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.

Travel modes and lane types

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

Choose Passenger, Commercial or On foot, then choose a lane type where one is available. NEXUS is a lane type for enrolled travellers. CBSA reports only traveller and commercial waits, so Canada-bound NEXUS and pedestrian waits are unavailable. On the Mexico border, lane choices also include SENTRI, Ready Lane and FAST where CBP reports them.

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.

I use the source that sets the rule: the operator for tolls, the transport department for roads, and the border agency for its programs and port hours. Another government agency’s record can provide supporting information. When a news report describes a planned change, I identify it as a report and check for confirmation from the responsible authority.

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.

Waits by time of day

The time-of-day tables on crossing pages are made from the agency reports this site has stored. Each report counts from its time until the next report, for up to two hours. The tables cover the last eight complete weeks in the crossing’s own time zone, with weekdays and weekends kept apart; holiday Mondays count as weekdays. The usual wait in each cell is the median: the middle of the reported waits over that time, lined up from shortest to longest.

A cell needs at least 20 weekdays, or 12 weekend days, with reports covering most of its three hours; otherwise it says there are not enough reports. A cell says Closed only when the lanes were reported closed for nearly all of it. CBSA’s “No delay” appears as “No delay reported” and is never converted to minutes. Closed hours are left out, and so are reports stamped more than 40 minutes after this site received them. A crossing gets a table only when nearly all its cells have enough reports, its reports usually arrive at least every two hours and almost none are stamped ahead of receipt, and in at least one cell the reported wait reached 15 minutes for more than a tenth of the time. Crossings whose reports almost always say no delay have none. The tables describe past reports only.