How border wait times work What the labels on a card mean

Two clocks on every card

“Reported” is the agency’s own observation time. “Feed checked” is when Border Delays last looked for a new figure.

Those two rarely match, and that is normal rather than a fault: this site looks every five minutes, while CBP and CBSA publish roughly once an hour. The reading may accurately represent what the agency observed then, but conditions may have changed since.

Past the hour, a reading also stops competing for the “lowest reported” badge on comparison pages. A stale zero can never crown a crossing.

What the agencies actually count

The queue at the inspection booths — not the roads leading to them. Approach traffic, bridge ramps and city streets can add time that no official number captures, which is why a crossing can look clear and still take a while to reach.

Neither agency promises accuracy. The live feeds used by Border Delays are snapshots rather than complete archives. CBP separately provides historical views for some ports, but they do not fill in the lane observations missed between checks. Treat every figure as an estimate that was true when it was observed.

Why the two agencies are never blended

Where a direction is reported, the wait comes from the agency of the country you are entering: CBP for traffic into the United States, CBSA for traffic into Canada. No border agency publishes a wait for traffic into Mexico, so that direction reads as not reported.

Border Delays never averages the two or fills a gap in one agency’s data with the other’s number. If the agency responsible for your direction has published nothing, the card says so instead of guessing.

The four travel modes

Passenger

All personal vehicles — cars, SUVs, pickups and vans

NEXUS

Trusted-traveller lanes, where they are reported separately

Commercial

Trucks and other commercial vehicles

Pedestrian

On foot, at the few crossings where a walkway exists and is reported

CBSA does not report NEXUS separately for Canada-bound traffic, so the NEXUS tab is disabled in that direction and the page explains why rather than offering a lane with nothing behind it. Its feed splits commercial from traveller traffic and nothing else, so it publishes no pedestrian figure at any crossing.

Where the other facts come from

Tolls, operating hours, lane eligibility and vehicle limits are not in the agency feeds. Each one is researched, then stored with its source and the date it was last checked.

Sources are used in order, and a lower one never overrides a higher one. First comes the authority that sets the fact: the bridge or tunnel operator for its own tolls and lane hours, the transport department for road matters, the agency for its own programs and port hours. After that comes the other government agency’s published record, where it covers the same fact. News coverage, aggregator sites and forum posts are not used as the source for a fact on this site.

CBP and CBSA are border agencies, not toll authorities, so their silence about a toll is not evidence that none exists. A crossing is only described as free when a toll or transport authority says so.

Official sources disagree regularly — an operator’s table and an agency’s record often print different lane hours for the same booth. The disagreement is named on the page and both sources are linked, rather than quietly resolved. Where the conflict is a safety limit — a weight, a height, a width — the lowest figure is the one published.

Found one that is out of date? Report it.