At Orlando's Terminal C, 6 in 10 arrivals wait over 30 minutes at passport control

At Orlando’s Terminal C, 61.6% of arriving passengers waited more than 30 minutes at passport control over the past year. At Atlanta it was 3.1%.

Those are shares of people, from a year of hourly counts covering 108.7 million arrivals at 46 US airports. Most wait figures average the hours, which treats a quiet hour the same as a packed one. This counts the passengers.

The hall matters more than the airport

JFK has the widest spread at one airport. At Terminal 1, 36.3% waited over 30 minutes and 13.0% waited over an hour. At Terminal 5 those numbers were 10.3% and 1.2%. Terminal 4 sat at 20.2% and Terminal 8 at 26.3%.

Orlando’s gap is wider still. Terminal C ran 61.6% over 30 minutes, Airside 4 ran 14.9%.

LAX shows it too: 20.9% at Tom Bradley, 7.2% at the Satellite 7 hall. Newark’s Terminal B ran 19.6% against 9.0% at Terminal C.

You can’t choose a hall on the day. You can choose the airline that lands there when you book.

Atlanta stands out at the other end. It handled 6.3 million arrivals and only 3.1% waited over 30 minutes.

Late afternoon beats morning, even with twice the people

Across the 13 busiest gateways, the 10 AM hour had the highest share over 30 minutes, at 25.9%. The 6 PM hour had the lowest of any busy hour, at 14.3%, while handling about twice as many passengers.

Single airports show it more sharply. At Boston the share is 32% in the 9 AM hour and 4% at noon. At Newark it’s 7% in the 6 PM hour and 30% at 10 PM, so the pattern isn’t simple and each airport has its own day. The airport pages show it hall by hall.

The season moves it a lot

Across those 13 gateways, December was the worst month at 25.0% and October among the best at 16.4%. Orlando went from 35.1% in February to 55.0% in August. Seattle swung from 37.5% in August to 15.8% in October.

How this was made

Public wait-time reports give each arrival hall’s passengers for each hour, sorted into wait bands: 0 to 15 minutes, 16 to 30, and so on past two hours. I used 205,337 hall-hours from November 1 2025 to November 4 2026, and added up passengers, so a busy hour counts for more than a quiet one.

Every share on this page is measured, as reported. Airport figures for US and visiting passengers come from the same reports as a median of hourly averages. At JFK that’s 11 minutes for US passports and 23 for others. At Orlando it’s 18 and 29. At Atlanta it’s 5 and 8.

What this can’t tell you

The band counts mix US citizens, visitors and Global Entry together, so a hall with more visitors looks slower for that reason alone. Across the 26 gateways with over 500,000 arrivals, the visitor share and the over-30 share correlate at 0.68. Two-thirds of Orlando’s arrivals hold a foreign passport, against 29% at Atlanta. So part of each gap is who lands there, and this page can’t say how much.

It can’t tell you when the clock starts. The reports don’t say where in the hall a wait begins, so the walk from the gate and the wait for your bag are extra.

It only covers airports that report. Flights from airports with US preclearance skip this stage entirely, so they aren’t in these counts.

The past year includes its bad days and its good ones, so this describes the whole year. It isn’t a forecast for your flight. It also isn’t live, and it isn’t a promise.

Hour patterns mix airports. Morning arrivals land at a different set of airports from evening ones, so the 13-gateway line is partly a change in where people land.

Report a wrong number. A corrected number keeps its old value struck through for 30 days.