the UK or France. For the full ranking London sits inside, see the cheapest places to fly into in Europe. For the country, cheap flights to the UK covers Manchester, Edinburgh and Glasgow alongside London. For the two routes with the most traffic, New York to London and Boston to London go seat by seat.