How Bad Are Flight Delays and Cancellations at SFO Now?

San Francisco International Airport, long known for fog and runway work, is again emerging as one of the most delay-prone major U.S. hubs, according to the latest federal performance data and independent analyses of 2025 and early 2026 flights.

New numbers show on-time performance sliding

Recent figures compiled from U.S. Department of Transportation and Bureau of Transportation Statistics data indicate that SFO’s overall on-time arrival rate has slipped to the mid-70 percent range over the past year, with some trackers placing it around 77 percent through May 2026. That means roughly one in four flights is now arriving more than 15 minutes behind schedule, a noticeable deterioration compared with pre-pandemic norms.

Airport-level summaries covering May 2024 through April 2025 show that San Francisco recorded an airport delay percentage in the high teens in several busy months, placing it among the slower large hubs for punctuality. Public dashboards that aggregate the same underlying data point to a widening gap between SFO and more delay-resilient airports in the Mountain West and parts of the Midwest, even as the national system overall has seen modest improvements in cancellation rates.

Compared with national trends, SFO stands out more for chronic lateness than for outright cancellations. Federal transportation releases for 2024 described a nationwide cancellation rate near 1.4 percent for the first half of that year, one of the lowest in more than a decade. While airport-specific cancellation shares at SFO typically run a bit higher than the U.S. average, they remain low in absolute terms, usually in the low-single-digit percentages, suggesting that passengers are more likely to arrive late than not at all.

Consumer-oriented rankings and disruption reports produced in 2024 and 2025, drawing on the same government datasets, consistently placed SFO toward the bottom of large U.S. airports for on-time performance, though not at the very top of lists for mass cancellations. These assessments conclude that travelers using SFO face elevated odds of delay compared with most other major hubs, even if the chance of a complete cancellation remains relatively contained.

Construction, safety rules and a spike in delay minutes

The sharpest deterioration has happened in 2026. A recent analysis by the San Francisco Chronicle, based on federal flight records between April 1 and June 10, 2026, found that SFO’s average delay time roughly quadrupled year over year. According to that review, the typical flight in that period left or arrived about 20 minutes late, compared with around 5 minutes in the same stretch of 2025.

Two overlapping changes appear to be driving the spike in delay minutes: major runway construction that has temporarily reduced capacity and a federal safety order that restricts simultaneous approaches to SFO’s closely spaced parallel runways in certain conditions. Publicly available coverage of the order indicates that it effectively lowers the rate at which aircraft can land during busy periods, forcing airlines and air traffic managers to meter arrivals more conservatively, especially during peak banks.

Local reporting notes that SFO has experienced similar delay spikes in prior years that coincided with runway projects, including in 2017, 2019 and 2023. Historical BTS time series show that disruptions tend to cluster in those construction windows, when temporary runway closures compress traffic onto fewer arrival and departure paths. The current round of work appears to be following that pattern, but with added pressure from the new safety-related approach restrictions.

The result for travelers is a higher likelihood not only of being late, but of being significantly late. Distribution charts based on DOT datasets show a growing share of SFO flights arriving 30 minutes or more behind schedule on the worst days. That pattern, analysts say, is consistent with a hub operating near or above its effective capacity whenever weather or volume squeezes the available runway network.

Fog, wind and SFO’s geography keep weather central

Weather remains a defining feature of San Francisco’s delay profile. FAA summaries of delay causes show that, nationwide, weather accounts for a majority of system-impacting delays longer than 15 minutes. SFO’s location on the edge of the Pacific, framed by hills and the Golden Gate gap, makes it particularly vulnerable to low marine clouds, wind shear and crosswinds that are less common at inland airports.

Bay Area coverage in late 2024 described episodes where dense fog prompted the FAA to slow arrival rates at SFO, triggering long lines of inbound flights and multi-hour delays. While such extreme events do not occur every day, they underscore how quickly the airport’s tightly scheduled operations can unravel when visibility drops or winds shift across its already constrained runway layout.

Analysts who model airport performance using federal datasets frequently identify a strong interaction between weather and local capacity limits. At SFO, this plays out in reduced acceptance rates even for relatively modest ceiling and visibility reductions. That means that a morning of routine coastal fog can leave residual delays that propagate into the afternoon and evening, especially during the summer high season when schedules are densest.

Because SFO is a major transpacific and transcontinental hub, late-arriving aircraft can cascade into subsequent departures across the airline network. Studies of delay propagation in the U.S. system, using hierarchical models on BTS data, show that large connecting hubs with weather-sensitive runways can serve as amplifiers of disruption, and SFO has increasingly fit that profile over the past decade.

How cancellations compare with other major hubs

While the headlines often focus on missed connections and long waits on the tarmac, SFO’s cancellation picture is more mixed. Nationally, the Department of Transportation has reported that airline cancellations have trended lower in recent years compared with the worst of the pandemic recovery period, thanks in part to schedule adjustments and closer coordination between carriers and air traffic managers.

Within that context, airport-level statistics place SFO roughly in the middle of the pack for cancellation share among large U.S. hubs. Airports along the East Coast and in parts of the South have seen higher cancellation spikes during severe convective weather seasons, while SFO’s primary challenges lie in chronic, smaller-scale delays tied to marine weather and infrastructure work.

Independent disruption scorecards that aggregate summer performance often highlight Florida and Northeastern airports for elevated cancellation rates during storms, whereas SFO tends to appear more prominently for delay minutes and on-time percentages. For travelers, the practical takeaway is that flights into and out of San Francisco are more likely to operate, but with an increased risk of meaningful schedule slippage.

That distinction matters for trip planning. A 30- to 60-minute delay may be tolerable for point-to-point travelers, but it can be critical for those relying on short connection windows, especially on long-haul international itineraries. As SFO’s average delay minutes rise, the margin for error on such connections narrows, even if the underlying cancellation probability remains modest.

What this means for travelers using SFO

The current data depict an airport under strain rather than in meltdown. SFO continues to handle more than a thousand aircraft operations per day and remains one of the busiest hubs in California by passenger volume. Most flights still depart and arrive within a window that federal metrics consider on time, and the share of outright cancellations, while variable by month and airline, is nowhere near the levels seen during systemwide crises in recent years.

At the same time, publicly accessible performance trackers and recent local analyses leave little doubt that conditions have worsened in 2026 compared with the year before. Average delay minutes have surged, peak-period congestion has intensified, and the combination of runway construction, new approach rules and persistent coastal weather has created a challenging operating environment.

For travelers weighing how “bad” SFO is right now, the best data suggest a nuanced answer. The airport is currently among the poorest performers for schedule reliability among large U.S. hubs, particularly during busy morning and evening banks, but it is not an outlier for cancellations in the way some storm-prone or operationally brittle airports have been. That makes careful itinerary planning, buffer time for connections and attention to carrier-specific track records especially important for anyone passing through San Francisco in the coming months.