About
How long is the line at the airport?
This site answers that question for 30 U.S. airports. It shows the security checkpoint wait at every terminal right now, projects the next twelve hours, and shows when each checkpoint is usually busiest, so you can decide when to leave for the airport.
Who runs it
It is an independent project by Henry Williams. It is not affiliated with the TSA, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, any airport operator or any airline.
Where the numbers come from
Most large airports publish an estimated wait for each security checkpoint, and many publish TSA PreCheck separately. This site reads those feeds every minute and keeps every reading. That history is what the charts, the busy-hours heatmap and the written guide on each airport and terminal page are built from.
For international arrivals, 23 of the airports also have an immigration view built from U.S. Customs and Border Protection's published airport wait-time records, which give the average and longest wait at each passport control hall, hour by hour.
The forecasts come from a model retrained every night on the same archive. A new version only replaces the running one if it predicts recent days it has not seen more accurately.
How accurate is it?
The posted wait is each airport's own estimate, and airports produce it in different ways. It is a good guide but not a guarantee. Lines can build quickly when several departures bunch up or a lane closes. Leave yourself a margin, and on a tight connection trust your airline's advice over any website.
Open data
The full archive is published free under CC BY 4.0 on Hugging Face and refreshed nightly. The data page describes what is in it.
Keeping it free
There are no accounts or paywalls. Running costs are covered by a few ads and by readers who buy me a coffee. The privacy notice explains what that involves.
Corrections and requests
Spotted a wrong terminal, a dead feed, or an airport you want added? Open a thread on the dataset's discussion board.