New Distribution Capability adoption in the United States has paused, at least for now. Data released by Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC) on August 20 shows NDC transactions accounted for 21.2% of total ARC-settled transactions in July 2026, down from 21.6% in June and 21.6% in May. It is the second consecutive monthly decline after a run that took the channel from 20.1% in April to a mid-year high in the low 21% range.
Two months of softening is not enough to call it a ceiling. ARC’s own commentary on the July figures did not flag the dip as significant, and monthly NDC share has fluctuated before without breaking its longer upward path. But after a year in which nearly every ARC release carried a version of the same headline, NDC hitting new highs, July marks the first release where the channel’s growth story needs a caveat attached to it.
The number of agencies reporting NDC transactions tells a similar story. There were 1,186 agencies reporting NDC activity in July, down from 1,197 in May and 1,190 in June. The declines are small, in the tens of agencies, but they move in the same direction as the transaction share.
What is not in question is the overall health of the U.S. agency air sales market. Total sales reached $9.6 billion in July, up 18% year over year and 6% month over month. Passenger trips settled through ARC rose to 25.8 million, up 6% from June and 4% from July 2025. Average ticket price sat at $619, up 17% year over year despite easing 2% from June.
That price-versus-volume gap has held for four straight months now. Since April, ARC’s monthly releases have shown ticket prices climbing in the mid-to-high teens year over year while passenger trip growth stays in the low single digits. July fits the same shape. Sales growth is being driven largely by what travelers pay per ticket rather than by how many more of them are flying, a dynamic worth watching even as ARC continues to describe underlying demand as resilient.
For Africa and MENA markets, where NDC adoption still trails the U.S. by a wide margin in aggregator and travel management company penetration, a U.S. pause is worth watching rather than worrying about. The U.S. figure reflects a market that industrialized NDC distribution years ahead of most emerging markets, so a short-term stall there says little about the trajectory for carriers and aggregators still in earlier phases of NDC rollout across the two regions. If anything, it raises a question implementation teams elsewhere should be asking now: does adoption get harder past the 20% mark, once the conversation shifts from switching on NDC to actually using it for servicing, payment, exchanges, and offer management?
Two things are worth flagging on methodology. ARC’s NDC share figure measures transaction volume through its own settlement platform and does not capture NDC bookings settled outside ARC or direct-to-airline. And two months of decline, however consistent in direction, is a small sample against sixteen months of prior data. Whether this is a genuine stall or ordinary volatility around a ceiling near 21 to 22% will not be clear until ARC’s August and September releases are in.
