About LiveWaits

LiveWaits shows how long the line is, at every US airport checkpoint, land border crossing and passenger ferry, and turns that wait into the answer you actually want: a time to leave.

What LiveWaits is

LiveWaits shows how long the line is, and turns it into a time to leave. Three things a traveler waits on sit under one roof: security at 355 US airports, delays at 75 land border crossings straight from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and passenger ferry sailings. A calculator ties them together, working backward from your flight or sailing to the moment you should walk out the door. We are not TSA, CBP, the FAA, an airline or an airport, and we are not affiliated with any of them.

Measured, or modeled, and we always say which

Most airport waits here are modeled from three months of published flight schedules, because there is no national feed of real-time TSA waits. A few airports publish their own checkpoint sensors, and there the number is measured and labeled as such. Border waits come straight from CBP. We never dress an estimate up as a measurement, and the full method, including the assumptions we make and where they can be wrong, is written out at how the numbers are made.

Where the data comes from

Flight schedules from the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics; border waits from U.S. Customs and Border Protection; airport locations and time zones from OurAirports and OpenFlights; ferry schedules from transit agencies and operator timetables. Everything on the site is built from public data, and the source is named on the page that uses it.

Why we built it

The wait is not the answer a traveler actually wants. The answer is what time to leave. Most sites stop at a number; LiveWaits carries it one step further, to a departure time worked back through the drive, the checkpoint at your own airport, and the walk to the gate. That is the whole point of the site.

Not affiliated with TSA, CBP, FAA or any airport. Always check your airline's own cutoff times.