Is An Aircraft Carrier Bigger Than A Cruise Ship? Here's How They Compare

Aircraft carriers and cruise ships are some of the largest floating vessels in the world — both capable of carrying thousands of people on board. Cruise ships and carriers are engineering marvels decades if not centuries in the making as shipbuilding has advanced over the ages.

However, cruise ships and aircraft carriers differ massively in their purpose. Cruise ships are leisure vehicles, designed to bring tourists to many different ports and explore different places and countries, while at the same time having a good time between stops. On the other hand, aircraft carriers are naval vessels that countries use to project power and influence regional geopolitics, meaning the people aboard them aren't there to have a good time.

Both ships are massive floating cities, but which one is actually larger? Let's measure the largest examples of these boats.

At the time of writing, the title holder of the largest cruise ship in the world is Royal Caribbean International's Icon of the Seas. She is an Icon Class ship with a gross tonnage of 248,663 and entered service with the cruise liner in January 2024. This gives her a length of 1,196 feet or 365 meters — about four football fields long — and a width of 159 feet or 48 meters (about 11 cars long, at around 14.7 feet long per car). Royal Caribbean spent $2 billion to build her, and its CEO, Jason Liberty, describes her as the "biggest, baddest ship on the planet," according to CNBC. 

However, the Icon of the Seas won't remain as the largest cruise liner for long. That's because her sister ship, the Star of the Seas, will have an expected gross tonnage of 250,880. She's currently under construction at Meyer Turku in Finland, with Royal Caribbean International expecting her to enter service in the summer 2025. A third Icon Class ship is slated for delivery in 2026, but we don't have much information on it right now.

The Icon of the Seas has a total of 20 decks, with 18 accessible to guests. However, not all decks contain rooms, of the 18 guest decks, only 12 have guest accommodations. The rest of the decks are reserved for amenities and crew.

The U.S. Navy claims that its newest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78) is the world's largest. It is the first ship in the Gerald R. Ford class of supercarriers and is designed to accommodate modern systems within its planned 50-year service life. The Gerald R. Ford has a length of 333 meters or about 1,092 feet — slightly shorter than the Icon of the Seas — and a beam of 40.8 meters or almost 134 feet. It also weighs a little less than 100,000 tons. This makes the carrier significantly slimmer and lighter than the cruise ship, but that's because aircraft carriers need to be as fast as possible.

This ship's primary mission is to deploy aircraft, but because it has such a short length of just 333 meters (versus the runways at U.S. Air Force bases, with the longest at Edwards Air Force Base with 4,579 meters), carriers use speed to get a brisk wind of over 30 knots blowing over the deck when launching planes, alongside the use of its catapult. The slimmer profile of an aircraft carrier allow it to go faster (which also means that it can get in and out of danger more quickly, too).

As for the price, the Gerald R. Ford class will cost the American taxpayer a cool $13 billion per ship. This is more expensive than the USS Nimitz, which it slated to retire in 2026, and has an inflation-adjusted price of over $11.5 billion.

Aside from its size, we can also look at the number of people each ship can carry. After all, although the Icon of the Seas and USS Gerald R. Ford have almost the same length, it doesn't mean that they can carry the same number of people. The largest Royal Caribbean International cruise ship has 2,805 staterooms, meaning it can carry 5,610 guests if each room is occupied by two people.

However, the Icon of the Seas also has a few bigger rooms that can hold more people. If you fill all the rooms to the maximum, the ship's passenger capacity is at 9,302. And with its 2,350 total international crew to complement, that would mean that the Icon of the Seas has 11,652 souls on board when filled to the brim.

We must also remember that cruise ships aren't just floating motels. Instead, they're full-fledged entertainment venues with multiple amenities. The Icon of the Seas itself features 27 restaurants, 18 bars and lounges, six activity centers for kids and teens, and 24 other amenities, including a conference center, theaters, swimming pools, sports courts, to name a few.

Aircraft carriers also have a large number of people aboard. But since they're military weapons, these are not tourists on a leisurely trip. Instead, they're mostly sailors and naval aviators, occasionally some marines and other personnel that are there to support the carrier's operations.

The USS Gerald R. Ford has enough accommodations for 508 officers and 3,789 enlisted personnel, for a total crew complement of 4,297. This is 1,715 less than the Nimitz's full complement of 6,012 people, showing how the Ford has streamlined its operations.

But aside from its crew, remember that aircraft carriers carry both fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft. The majority of the Icon of the Seas' space is occupied by leisure amenities. On the other hand, the USS Gerald R. Ford has an expansive flat top for launching multiple aircraft simultaneously and it also has spacious hangars to store and service loads of up to 90 planes, helicopters, and drones — including the F-35C, F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, E-2D Advanced Hawkeye airborne early warning radar, EA-18G Growler electronic warfare aircraft, and MH-60R/S helicopters.

The short answer to whether an aircraft carrier is bigger than a cruise ship is no, if you look at the biggest ships in their class. However, many smaller cruise ships will be dwarfed by the Navy's smallest actively serving carrier. But even though the Icon of the Seas and the USS Gerald R. Ford are behemoths in their own right, neither of them is the largest ship on the world to have been made (although they both made the top 10). Instead, this award goes to the oil carrier Seawise Giant, designed for shuttling oil from the Middle East to the United States. However, it has since been retired and sold for scrap in 2010.

As of today, the largest ship in service is the OOCL Spain, which is almost 400 meters long and can carry over 24,000 shipping containers. Next to it are four ships owned by the Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) — Irina, Loreto, Michel Cappellini, and Gülsün — all of which carry around 24,000 containers.

We might see larger cruise ships and carriers in the future, especially as Royal Caribbean International and the Navy still has several cruise ships and aircraft carriers on order. We might even see a larger carrier from other countries, as the U.S. Navy isn't the only one to field these mighty ships.