What Terminal Is Southwest at ORD? Terminal 5 (For Now)

Ask which terminal Southwest uses at Chicago O’Hare and the honest answer is Terminal 5, Concourse M. That’s correct today. It won’t be correct for long.

I covered the O’Hare beat — United, American, and the carrier strategy nobody reads the press releases about — for Crain’s Chicago Business, and I still fly ORD most weeks. So here’s the part the directory pages and the Reddit threads sitting at the top of your search results leave out: Southwest is walking away from O’Hare entirely this summer. If you’re booked, that changes your plans. Let’s take it in order — the gate first, then the exit.

The quick answer: Terminal 5, Concourse M

Southwest Airlines operates out of Terminal 5, Concourse M at O’Hare — the airport’s international terminal, the same building that handles Delta, Frontier, and most of the foreign carriers, according to AirportMapHQ’s 2026 ORD terminal guide. Southwest’s gate positions there are M2 and M5, per an aviation case study from DWU Consulting.

Terminal 5 has its own baggage claim, its own ground-transport curb, and its own parking in Lot D, according to the DetailedDrivers ORD guide. In practice that means if someone’s picking you up or you left a car, you handle all of it at Terminal 5 — you never have to set foot in the rest of the airport.

Here’s what none of the pages ranking above this one will tell you: that terminal assignment has an expiration date. Southwest’s own generic airport page, the Reddit thread, the thin aggregator posts — they answer “Terminal 5” and stop. The real answer is Terminal 5 until June 3, 2026.

Why Terminal 5 feels cut off from the rest of O’Hare

If you’ve only ever flown United or American at O’Hare, Terminal 5 will feel like a different airport. It kind of is. There’s no airside walkway between Terminal 5 and Terminals 1, 2 and 3 — the buildings simply aren’t connected the way the domestic terminals are, according to the DetailedDrivers guide. To cross over, you take the free Airport Transit System (ATS) people-mover or the terminal transfer bus.

That physical separation matters more than it sounds, and it’s part of why Southwest’s exit is a story at all. United runs its hub out of Terminal 1 and American out of Terminal 3 — both in the connected core of the airport. (If you’re flying one of those two, I’ve mapped United’s own ORD terminal guide and American’s Terminal 3 gate guide at O’Hare separately.) Southwest sat off on its own in Terminal 5.

Aviation analyst Joseph Schwieterman made the point to the Chicago Sun-Times that Southwest leaving Terminal 5 actually eases a gate crunch: because Southwest’s gates are physically separated from the Terminal 1-2-3 core where United and American are fighting for space, its departure frees gates the two big hub carriers could go after. In other words, the thing that made Terminal 5 inconvenient for Southwest flyers is the same thing that makes those gates valuable to somebody else.

The bigger story: Southwest is leaving O’Hare entirely on June 4, 2026

On March 12 and 13, 2026, Southwest announced it will discontinue all flights to, from, or through O’Hare starting June 4, 2026 — the last day of ORD service is June 3 — ending a five-year run, according to CBS Chicago. And it’s not just Chicago. Southwest is pulling out of Washington Dulles (IAD) on exactly the same date. This is a network-wide retrenchment, not an O’Hare-only sulk.

Why now: the stated reasons

Southwest framed the move as part of “ongoing efforts to refine its network.” A company spokesperson put it plainly, per WTTW: “Operating at Chicago O’Hare continues to be challenging, and we are confident we can serve Chicagoland through our strongly-held position at Chicago Midway.”

Two pressures sit under that corporate language. First, demand: Southwest’s O’Hare-to-Cancún flight — its only international route out of ORD — saw its load factor slide to 83.4% in 2025, the weakest in four years, according to a route analysis from Migflug. Second, congestion: the FAA has pushed to cap O’Hare operations this summer to curb overscheduling, and while Chicago’s Department of Aviation argues ORD can safely handle 2,800 flights a day and is fighting an FAA proposal to hold it to 2,400, according to CBS Chicago, being the small operator at a capped, congested hub is a losing hand.

The numbers behind the exit

Southwest was never big at O’Hare. It carried about 1.51 million passengers there in the 12 months ending January 2025 — a 1.9% market share, according to the DWU Consulting case study. Compare that to Midway, where Southwest holds a 90.5% seat-capacity share and runs its single highest-volume operation in the whole system.

It was a five-year experiment that never scaled. Southwest launched its first-ever O’Hare service on February 14, 2021, with 20 daily departures to Baltimore, Dallas Love Field, Denver, Nashville, and Phoenix, fares starting at $39 — ending more than 30 years of flying Chicago exclusively out of Midway, according to NBC Chicago. It grew to roughly a dozen destinations, and then, this spring, it folded.

The backdrop is CEO Bob Jordan’s profitability push. Southwest has guided full-year 2026 adjusted earnings of at least $4.00 a share, up from $0.93 in 2025, and cut more than $370 million in costs in 2025 — including the airline’s first-ever layoffs of non-contract and management staff, according to an analysis from Kavout. O’Hare and Dulles are two line items in that math.

What happens to your existing Southwest ORD booking

If you’re booked on Southwest to O’Hare on or after June 4, 2026, you have options — take them before the schedule shuffles under you. According to The Points Guy, Southwest is letting ORD travelers rebook for free to Midway (MDW), Indianapolis (IND), or Milwaukee Mitchell (MKE), or take a full refund. If you’re booked to Washington Dulles instead, you can rebook to BWI, DCA, PHL, or Richmond (RIC), or get a refund.

Practical advice: check your confirmation email now. If you’ve got an ORD itinerary this summer, Midway is almost certainly your simplest swap — and for most people it’s an upgrade, which brings me to the last point.

Why Midway is the smarter Chicago pick for Southwest flyers now

Here’s where I’ll be blunt: for a Southwest flyer, Midway was almost always the better Chicago airport anyway. Southwest is folding its roughly dozen ORD destinations back into Midway, which already serves more than 80 destinations — including all 15 cities it currently flies from O’Hare, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. You lose nothing on the route map.

What you gain is a simpler airport. Midway is a single terminal with three connected concourses — A, B and C — that you reach without any inter-terminal train and without re-clearing security, according to a Midway terminal layout guide from Chicago O’Hare Limo Service. Southwest is roughly 90 to 93% of Midway’s traffic — about 16.7 million passengers in 2025 — the most lopsided single-carrier share of any major U.S. hub. It has flown Midway for 41 years and runs 244 daily departures there, per the Sun-Times. This is Southwest’s fortress, and it behaves like one. If you want the full walk-through, I’ve written up Chicago Midway’s single-terminal layout, lounges, and USO spaces separately.

Put simply: no ATS train, no Lot D detour, no Terminal 5 island. You walk in and you’re at your gate.

Quick answers: Southwest at O’Hare vs. Midway

What terminal is Southwest at ORD? Terminal 5, Concourse M, at gates M2 and M5 — through June 3, 2026. After that, Southwest no longer serves O’Hare.

Is Southwest leaving O’Hare? Yes. Southwest announced in March 2026 that it will end all O’Hare service on June 4, 2026, and exit Washington Dulles the same day.

What terminal is Southwest at Midway? Midway is a single terminal with three connected concourses (A, B, and C). Southwest operates across all of them — no inter-terminal train needed.

Can I still fly Southwest to Chicago after June 2026? Yes — just from Midway, not O’Hare. Southwest already serves every city from Midway that it flew out of O’Hare, plus dozens more.

For more Chicago O’Hare field notes, I keep tracking the airport’s terminals, transport, and lounges as the map keeps shifting — and right now, it’s shifting fast.