The holiday season is fast approaching. And for most of us in the United States, that means airports, particularly the larger ones, will be crowded messes for the days around Thanksgiving, as well as roughly the last week of December.
Unfortunately, some airports are ALWAYS an inefficient hot mess, regardless of what time of year it is. If you travel a lot, you probably even know which airports those are.
Now let’s see if you were right. 😉
Luggage storage company Bounce decided to see which airports had the longest and shortest wait times at TSA and passport control, so you can know which ones may cause you the most and least delays.
Their methodology
Here’s how they did it, in their own words:
We looked at airports in the United States and its territories, sourcing the average wait time at passport control using the US Customs and Border Protection CBP Airport Wait Times.Â
We looked at the average wait time for passengers processed on flights arriving each hour based on how long it took to clear passport control. We calculated the average wait times for each hour that flights arrived over the last year (09/13/2023 – 09/14/2024).
We sourced the average wait time at the TSA for each airport using TSA wait times and calculated the average wait time for passengers arriving at each hour as of 09/18/2024.
We combined the average Passport Control and TSA wait time for each airport to calculate the average total waiting time at each airport.
All figures were rounded to two decimal places.
The 10 airports with the longest waits
| Number | Airport | State | Average TSA Wait Time | Average Passport Control Wait Time | Average Combined Wait Time |
| 1 | John F. Kennedy International Airport | New York | 15:05 | 24:43 | 39:48 |
| 2 | Orlando International Airport | Florida | 15:34 | 23:42 | 39:16 |
| 3 | O’Hare International Airport | Illinois | 11:53 | 25:59 | 37:52 |
| 4 | Los Angeles International Airport | California | 11:32 | 23:53 | 35:25 |
| 5 | Austin–Bergstrom International Airport | Texas | 15:53 | 19:29 | 35:22 |
| 6 | Miami International Airport | Florida | 14:40 | 20:19 | 34:59 |
| 7 | San Francisco International Airport | California | 12:43 | 21:01 | 33:44 |
| 8 | George Bush Intercontinental Airport | Texas | 13:53 | 19:16 | 33:09 |
| 9 | Ontario International Airport | California | 13:32 | 19:35 | 33:07 |
| 10 | Salt Lake City International Airport | Utah | 15:17 | 17:23 | 32:40 |
None of these statistics should surprise anyone—most of these are large airports that have to service a lot of people. With continued record-setting numbers of people traveling every day, many of them not really understanding the whole “airport” process (which slows down efficiency), and a good chance of not having enough TSA officers to handle them all, on top of new CAT machines that run slower than the previous scanners, it’s not surprising.
But there’s hope!
This isn’t the first year Bounce has determined the longest waits at airports. And if you compare 2024 to 2023 and 2022, there’s actually some good news for some of the top 10.
- JFK: 44:54 in 2022; 48:24 in 2023; 39.48 in 2024
- ORD: 39.26 in 2022; 36.54 in 2023; 37:52 in 2024
- MIA: 46:57 in 2022; 45.54 in 2023; 34.59 in 2024
- SFO: 45:56 in 2022; 47:18 in 2023; 33:44 in 2024
Other statistics
Bounce’s research also has the airports with the shortest waits. You can see those and lots of other statistical goodness on this page of their website.
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