San Francisco · CA

SFO — San Francisco International Airport

A ring of four terminals with BART running from the middle of it

SFO is laid out as a ring: three domestic terminals and an international terminal arranged around a central parking area, joined landside by an automated AirTrain and in several places connected behind security as well. It is a manageable airport by the standards of a major hub.

Its distinguishing feature is transport. BART runs directly from a station at the International Terminal into downtown San Francisco, which makes arriving here notably less stressful than at most large American airports.

Terminals and how they connect

Terminals 1, 2 and 3

Domestic operations around the ring, with airside connections between several neighbouring terminals so that many transfers avoid re-screening. Which pairs are joined has changed with renovations, so confirm rather than assume.

International Terminal

Two concourses, A and G, at the western side of the ring. Concourse A connects airside towards Terminal 1 and concourse G towards Terminal 3, which makes some international-to-domestic connections much easier than they look on a map.

AirTrain

A free automated people mover circling the airport on two lines, linking all terminals with the parking garages, the rental car centre and the BART station. Landside, so moving between unconnected terminals on it means clearing security again.

Getting into San Francisco

Times below are realistic ranges rather than best cases. Rail journeys keep to a timetable; road journeys do not, and treating the two the same is how people miss flights.

BART

30 minutes to downtown

Trains run from the station at the International Terminal to Embarcadero, Montgomery, Powell and Civic Center. From the domestic terminals, take the AirTrain to the station first. Reliable, reasonably priced and unaffected by traffic on the 101.

Caltrain via Millbrae

45 to 70 minutes

BART one stop to Millbrae, then Caltrain south towards Palo Alto, Mountain View and San Jose. The right answer if you are heading down the Peninsula rather than into the city.

Taxi or ride-hailing

25 minutes to over an hour

Around fourteen miles up the 101, which is dependable outside the peaks and slow within them. Ride-hailing pickups are from designated areas on the departures level at each terminal rather than arrivals.

SamTrans bus

60 to 90 minutes

Local buses towards the city and along the Peninsula. Cheapest option, slow, and mainly of interest for nearby destinations rather than downtown.

Connecting through SFO

Where your two terminals share an airside connection, SFO is easy and an hour can be enough for a domestic transfer. Where they do not, you take the AirTrain and re-screen, and ninety minutes becomes the sensible floor. The international-to-domestic case is better here than at many US airports because concourses A and G link towards Terminals 1 and 3 respectively, but you still clear immigration and customs and re-check bags first, so two hours remains the realistic target.

Worth knowing before you fly

Ride-hailing picks up on the departures level

Not arrivals. Follow the signage up rather than waiting at the kerb where you walked out, which is a common few minutes wasted with luggage.

Fog and low cloud cause genuine delays

SFO's parallel runways are close together, and when the marine layer sits low the airport has to space arrivals further apart, cutting capacity substantially. Summer mornings are the classic case. It is a real reason not to book the tightest possible connection here.

Oakland and San Jose are worth comparing

Both serve the Bay Area, both are on the BART or Caltrain network, and depending on where you are going one can be materially more convenient. On a domestic itinerary this is worth pricing rather than defaulting to SFO.

Terminal assignments, transit timetables and fares all change. Confirm the details that matter to your trip with the airport or transport operator before you travel.

Will you make your connection at SFO?

Most of what a tight connection costs was never about SFO. Border formalities, a bag that is not through-checked and a door that closes before departure are the same at every airport, and they are usually what strands people — so the sum below is real arithmetic even though we hold no transfer times for SFO.

Connection typeNo border formality either side.Scheduled layover (minutes)Inbound flight running late (minutes)Terminal change at SFO (minutes) — your figureWe do not publish a terminal-transfer time for SFO. We have not sourced one from the airport and we will not estimate it, because a made-up number here is exactly what makes somebody miss a flight. Take it from San Francisco International's own site and everything else in the sum below is statutory, structural or your own itinerary.

Both flights use the same terminalTwo separate tickets, not one booking

45 minutes to spare

You have 60 minutes after the delay. This connection needs about 15. Enough room for a gate change.

This is the floor, before you walk anywhere. Every minute below holds at any airport, because none of it is a property of SFO — it is border formalities, baggage and a closing gate. Add your terminal change above to finish the sum.

How the required time is made up
15m	Gate closes before departure	typical published gate cutoff
15m	needed in total

Arithmetic, not a prediction — we hold no data that would let us put a probability on your flight, so we do not pretend to. The gate cutoff is a typical published figure; confirm your airline's. Your airline's app knows your actual gates, which we do not.

For four hubs we have read the operator's own transfer figures and datestamped them, which lets the arithmetic run without asking you anything: DFW, IAH, MIA and LAX.

If your flight through SFO is cancelled or badly delayed

SFO in the DOT's own numbers

Departures from San Francisco as the carriers filed them with the US Department of Transportation for May 2026. This is the figure that decides whether a delay here is anybody's fault but the weather's.

SFO ranks 11th of 41 for departures among the airports we cover, its 28.7% late rate is 6.3 points worse than the 22.4% median, the 4th-worst here, and 85.8% of the filed delay minutes were coded as carrier delay or late-arriving aircraft rather than extreme weather or air traffic control — above the 74.6% median, which matters because a delay coded to the carrier is the kind a contract can be held to.

Departures filed: 10,596
Over 15 min late: 28.7%
Cancelled: 0.7%
Carrier delay + late-arriving aircraft: 85.8%

The last figure is the share of filed delay minutes coded as carrier delay or late-arriving aircraft rather than extreme weather or air traffic control. It sums two BTS fields and is not a BTS field itself, and it establishes no fault: the late-arriving code records that the inbound aircraft was late, not what delayed it. The reasoning, and the objection to it, are set out in the airline accountability index. Summed across reporting carriers only, so a hub carrying a lot of non-reporting regional traffic reads better here than a traveller experiences it.

These are monthly aggregate filing codes. They cannot establish what caused your individual flight, whether it was within the carrier's control, or whether compensation is owed.

The departures from SFO most likely to run late

Every carrier and destination out of San Francisco with enough filed departures to measure, worst first. A route missing from this list flies too thinly for a percentage to mean anything, which is a reason to withhold it rather than to soften it.

Route	Airline	Flights	Late
SFO → LAX	United Airlines	302	26.5%
SFO → ORD	United Airlines	370	22.4%
SFO → IAH	United Airlines	307	21.2%
SFO → DEN	United Airlines	310	18.7%
SFO → EWR	United Airlines	342	18.1%

What the airlines flying here have committed to in writing

Under 14 CFR § 253.4 a carrier's Conditions of Carriage are incorporated into your ticket, which makes them enforceable terms rather than a customer-service policy. Below is what each carrier with filed departures from SFO commits to when the disruption is theirs. These 4 have contract text we have read ourselves.

American Airlines

Ask for the seat

American Airlines' contract commits to their own next available flight and says nothing about who sold the ticket.

Rebooking your delayed / canceled flight. Read from the contract on 2026-07-29. Source

Delta Air Lines

Ask for the seat

Delta Air Lines' contract commits to their own next available flight and says nothing about who sold the ticket.

Rule 19.A, Delta's Liability in the Event of Schedule Changes, Delays and Flight Cancellations. Read from the contract on 2026-07-29. Source

United Airlines

We hold no text

United Airlines' contract page refuses automated requests, so we cannot verify what it currently says and will not paraphrase it.

Not yet transcribed. Source

Southwest Airlines

Ask for the refund

Southwest Airlines' contract only says it may rebook you, so there is no seat to demand — but it names a refund as your remedy.

Section 9.b(1)(i). Read from the contract on 2026-07-29. Source

AS, B6, F9 also file departures from SFO. We have not transcribed their Conditions of Carriage, so this page says nothing about what they promise rather than guessing.

Get the exact clause and a script to read them

The federal floor, underneath any contract

Statutory minimums, so no airline's contract and no agency's terms can go below them. They follow your itinerary rather than SFO, so each one is set out in full on its own tool:

How SFO compares with airports of its size

A late-departure rate means little on its own, so these are the airports sitting immediately either side of SFO on the same table. Each figure is the share of departures leaving more than fifteen minutes behind schedule, from the same Department of Transportation filing.

Which airlines run late out of SFO

Departures from SFO as filed with the US Department of Transportation, worst first. Only carriers with at least 300 departures in the month appear, so a carrier missing from this table flies here too thinly to measure fairly rather than perfectly.

Airline	Departures	Over 15 min late	Carrier delay + late-arriving aircraft
Southwest Airlines	858	55.1%	90.3%
Frontier Airlines	361	41%	91.2%
Delta Air Lines	1,235	31.2%	88.6%
Alaska Airlines	1,010	31%	79.6%
American Airlines	1,087	27%	87%
United Airlines	5,657	23.7%	83.7%
JetBlue Airways	388	21.6%	72.3%

The last column is the share of filed delay minutes coded as carrier delay or late-arriving aircraft, as opposed to extreme weather or air traffic control. It records how the minutes were filed, not who was at fault. Each airline guide carries that carrier's national record; the accountability index sets out why late inbound aircraft is grouped with carrier delay, and publishes the whole table as a downloadable file.

Figures cover May 2026, a single reporting month, from the US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics On-Time Performance database. Retrieved 2026-07-28. Reporting under 14 CFR part 234 covers domestic US scheduled service only, so no international route appears — including anything to or from Mexico.

Airlines based at SFO

Carriers based here, which usually means more non-stops and more daily frequencies to fall back on if something goes wrong.

Alaska AirlinesAS United AirlinesUA

Routes through SFO

Flying from San Francisco

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FAQ

SFO — common questions

Terminals, transfers and getting into the city.

How do you get from SFO to downtown San Francisco?

BART is the best option for most people: about 30 minutes to Embarcadero, Montgomery, Powell or Civic Center, at a fraction of a taxi fare and unaffected by traffic. The station is at the International Terminal, so from a domestic terminal you first take the free AirTrain round to it. By road it is around fourteen miles up the 101, taking 25 minutes when clear and over an hour in the peaks.

Are SFO terminals connected behind security?

Several are. There are airside connections between some neighbouring domestic terminals, and the International Terminal's concourse A links towards Terminal 1 while concourse G links towards Terminal 3. Which specific pairs are joined has changed with successive renovations, so it is worth confirming for your particular connection rather than assuming. Where no airside link exists, the free AirTrain gets you round the ring landside and you clear security again.

Why is SFO prone to delays?

Its two main arrival runways are unusually close together, so in low visibility — which the Bay Area's summer marine layer produces regularly — aircraft have to be spaced much further apart on approach. That cuts the arrival rate sharply and creates delays that have nothing to do with your own flight's weather. It is a good reason to avoid the tightest connection on an SFO itinerary, particularly on a summer morning.

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