Route reliability record
SBP→SFO
San Luis Obispo to San Francisco
- Flights
- 1,145
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 191 mi
- Carriers
- 2
This route draws a D. Roughly one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is a little over an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 1,145 SBP to SFO flights, with a median arrival 3 minutes late.
Best time to fly SBP to SFO: a 5am–8am departure, ideally on a Tuesday. Flights in that window arrived on time 83.2% of the time and Tuesday flights 68.6%, against 62.1% for the route overall.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so this route runs 15 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 155 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
62.1%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,131 completed flights
Avg delay
70 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.14%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
SkyWest
62.3% on time across 965 flights
These figures cover 1,145 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 12.8% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule. That is the number that wrecks a connection, and it is not visible in an on-time percentage alone.
Carrier by carrier
Which airline is most reliable on SBP 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 | 965 | 62.3% | 67 min | 1.14% | D |
| United Airlinesthin sample | 180 | 60.7% | 86 min | 1.11% | D |
Flight by flight
Flights on SBP to SFO
The flight numbers below flew this route at least 250 times in the period, busiest first. Each has its own record, with its schedule and delay causes.
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 64 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am246 flights83.2%
- 8am–11am264 flights34.7%
- 11am–2pm68 flights72.1%
- 2pm–5pm380 flights65.5%
- 5pm–8pm144 flights75.6%
- 8pm–5am43 flights19.0%
Scale runs 10% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 8pm–5am window is where this operation falls apart: 19.0% on time, against 83.2% for the 5am–8am slot. By evening the aircraft flying these rotations have absorbed a full day of small delays and there is no slack left to recover in. The 2pm–5pm window is the busiest, with 380 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 46 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 34.8% on time, 46 points below January, the best at 80.4%. 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. October was the busiest month here, with 120 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 68.6% on time and Wednesday the weakest at 56.2%. 12 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
One category carries most of the weight here. National Airspace System accounts for 47% of the 30,000 delay minutes carriers reported, and the remaining four split what is left. The split is by minutes rather than by flights, so a few very long delays count for as much as many short ones.
- 47%National Airspace System
- 35%Carrier
- 11%Late-arriving aircraft
- 7%Extreme weather
The largest share of delay minutes, 35%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. Unlike weather, that is a management outcome, and it is the category where the gap between two carriers on the same schedule is genuinely earned. It accounts for 11,000 of the 30,000 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 30,189 reported delay minutes.
47% 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 30,000, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations sit at 1.14% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.09%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here actually costs
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 12.8% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% nationally. A 45-minute layover does not survive that, and no amount of walking quickly changes it. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.
At 191 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 74.9% on time across 1,144 flights, 13 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 13 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,145 flights, enough that the headline rate is stable to within roughly a point. The hour-block and month splits divide that further, so read the thinner bars with more caution than the headline.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in SFO after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. January runs 80.4% on time and June 34.8%, a swing of 46 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of June before you think about anything else. 1,131 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
SBP to SFO questions
How often is SBP to SFO delayed?
Roughly one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 37.9% of the 1,145 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by a little over an hour on average.
How reliable is SBP to SFO compared with the rest of the country?
62.1% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.6%, a difference of 15 points against it. That is worth a D on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on SBP to SFO?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 83.2% on time. The 8pm–5am window is the weakest at 19.0%, 64 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 SBP to SFO?
June is the weakest month at 34.8% on time, compared with 80.4% in January. Across the year that is 46 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 SBP — the return legseparate record
- San Francisco International (SFO) delay statistics
- SkyWest Airlines on SBP to SFO62.3%
- United Airlines on SBP to SFO60.7%
- SBP to PHX, a related route82.9%
- LAX to SFO, a related route64.8%
- SBP to DEN, a related route81.2%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record62.3%
- United Airlines on-time record60.7%
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
- How often a connection fails at the major US hubs
Direction matters. SBP to SFO and SFO to SBP 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, July 2025 to June 2026. Last updated 15 September 2026; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.