SFO Customs & Immigration Wait Times

What these numbers mean

Each row is CBP's most recent published hour for that arrivals facility at San Francisco International Airport. The average is what a typical passenger in that hour spent between reaching the primary-inspection queue and clearing passport control; the max is the longest anyone waited. US-passport and visitor lanes are staffed and reported separately, which is why the columns diverge. In the data above, the longest published wait at SFO was 21 minutes (Terminal A), with 8 booths open in that hour.

If you clear customs at SFO more than once or twice a year, Global Entry is the single biggest lever: members use kiosks or e-gates and bypass the standard queue entirely, so the max-wait column above largely stops applying to them. Mobile Passport Control — CBP's free app, no interview required — gets US citizens and eligible travelers a shorter dedicated lane and is the best zero-cost fallback when the visitor or standard lines run long.

Arrival peaks, not time of day alone, drive these waits: transatlantic banks tend to land in the early-to-mid afternoon and transpacific and Latin America banks in the morning and evening, so several wide-bodies can feed one arrivals hall inside an hour. Booth staffing matters just as much — a modest arrival bank with few booths open can out-wait a heavy bank that is fully staffed, which is why the booths-open column is worth reading alongside the waits.