Route brief · SFO → RIO
San Francisco → Rio de Janeiro
$1,161
round-trip · too little price history on this route to compare
Oct 2 – Oct 10 · 8 nights
Avianca2 stops
Cached fare — the booking search re-prices live before you pay.
Destination briefRIORio de JaneiroBeaches with mountains growing out of them. Fares south swing hard — we catch the dips.Best windowApr–Jun · Sep–OctAirportsGaleão (GIG) · Santos Dumont (SDU)All routes into Rio de JaneiroWhen this route gets cheap.
Best time to be in Rio de Janeiro: Apr–Jun · Sep–Oct. 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 15 hours outbound, on a 8-night trip — ticketed under Avianca, which on a connecting fare need not operate every leg. At $1,161 for 10,662 km each way, that works out to about $54 per 1,000 km flown. That is above the $44 typical of long-haul fares here. Across the 27 departure cities we track at a similar distance from Rio de Janeiro, this fare ranks 23rd — 2.5× the $473 we hold from Chicago. For context, the middle fare among the 50 routes of similar length we watch out of San Francisco is $813. 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 2 days we hold a cached fare for
Tap a date → live search
The median cached fare across this calendar is 21% higher than when tracking began on Aug 8 — $843 then versus $1,019 now, across 3 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 $810, on Oct 2.
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) ↔ Galeão (GIG) · Santos Dumont (SDU)
- Flight time
- ~15 hours outbound
- Distance
- ~10,662 km each way
- Airlines on the board
- Avianca
- Itineraries
- Connections on current fares
- Best months to visit
- Apr–Jun · Sep–Oct
SF → RIO, answered.
How far in advance should I book SF → Rio de Janeiro?
We do not publish a number for this, because we cannot measure it yet.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 Rio de Janeiro?
The current cheapest fares involve a connection, ticketed under Avianca. 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 Rio de Janeiro?
Lock the flight first — then compare stays for Oct 2 – Oct 10 · 8 nights.
Browse hotels ↗
Missed it?
Cached fares expire. This route has a feed of its own — follow it and the next SF → RIO drop reaches you as soon as we find it.
Follow SF → RIO