What Terminal Is Southwest at STL? Terminal 2, Gates, and the 2031 Move Ahead

If your ticket says Southwest and your airport is St. Louis Lambert (STL), you want Terminal 2, Concourse E. That’s the whole answer. But St. Louis is one of the few US airports where getting it wrong actually costs you, so it’s worth thirty more seconds.

The Quick Answer: Southwest Flies From Terminal 2, Concourse E

Southwest operates exclusively out of Terminal 2 — the building St. Louis still sometimes calls the East Terminal — and it uses a single concourse: E. Terminal 1, roughly a mile up the road, holds the other two concourses: A (Air Canada, Delta, United) and C (Alaska, American, Frontier, and the charters), per the St. Louis Airport Map 2026 guide. The two terminals are not connected airside. You cannot clear security in one and walk to the other. Show up at the wrong curb and you’re catching a shuttle, not taking a stroll.

This isn’t an accident of the moment. Terminal 2 and Concourse E opened in 1998 to soak up Southwest’s growth after American Airlines shut its St. Louis hub, and Southwest has anchored the building ever since. Upgraded Points’ 2026 STL guide puts Southwest at roughly 60% of the airport’s passenger traffic — at an airport that moved 15.9 million people in 2025 across 270-plus daily departures. Southwest doesn’t share Terminal 2 so much as own it. (If the “Terminal 2 is the low-cost carrier’s building” setup feels familiar, it’s a pattern the airline repeats — see Southwest’s similarly numbered Terminal 2 at MSP.)

Southwest’s Gates on Concourse E (E4–E40)

Concourse E runs 18 gates: E4, E6, E8, E10, E12, E14, E16, E18, E20, E22, E24, E29, E31, E33, E34, E36, E38 and E40, according to Upgraded Points. The upper level is where your day happens — ticketing, the security checkpoint, and the gates themselves — while arrivals and baggage claim sit on the lower level. The Wingtips Lounge (Priority Pass) is up near gates E29/E31, and the food isn’t an afterthought: there’s a Shake Shack and a Stella Artois Bar on the concourse.

One tell for how much Lambert still leans on this concourse: Concourse E now handles St. Louis’s transatlantic flying too. British Airways launched STL’s first-ever nonstop to London Heathrow from here on April 19, 2026 — the airport’s second transatlantic route after Lufthansa’s Frankfurt service, which started in 2022. A single Southwest concourse pulling double duty as the international departure point tells you where the weight sits at this airport.

Check-In and Security at Concourse E

Southwest’s ticket counters and curbside check-in are on the Terminal 2 upper level, along the departures drive. There is exactly one security checkpoint for the whole concourse, and it runs standard lanes plus TSA PreCheck and CLEAR — the CLEAR pods sit on the upper level near Doors 2 and 3. The checkpoint opens at 3:30 a.m. and closes at 10 p.m.

Here’s the honest buffer, not the brochure one. Terminal 2 has a single checkpoint feeding every Southwest departure, so it lacks the pressure-release valve of a multi-checkpoint terminal. On a normal midday it’s quick. On a 6 a.m. Southwest bank, or a holiday morning, that one checkpoint is the entire story. Give yourself 90 minutes for a domestic flight and two hours if you’re checking bags or flying in peak season. And if you’re driving in, what you’ll actually pay in STL’s Lot A is worth a read before you circle the garage.

Arrivals and Baggage Claim

Southwest arrivals come into the Terminal 2 lower level — the same level where U.S. Customs handles STL’s international arrivals. Southwest bags typically land on carousels 1 through 4, with the baggage service office right there if something didn’t make the trip.

Worth knowing: Southwest is in the middle of a roughly $60 million, bond-financed expansion of Terminal 2 baggage claim — a new third carousel, replaced older units, and about 11,000 square feet of added public space, as reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. If the lower level looks like a work in progress on your next trip, that’s why.

Getting Between Terminal 1 and Terminal 2

Connecting from Southwest to Delta, United, American, Alaska or Frontier — all Terminal 1 carriers — means changing buildings, not just gates. There are two ways to do it without a car. A free inter-terminal shuttle runs 24 hours, every 8 to 15 minutes, from Terminal 1 exit 12 and Terminal 2 exits 10/12, per Upgraded Points. And the MetroLink Red Line has its own Terminal 2 station, so you can hop a train over to Terminal 1’s lounges and amenities.

Budget real time for this. You’re exiting security, riding between buildings a mile apart, then re-clearing at the other end — a leave-the-secure-area connection, not a concourse walk. If you’re weighing whether to just drive and park instead, STL’s parking-versus-MetroLink math lays out where each option actually wins.

What Southwest’s August 2025 Route Cuts Changed

Now the part no other “what terminal” page will tell you — and the part I actually care about. St. Louis’s Southwest map is shrinking.

Effective March 6, 2026, Southwest ended nonstop service from STL to Little Rock, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Des Moines and Wichita, and pulled Burbank back to a seasonal-only schedule, per KSDK — cuts first confirmed in mid-August 2025. Southwest’s own framing, given to First Alert 4, was that it was “redesigning east-west connectivity in our network that has traditionally gone through St. Louis to other SWA points of strength” — routing Wichita, Des Moines and Tulsa through Chicago Midway, Little Rock through Nashville, Oklahoma City through Dallas. The airline said it would still fly “up to 110 departures” at STL under the March 2026 schedule and called itself “fully committed to the Gateway City.”

Read past the PR and it’s a strategy shift. According to Cirium schedule data cited by The Points Guy, St. Louis and Denver were hit hardest in Southwest’s broader cull — each losing seven routes inside an up-to-30-route reduction — as the airline moves away from pure point-to-point flying toward a hybrid, connection-banked model built around four hub-like bases: Nashville, Denver, Chicago Midway and St. Louis. St. Louis isn’t being abandoned. It’s being repurposed from a spoke-heavy point-to-point city into a connecting bank.

A Second Round of Cuts Lands for Summer 2026

Then a second wave. For the third quarter of 2026, Aeronautics Magazine reports Southwest is dropping seven more STL nonstops — Des Moines, Little Rock, Tulsa, Wichita, Oklahoma City, Long Beach and San Jose — while it pushes capacity toward Nashville.

Before you read that as an exit: St. Louis remains Southwest’s 11th-busiest base per Cirium, and the airline made its single biggest customer-facing change here alongside everywhere else, replacing roughly 50 years of open boarding with assigned seating on January 27, 2026. This is a carrier reshaping St. Louis, not leaving it. The nonstop map gets thinner; the base itself stays.

Why Southwest Isn’t Moving Terminals Anytime Soon

Here’s the strongest signal that Southwest is staying put in Terminal 2, and it’s a money signal, not a press line. That ~$60 million baggage-claim expansion? Southwest chose to spend it even with an airport-wide single-terminal project already approved. You don’t bond-finance a new carousel and 11,000 square feet of hall for a building you’re about to walk away from.

Airport Director Rhonda Hamm-Niebruegge said the quiet part plainly to the Post-Dispatch: Southwest “will still probably be in Terminal 2 until the end of 2031” regardless of how the new terminal progresses. With about 25% of Southwest’s St. Louis customers connecting, the airline needs Terminal 2 working well for years yet.

Lambert’s New Single Terminal, and When Southwest Actually Moves

The long game is one building. Lambert’s consolidation is a roughly $3 billion project, and the airport’s 12 signatory airlines have agreed to fund more than 75% of $331.6 million in “enabling projects” — utility-plant relocation, a new de-icing pad — to clear the ground, per Fox 2 Now. The payoff is a single new terminal with 62 gates, up from 54 spread across the two terminals today.

An April 14, 2026 First Alert 4 Investigates report laid out the phased timeline, and it’s worth seeing in order:

• August 2027 — Concourse A in Terminal 1 closes as a Concourse C extension and a new Concourse D open.
• April 2029 — those close in turn, and airlines shift into the new terminal.
• March 2031 — Southwest relocates to the new terminal.
• November 2031 — Terminal 1 and Terminal 2 fully close.
• 2032 — the targeted completion and opening.

Hamm-Niebruegge has described the new building as a single, dual-sided terminal whose footprint is most comparable to Salt Lake City International — a design meant to ease the very connections that today’s mile-apart terminals make painful. Architecture firm HOK submitted 30% design plans on January 7, 2026, though those remain internal and haven’t been released publicly.

If you want a preview of what “one big building” actually feels like day to day — the walks, the train dependency, the way a single roof can still behave like separate airports — I wrote about Denver’s own single-terminal experience, and Lambert is betting the Salt Lake City layout dodges those traps.

Bottom Line for Travelers Right Now

For the next several years, nothing about your Southwest trip through St. Louis changes: Terminal 2, Concourse E, gates E4–E40, one checkpoint, bags on the lower level. If you’re connecting to a Terminal 1 airline, plan for the shuttle or the MetroLink Red Line and give it real time. Expect a thinner nonstop map than St. Louis had a year ago, and expect Southwest to route more of the network through its bank here rather than fly you point-to-point. And don’t let the single-terminal headlines rush you — Southwest doesn’t move buildings until March 2031, with the new terminal targeted to open in 2032.

FAQ

Is Southwest Terminal 1 or 2 at STL? Terminal 2. Southwest flies exclusively from Terminal 2, Concourse E. Terminal 1 is where the other carriers live.

What airlines fly out of Terminal 2? Southwest is the anchor. Terminal 2 also handles St. Louis’s international departures — Lufthansa to Frankfurt (since 2022) and British Airways to London Heathrow (since April 2026) — and it’s where U.S. Customs processes international arrivals.

Can you walk between Terminal 1 and Terminal 2? Not airside. The terminals are about a mile apart and not connected past security. Use the free 24-hour inter-terminal shuttle (every 8–15 minutes) or the MetroLink Red Line between the two terminal stations.

What’s the difference between Terminal 1 and Terminal 2? Terminal 1 has Concourse A (Air Canada, Delta, United) and Concourse C (Alaska, American, Frontier, charters). Terminal 2 is Southwest’s single-concourse home (Concourse E) and STL’s international gateway.

When does Southwest move to the new STL terminal? March 2031, according to the airport’s April 2026 timeline. The full new single terminal is targeted to open in 2032, and Terminals 1 and 2 close in November 2031.