What time should I leave for the airport?

Pick your airport

Each airport page starts the same plan with that airport's typical security wait, the walk to the gate and the parking, and asks whether you're checking a bag and flying domestic or international.

How the airport math works

The time on your ticket is when the plane leaves, and nobody is let on at that moment. Boarding for a domestic flight usually starts about thirty minutes before departure and the door closes ten to fifteen minutes before it, so the deadline you are really planning for is the start of boarding. Everything else is a subtraction from there: the walk to the gate, the security line, the bag drop, the shuttle from the parking lot, the drive, and the part at home before any of it.

The steps people forget are the ones between the car and the checkpoint. Long-term parking means a shuttle with its own wait. A rental return means a bus. A bag to check means a counter queue and a cutoff, typically 45 minutes before a domestic departure and an hour before an international one, and that cutoff is a second deadline inside the first. Put each of them in as its own row and the leave time the calculator gives you will be earlier than the one you had in your head.

How early should I get to the airport?

The usual advice is two hours before a domestic flight and three before an international one. It is a reasonable average and a poor answer for any particular morning, because a 6 AM flight from a small airport with no bag and TSA PreCheck is a different trip from a 5 PM flight out of a hub with two checked bags.

The calculator above replaces the rule with your own numbers. The per-airport pages go one step further and start you with that airport's typical security wait, walk and parking.

What time should I leave for an international flight?

Set the boarding row to 45 minutes instead of 30, because wide-body flights start boarding earlier. The bag check cutoff moves too, usually to an hour before departure, so if you are checking a bag the bag drop row has to finish by then.

Add a few minutes at the bag drop for the passport and visa check, and if your airport puts international departures in a separate terminal, check whether the drive and the parking change with it. Passport control on the way out is not a step in the United States; it is on the way back in.

What time should I leave if I'm not checking a bag?

Drop the bag drop row to zero, or take it out, and go straight from the parking shuttle to security with a mobile boarding pass. If you have TSA PreCheck or CLEAR, cut the security row to the wait you actually see in that lane. Carrying on is the single biggest change you can make to this plan, and it is the reason two people on the same flight can leave the same neighborhood forty minutes apart and both make it.

What time should I leave for an early morning flight?

For a flight before 7 AM the question turns into what time to set the alarm, and the wake-up time calculator runs the same chain back to it. Two things are different that early: checkpoints open at a fixed time, often around 4 AM, so arriving before that buys nothing, and parking shuttles run less often, so the shuttle wait row deserves a few more minutes. Traffic is lighter, so the drive row can come down.

What time should I leave to pick someone up at the airport?

Make the arrival time the moment they will actually be at the curb, which is the landing time plus the taxi to the gate, the walk out and, if they checked a bag, the carousel. Twenty minutes after landing with a carry-on and forty with a bag is a fair starting point. Set that as the deadline above, put the drive in, and aim for the cell phone lot rather than the curb so a late bag does not cost you a loop.

The drive row is the time to leave the house, and the top row is when the morning has to start. The boarding row is the deadline the airline sets, so leave it alone unless your airline says otherwise, and change the rest to match your airport, your bag and your parking. Every start time above it moves.

How early should I get to the airport for a domestic flight?

Early enough to be at the gate when boarding starts, usually thirty minutes before departure, with the security line and the walk already behind you. For most people with a checked bag that is somewhere between ninety minutes and two hours before the flight; with a carry-on and PreCheck it can be an hour. The calculator above gives you the number for your own airport and bag, and the per-airport pages start you with typical waits.

Does this include security wait times?

Only the number you type. The 25 minutes in the plan is a placeholder to replace, because waits change by airport, terminal, hour and day. The per-airport pages start you with a typical wait for that airport and let you adjust it, and the airport's own site or app usually shows the live one on the morning.

Is there an app that tells you what time to leave for the airport?

Ready Time does. You enter the departure time and the steps, and it works out when to leave the house and when to start each step, with an alert at every one. The drive step can pull the travel time from Apple Maps, so the one number that changes most is looked up, and if the flight is delayed you change the deadline once and every alert moves.

Can I save this for my next flight?

Not from this calculator. It's a one-off calculation that disappears when you close the tab. Ready Time keeps the plan, so the next trip is the same steps with a new flight time, and the alerts fire at each step's start time on the morning.

Flying from a specific airport? The per-airport pages start you with that airport's numbers. For any other deadline, use the leave time calculator, and for a flight before dawn the wake-up time calculator runs the chain back to the alarm.