Route brief · SFO → PEK
San Francisco → Beijing
$843
round-trip · too little price history on this route to compare
Sep 21 – Oct 8 · 17 nights
Alaska Airlines2 stops
Cached fare — the booking search re-prices live before you pay.
Destination briefPEKBeijingImperial scale — the Forbidden City, the Wall an hour north, and a visa-free transit window worth checking.Best windowSep–Oct · Apr–MayAirportsCapital (PEK) · Daxing (PKX)All routes into BeijingWhen this route gets cheap.
Best time to be in Beijing: Sep–Oct · Apr–May. Fare history for this route is still thin, so we make no seasonal call yet.
The cheapest itinerary we are tracking makes 2 stops and takes about 17.5 hours outbound, on a 17-night trip — ticketed under Alaska Airlines, which on a connecting fare need not operate every leg. At $843 for 9,478 km each way, that works out to about $44 per 1,000 km flown. That is about the $44 typical of long-haul fares here. Across the 27 departure cities we track at a similar distance from Beijing, this fare ranks 21st — 58% above the $534 from Sydney. For context, the middle fare among the 41 routes of similar length we watch out of San Francisco is $794. We have 3 months of cached prices for this route so far — not enough to call a fare cheap or expensive, so we publish the price without a percentage.
The 7 days we hold a cached fare for
Tap a date → live search
The median cached fare across this calendar is 9% higher than when tracking began on Aug 8 — $865 then versus $941 now, across 6 recorded snapshots. This is a calendar-level trend, so an individual deal above can be lower. The lowest single day we have seen here is $779, on Aug 24.
- Sat, Sep 12$931
- Sun, Sep 13$904
- Mon, Sep 21$843
- Wed, Sep 30$941
- Tue, Oct 27$950
- Mon, Dec 7$971
- Wed, Dec 16$1,077
These are the only days we have a cached price for on this route so far — not the only days it flies. The search above covers any date.
Route facts
- Airports
- SFO · Oakland (OAK) · San José (SJC) ↔ Capital (PEK) · Daxing (PKX)
- Flight time
- ~17.5 hours outbound
- Distance
- ~9,478 km each way
- Airlines on the board
- Alaska Airlines
- Itineraries
- Connections on current fares
- Best months to visit
- Sep–Oct · Apr–May
SF → PEK, answered.
How far in advance should I book SF → Beijing?
We do not publish a number for this, because we cannot measure it yet. Answering it honestly means watching the same departure date on this route over many weeks as it approaches, and that archive is still filling up — so any "book N days ahead" figure here would be borrowed from somewhere else rather than measured. See /guides/what-moves-a-flight-price/ for the levers we can measure.
Are there nonstop flights from San Francisco to Beijing?
The current cheapest fares involve a connection, ticketed under Alaska Airlines. Nonstop options exist on many dates at higher prices — check the live search for your exact dates.
Are these prices guaranteed?
No — these are cached fares found on real searches (this one on September 1). Airlines reprice constantly, so the booking search re-checks the live price before you pay. Fresher finds are far more likely to still be available.
Next step
Sleeping in Beijing?
Lock the flight first — then compare stays for Sep 21 – Oct 8 · 17 nights.
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Missed it?
Cached fares expire. This route has a feed of its own — follow it and the next SF → PEK drop reaches you as soon as we find it.
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