Be at ORD two hours before a domestic departure and three before an international one. That still doesn’t tell you what time to leave the house, so put in your departure time and adjust the drive, parking and bags.
Every row is editable. Tap the departure or any duration and the plan recomputes backward. The first travel row is your leave-by time.
Until you know your gate, budget for the longer walk. Change it once your boarding pass shows which gates you’re on.
The 40-minute drive is a typical run from Chicago without traffic. In the app, set O'Hare International as the destination and Apple Maps fills in the time from where you’re leaving.
Still check traffic for the hour you’ll go (real drive to ORD). Change the row and every step before it moves.
A maps app covers the drive to ORD. Bag drop, security, and the walk to your gate usually take longer, and they are the steps people misjudge.
Here is the same plan drawn to scale. The first block is travel; the next two are the airport. A checked bag grows one, a far gate grows the other.
Front door to boarding: 2hr 53min
Two hours domestic, three international
Ahead of your departure time
At an airport this size, treat those as a floor. They assume a normal day, not a holiday crush or a long security line.
O'Hare is a major connecting hub, so checkpoint crowds follow the banks of departures: early morning and late afternoon are the crush. Terminals 1, 2, and 3 share one security envelope and Terminal 5 does not, so which terminal you fly from changes how the rest of your trip goes.
Terminals 1, 2, and 3 are walkable to each other; Terminal 5 (most international flights) is a separate building reached by the airport train, so confirm which one your airline uses before you plan the walk. Crossing between Terminal 5 and the rest airside is only possible on a shuttle that runs limited hours; outside them it means leaving and screening again.
The plan allows 25 minutes for a standard lane on a busy but normal morning. With TSA PreCheck, that drops to 15 minutes. A checked bag lengthens the one before it.
The CTA Blue Line runs from the Loop to O'Hare around the clock and skips the Kennedy Expressway, which is the main reason drives to ORD are hard to predict. If you drive, add time for remote parking and the shuttle before you reach the terminal. Terminal 2 is slated to be replaced by the new Global Terminal, so airline-to-terminal assignments here are mid-change.
For live waits, parking, and terminal maps, check the official ORD site.
Terminals, checkpoints and transit change; the official ORD site is the live source.
Save this ORD plan in Ready Time and it tells you when to start packing and when to leave for the airport.
Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time helps you know when to start.
Be at ORD two hours before a domestic departure and three before an international one. At an airport this size, treat those as a floor. They assume a normal day, not a holiday crush or a long security line. The plan above works back from there through security, bag drop, parking and the drive to a leave-by time.
The plan allows 25 minutes for a busy-but-normal standard lane. With TSA PreCheck it drops to 15 minutes, and you can edit either one to what you actually see. A checked bag lengthens the step before it. Checkpoint detail for ORD is in the section above.
Earlier than for a domestic one. International boarding starts 45 minutes before departure instead of 30, which pulls every step earlier. Use the airline desk for bags: documents get checked and counters often close an hour out. That also covers lap infants, unaccompanied minors, and oversized bags. If your boarding pass names a boarding time, match that.
Work backward from departure: boarding, time at the gate, the walk, security, bag drop, parking, then the drive (40 minutes in the default plan). Replace the drive with your own route. The leave-by moment is the first travel row, "Drive to ORD" by default.
Taking the train instead? The Amtrak station pages use the same kind of plan without security. The leave time calculator works for any appointment, and the wake-up time calculator runs it back to the alarm.
Two hours early still leaves the morning open: when to pack, when to leave. The plan keeps subtracting past the drive until it lands on a start time. Ready Time saves that chain and alerts you at each step, and can pick the flight up from your calendar.
Get a nudge at the right moment, while there's still time to act.
Each step gets its own alert, so you know what's next and how long you have.
“It has helped me tremendously to manage my timeblindness, and I tell people about it all the time.”Ready Time user, 2021
Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time helps you know when to start.
Plans for the rest of the trip