Route reliability record
MRY→SFO
Monterey to San Francisco
- Flights
- 780
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Distance
- 77 mi
- Carriers
- 1
This route draws a D+. Roughly one flight in two arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is about an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 780 MRY to SFO flights, with a median arrival 4 minutes late.
Best time to fly MRY to SFO: a 5am–8am departure, ideally on a Saturday. Flights in that window arrived on time 89.0% of the time and Saturday flights 68.0%, against 58.5% for the route overall.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.3%, so this route runs 19 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 188 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
58.5%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 776 completed flights
Avg delay
66 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.51%
National rate is 1.89%
Best carrier
SkyWest
58.5% on time across 780 flights
These figures cover 780 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 13.0% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.
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Carrier by carrier
Which airline is most reliable on MRY to SFO
Only one carrier clears this site's 365-flight floor here, so there is no comparison to draw. The table below is the full picture.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkyWest Airlines | 780 | 58.5% | 66 min | 0.51% | D+ |
Timetable by Aviasales, a Travelpayouts partner. Booking through it may earn this site a commission at no cost to you; it changes no figure here.
Departure window
The best time of day to leave
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 47 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier.
- 5am–8am118 flights89.0%
- 8am–11am185 flights43.2%
- 11am–2pm153 flights41.7%
- 2pm–5pm210 flights56.7%
- 5pm–8pm88 flights78.4%
- 8pm–5am26 flights—
Scale runs 35% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The weak window here is the middle of the day, not the evening: 11am–2pm runs 41.7% on time against 89.0% for 5am–8am. That shape usually means a departure bank rather than an accumulating delay, so the recovery later in the afternoon is real rather than noise. The 2pm–5pm window is the busiest, with 210 flights scheduled in it.
Explore
Filter MRY to SFO by airline, time, month and day
Pick a breakdown and a carrier. The dashed mark on each row is the same slice for every US flight.
On MRY to SFO, the best departure window is 5am–8am at 89.0% on time and the worst is 11am–2pm at 41.7%, a wide gap of 47.3 points. All US flights leaving 5am–8am ran 89.3%.
- 5–8am89.0%
- 8–11am43.2%
- 11am–2pm41.7%
- 2–5pm56.7%
- 5–8pm78.4%
- 8pm–5am—
best all US flightsScale 35% to 95%. Cells under 30 flights show a dash.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 55 points from best month to worst, which is wide. An annual average tells you very little about the week you are actually flying, so read the strip rather than the headline if your dates are fixed.
June is the worst month at 32.9% on time, 55 points below January, the best at 87.5%. Summer afternoon convection and peak-season schedules land on the same weeks every year, so this is a pattern you can book around rather than a run of bad luck. August was the busiest month here, with 104 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 68.0% on time and Monday the weakest at 52.5%, a spread of 16 points.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
National Airspace System accounts for 66% of the 21,000 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.
- 66%National Airspace System
- 18%Carrier
- 13%Late-arriving aircraft
- 4%Extreme weather
66% of delay minutes are charged to the National Airspace System: air traffic volume, runway configuration, ground stops. No carrier can price its way out of that, which is why airport choice moves the number here more than carrier choice does. That is 14,000 minutes out of 21,000, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 21,101 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations are rare at 0.51%, below the national 1.89% and low enough to earn the plus on the grade. Roughly one flight in 100 is called off; the risk here is arriving late, not not arriving.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here actually costs
13.0% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum for a connection here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.
At 77 miles this is a short hop, and stage length matters more than it looks. A flight this short spends under two hours in the air, which leaves almost nothing to claw back a late pushback with. Delay here is decided on the ground, in the turn, which is why the 5am–8am window matters as much as it does.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 72.6% on time across 780 flights, 14 points above this direction. Departure banks, aircraft rotations and the congestion at each end all differ, so scoring the two directions together would average away a real 14 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 780 flights over twelve months is enough to clear this site's floor but not enough to pin the rate down tightly, and a single bad week moves it by more than a point. Treat the grade as a rough reading.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in SFO after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 780 flights over twelve months is enough to clear this site's floor and not enough to be confident to better than a couple of points. The 58.5% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 776 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
MRY to SFO questions
How often is MRY to SFO delayed?
Roughly one flight in two arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 41.5% of the 780 flights in this analysis, against 22.7% nationally. Delayed flights are late by about an hour on average.
How reliable is MRY to SFO compared with the rest of the country?
58.5% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.3%, a difference of 19 points against it. That is worth a D+ on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on MRY to SFO?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 89.0% on time. The 11am–2pm window is the weakest at 41.7%, 47 points behind. Later departures inherit delays from earlier flights the same aircraft has already flown, which is why the curve slopes the way it does.
How bad are June delays on MRY to SFO?
June is the weakest month at 32.9% on time, compared with 87.5% in January. Across the year that is 55 points between the best and worst months. Moving flexible dates out of that month is one of the few things that reliably helps.
Related
Where to go next
- SFO to MRY — the return legseparate record
- San Francisco International (SFO) delay statistics
- MRY to PHX, a related route82.7%
- LAX to SFO, a related route60.1%
- MRY to LAX, a related route86.6%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record58.5%
- How often a connection fails at the major US hubs
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.05 million flight records
Direction matters. MRY to SFO and SFO to MRY are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
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Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated ; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.