How the busyness levels are built

Throughput is not a wait time

TSA publishes, every week, how many people passed through each checkpoint at each airport in each hour (TSA FOIA reading room, "TSA Throughput" files). That is a count of people screened, crew included. It is not how long anyone waited.

Turning a passenger count into minutes needs the number of lanes open, which TSA does not publish. So this site shows how busy a checkpoint typically is, not a minute figure. When we show minutes in future, they will come from a source and be labelled with it. For an airport's own wait figure, use the button on its page where there is one.

The 8-week median

• For each airport, day of the week and hour, we take the median number of people screened across the last 8 ordinary weeks: Sep 13, 2026; Sep 20, 2026; Sep 27, 2026; Oct 4, 2026; Oct 11, 2026; Oct 18, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 (weeks starting). The current window runs Sep 13, 2026 to Nov 7, 2026.
• Hours with no row in TSA's file are hours with no passengers and count as zero.
• Weeks that contain a holiday that moves travel (New Year, Memorial Day, July 4, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas) are left out and reported separately, as in the Christmas guide.
• Very small rows that are not public checkpoints (for example employee or private-terminal screening, under 0.1% of an airport's passengers) are left out.
• Hours are the airport's local time. TSA's file does not say so; we checked it by comparing airports in different time zones, whose overnight lull falls at the same local hour.

The levels

Each hour is compared with the airport's own busiest hour of the week. Busy is above 70% of that peak, Moderate is 40–70%, Quiet is below 40%. The levels are relative to each airport, so "Busy" at Pittsburgh is far fewer people than "Busy" at Atlanta. The cut-offs are our choice and may be tuned.

Checkpoints

Checkpoint tables list the checkpoints in TSA's most recent week, with TSA's own labels unless we have matched them to the airport's public name. "Screening seen" is the span of hours in which a checkpoint screened at least five people on a typical day: a sign of when it is open, not posted opening hours. Posted hours, terminals and PreCheck or CLEAR lanes are entered by hand from each airport's website, each with the page it came from and the month we checked it. A checkpoint that is new in the window shows how many weeks of data it has.

Arrival times

The arrival calculator uses our own rule of thumb, shown in full under every result. It is not an airline or TSA rule.

Updates

TSA posts a new file each week. We download it, parse it and rebuild the site, so the data should never be more than about two weeks old. The stamp on every figure says which weeks it covers.

Not affiliated

TSA Wait Checker is not affiliated with TSA, the Department of Homeland Security or any airport. Airport and checkpoint names are used to describe the data. Coordinates for nearest airports come from OurAirports (public domain).