When Is It Best to Buy Plane Tickets?

Published March 2025 · Updated November 2025. Written by Lena Marchetti, Fortrip's travel data editor, who has spent nine years tracking airline fare studies and government transportation data for consumer travel reporting.

The short answer, and why it's not really one number

When is it best to buy plane tickets for a domestic U.S. trip — or, as most people phrase the search, when is the best time to buy flights, or when is a good time to buy a plane ticket? For most travelers the honest answer sits between three and eight weeks before departure. That range is wide because the three big studies behind these headlines measure different things entirely: one reads search impressions, one reads scanned fare history, and one reads a single company's completed bookings.

Quick answer, before the detail:

• Domestic, non-holiday flights: buy 3 to 8 weeks out. Google Flights centers this on 38 days; CheapAir's own scan puts it at 42.
• Holiday travel runs on a different clock: book by early October for Thanksgiving, by late October for Christmas — but for summer (July/August), waiting until 3 to 6 weeks out tends to work better, not worse.
• International flights need more lead time: Google's data shows prices rarely drop before roughly 50 days out, so start tracking by then at the latest.

Year-over-year drift matters too — CheapAir's own number moved from 54 days in its 2014 study to 42 days in its 2024 study, which is reason enough to check more than one year of data before trusting a single figure. This site revisits the research whenever new annual studies land — see the rest of the blog for related fare-timing pieces.

Google Flights' 2024 analysis pulled four years of aggregated U.S. search data and found domestic fares average their low point 38 days before departure, inside a historical low-price range of 21 to 52 days. CheapAir's 2024 annual study works differently — it scans actual fares from 320 days out down to one day before departure — and landed close but not identical: an average best day of 42 days, inside a wider 'Prime Booking Window' of 74 to 21 days out. Expedia's Air Hacks data, drawn from its own completed bookings, recommends a tighter domestic window of 15 to 30 days out and reports that flyers who booked more than six months ahead paid about $160 more on average than those who booked in that window.

That Expedia figure comes with a caveat worth stating plainly: Expedia has not published the Air Hacks methodology or dataset on its own site in a form this piece could link to directly. The number above is reported via Frommer's coverage of Expedia's findings, and neither source discloses which calendar year of bookings the study actually covers. That's a real gap next to Google's dated 2024 blog post and CheapAir's dated annual study, and it's reason to weight the Google and CheapAir numbers more heavily until Expedia publishes a primary, dated source.

Here is how the main sources line up, with the sample behind each number:

Source	Sample / date range	What it measures	Recommended window
Google Flights (2024)	4 years of aggregated U.S. search data, through 2024	Search impressions	38 days domestic (21–52 range); 101 days international
CheapAir (2024)	Fares scanned 320 days out to 1 day before departure, 2024 data	Scanned historical fares	42 days average, 74–21 day Prime Booking Window
Expedia (Air Hacks)	Completed bookings on Expedia's platform; year undisclosed, reported via Frommer's	Actual ticket purchases	15–30 days domestic
U.S. BTS	10% government sample of issued tickets, quarterly filings	Actual ticket prices, not timing	Not a booking-window study — used as a price baseline

The gap between sources isn't static, either. CheapAir's own 2014 study (AP News, April 30, 2014), which scanned 1.3 billion fares, put the best day at 54 days — twelve days later than its 2024 number. A separate CheapAir study of 917 million fares (Yahoo Travel, December 30, 2025, citing CheapAir's original research) found that booking less than a week before departure can cost 59% more on average than booking inside the ideal window — the clearest evidence that waiting too long matters more than missing the exact best day by a week or two.

What a plane ticket actually costs right now

Booking-window studies tell you when to buy. They don't tell you what a reasonable price even looks like, which is where the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics is more useful than any of them. Using a 10% government sample of actually issued tickets — not search queries, not predictions — the BTS put the 2024 annual average domestic fare at $384, essentially flat against 2023's $382 and down 2.3% once adjusted for inflation. That $384 figure is the average plane ticket price most domestic travelers should expect to measure any quoted fare against.

Fourth-quarter 2024 averaged $398 according to the same BTS release, slightly above the annual figure, which tracks with Q4 including Thanksgiving and the start of the Christmas travel surge. If it's worth paying for help turning a fare alert into a full itinerary rather than doing it manually, the pricing page lays out what that costs, separate from whatever the airline charges for the seat itself.

Domestic vs. international: how far out to book flights for the best price

The three-to-eight-week domestic range doesn't transfer cleanly to international travel. Google's data puts international fares at their average low 101 days before departure — nearly three times the domestic figure — but also notes prices don't meaningfully drop before roughly 50 days out (Google blog). In practice, that means the first 50 days of watching an international fare are largely wasted effort; the useful window opens after that point. Expedia doesn't publish a separate, distinctly sourced international figure the way it does for domestic fares, so the Google number is the only one with a clear, dated methodology behind it for international trips. Before locking in international dates, running the planned itinerary through the itinerary validator can surface whether the trip's timing lines up with that 50-day-plus window before money changes hands.

Holiday and seasonal booking windows differ from the general rule

General advice falls apart around holidays. Google's seasonal breakdown, pulled from the same aggregated search dataset, shows four distinct patterns — each worth looking at on its own, since the math behind the shift differs by holiday.

Thanksgiving: book by early October

Fares bottom out around 45 days before departure, inside a 26–59 day range (Google blog). Compared with Google's 38-day general domestic average, that's 7 days later — book by early October for a late-November trip.

Christmas: book by late October

Fares bottom out around 58 days before departure, inside a 36–72 day range (Google blog). That's 20 days later than the 38-day general average — if you've been wondering when is a good time to buy a plane ticket for a trip home in late December, the back half of October is the realistic deadline.

Spring break: close to the general rule

Fares bottom out around 44 days before departure, inside a 33–59 day range (Google blog). At 6 days later than the 38-day average, spring break tracks closest to ordinary domestic travel.

Summer (July/August): the outlier that runs backward

Fares bottom out just 21 days before departure, inside a 13–43 day range (Google blog). That's 17 days earlier than the 38-day general average — waiting until three to six weeks out can pay off, the opposite of the 'book early' instinct that holiday travel trains into people.

Lined up against the 38-day general average, the four holidays move the ideal date by +7 (Thanksgiving), +20 (Christmas), +6 (spring break), and -17 days (summer). Most generic advice gives one window for the whole year and misses that spread entirely.

The cheapest day and time to book flights

The 'book on a Tuesday' advice has circulated for over a decade, and Google's own data quietly debunks it: booking on Tuesday saves only 1.3% compared to Sunday, the most expensive booking day (Google blog). Is Tuesday really the cheapest day to book plane tickets, then? Not meaningfully — that's not a difference worth rearranging a Tuesday errand around.

What does matter is which day you fly, not which day you book. Flying Monday through Wednesday runs about 13% cheaper than flying Friday through Sunday, rising to 20% cheaper on domestic-only routes, per the same Google dataset. CheapAir's separate 2024 analysis, which tracks actual fares rather than search behavior, found Wednesday the single cheapest day to fly, saving around $102 versus a Sunday departure, with Tuesday close behind at about $99 in savings (CheapAir). If a trip's dates have any flexibility, shifting the departure day matters more than timing the purchase to a specific weekday.

Flight price tracking tools: can they predict a price drop?

Tools like Google Flights price alerts, Hopper, and Kayak work by monitoring historical and current pricing on a specific route and flagging when something changes — they are not flight price prediction engines with certainty built in. Airline pricing responds to real-time demand and seat inventory, not a fixed calendar, so no tool can guarantee a fare will fall by a given date.

How to know if flight prices will drop before you book

There's no reliable signal that confirms a fare will drop on a specific day. The more useful habit is watching a route's price history once dates are set: if the current fare sits above the historical low-price range for that trip type (21–52 days domestic, 50+ days international per Google's data), there's more room for it to fall; if it's already inside or below that range, further drops become less likely. That's a probability read, not a guarantee.

The honest use of these tools is to set an alert the moment travel dates are firm and let it run for weeks, treating whatever booking window applies (domestic, international, holiday, or summer) as a range to scan rather than a single day to wait for.

How far out to book flights for the best price

For domestic, non-holiday travel, start watching fares around 60 days out and expect the real window to land somewhere between three and eight weeks before departure, depending on which source's logic fits the route. For holiday travel, book earlier than that default: by early October for Thanksgiving, by late October for Christmas. For summer travel, resist the instinct to book early — prices often improve inside the final three to six weeks, per Google's 13–43 day range. For international travel, start tracking at least seven to eight weeks out, and longer for long-haul or peak-season routes where the 101-day average low applies.

Whatever the destination, the one step that survives all this disagreement between sources is setting a price alert the day dates are confirmed, rather than waiting for a single 'best day' to arrive. Building the full trip around that window — flights, connections, and the days in between — is easier with a structured plan; Fortrip's AI trip planner can lay out an itinerary around a target booking date so the fare-watching has a fixed trip to attach to.

Frequently asked questions about when to buy plane tickets

Is Tuesday really the cheapest day to book plane tickets?

No. Google's 2024 search data shows booking on a Tuesday saves only 1.3% compared with Sunday, the most expensive booking day — not a meaningful difference. The day that actually matters is which day you fly: Monday through Wednesday departures run about 13% cheaper than Friday-through-Sunday departures, and CheapAir's fare data separately puts Wednesday as the single cheapest day to fly.

When is it best to buy plane tickets for international trips?

Google's 2024 data puts the average low point for international fares at 101 days before departure, but prices don't meaningfully drop before roughly 50 days out. That means the practical window to start watching international fares is around 50 to 101 days ahead, with longer lead times advisable for long-haul or peak-season routes.

How far in advance should I book for Thanksgiving and Christmas?

For Thanksgiving, Google's data shows fares bottoming out around 45 days before departure — book by early October for a late-November trip. For Christmas, the average low is 58 days out, pushing the realistic deadline into the back half of October.

Can a flight price tracking tool predict when a fare will drop?

Not with certainty. Tools like Google Flights alerts, Hopper, and Kayak monitor historical and current pricing on a route and flag changes, but airline pricing responds to real-time demand and inventory rather than a fixed calendar. The practical approach is to set an alert as soon as travel dates are firm and treat any stated booking window as a range to watch, not a single date to wait for.