Plan on about 20 to 35 minutes from touchdown to the curb at a big US airport with a carry-on, and about 30 to 45 with a checked bag. Those are typical times, worked out on Nov 7 2026. The slow end runs further: at O’Hare with a checked bag it reaches about 68 minutes.
Airports’ own rules of thumb are short of that. Los Angeles says about 15 minutes with no checked bags, 30 with them and 45 from abroad. Orlando tells people meeting a flight to allow at least 20 minutes, or 40 with bags. My typical figure for LAX is 27 with a carry-on. Fifteen is someone near the front of the plane with a near gate, and most of the plane isn’t.
Six stages, and they aren’t equal
| Stage | Size | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Taxi to the gate | 7 min national median, 16 at the 90th percentile. Midway 4, O’Hare 18 | Measured |
| Door | About 1 min | Judgement |
| Getting down the aisle | About 3 min from the front, 10 from row 30 | Modelled |
| Walk and train | 2 to 4 min at Burbank, 3 to 30 at Dulles, 2 to 30 at LAX | Computed from maps |
| Your checked bag | About 20 min after parking, 23 at a large hub | Judgement |
| Passport control | US passport median 5 at Atlanta, 18 at Orlando | Measured hourly averages |
Taxi-in gets the attention because it’s the stage you can watch. It’s rarely the one that decides your evening. Your row and your bag move the answer more, and you know both before you land.
Typical times, by airport
Times are minutes from touchdown to the arrivals curb on a domestic flight, for an unknown row and gate on an A320-sized plane about 82% full. The range is meant to hold about 85 trips in 100 on a normal day. That’s a design target, and nobody has timed it.
| Airport | Carry-on | Checked bag |
|---|---|---|
| Burbank | 13 (6 to 22) | 26 (15 to 37) |
| Midway | 19 (11 to 28) | 28 (19 to 38) |
| Boston | 21 (13 to 32) | 31 (21 to 43) |
| LAX | 27 (13 to 43) | 37 (25 to 52) |
| JFK | 28 (16 to 42) | 37 (25 to 51) |
| Atlanta | 32 (20 to 46) | 38 (27 to 50) |
| Denver | 33 (20 to 48) | 39 (28 to 53) |
| O’Hare | 34 (19 to 56) | 45 (29 to 68) |
From abroad, add passport control and a widebody’s slower bags. Landing at JFK with a checked bag comes to about 46 minutes on a US passport (32 to 62) and about 57 on another passport (33 to 82). Those use the airport’s domestic taxi figures, because nobody publishes international ones.
One plane, two concourses
Take a Delta 737-800 landing in Atlanta at 2 PM in June, and you in row 25. Taxi is about 7 minutes and getting off is about 9, door included, so you’re on the jet bridge about 16 minutes after touchdown wherever you park.
At a Concourse T gate, you’re near the terminal. The curb comes at about 24 minutes (18 to 31). At Concourse E, you ride the train and walk, and the curb comes at about 38 (29 to 48).
Now check a bag. At T that takes you to about 34 minutes, 10 more. At E it takes you to about 40, only 2 more. You arrive at the belt after your bag does, so the walk has already spent the wait. This is why a flat “add 15 for bags” is wrong in both directions, and why an airport’s single number can’t be right for every gate.
How the numbers were made
Taxi-in comes from a year of public flight records, Sep 2025 to Aug 2026, as medians and 90th percentiles by airport, carrier and local hour. Deplaning is a model fit to 30 timed flights. Walks are computed along mapped paths at 1.34 m/s, with 1.0 m/s for the slow end. Passport figures are hourly averages from public wait-time reports, 12 months to Nov 4 2026.
The stages combine by adding variances, because adding every 90th percentile assumes everything goes badly at once. Bags are a race: you leave claim at the later of reaching the belt and your bag reaching it.
Nobody has timed this
Nothing here is a timed gate-to-curb trip. Published airport walking times run about 1.4 times my median walker, so I raised the slow end to match. That means the check isn’t fully independent.
Bag times are judgement, because the US has no public measurement. Stages are treated as independent, and bad days stretch several together, so real tails run longer. A flight landing 30 minutes early may also wait for its gate, which these figures don’t include. Airport tables describe a normal day, and closures aren’t in them.
If your landing time itself looks wrong, the tracker and the airline may be timing different events. The full method, with other airports, is at Landing to the curb, by airport.
Skycap runs this chain for your flight, with your row, your bag and your gate once it’s known. The range tightens as each stage finishes, so you can see when you should be at the curb. How at the curb works