Route brief · SFO → WAS
San Francisco → Washington
$278
round-trip · too little price history on this route to compare
Oct 1 – Oct 5 · 4 nights
Frontier Airlines1 stop
Cached fare — the booking search re-prices live before you pay.
Destination briefWASWashingtonFree museums by the dozen, and three airports competing hard enough to keep transatlantic fares honest.Best windowApr–May · Sep–OctAirportsDulles (IAD) · Reagan National (DCA) · Baltimore (BWI)All routes into WashingtonWhen this route gets cheap.
Best time to be in Washington: Apr–May · Sep–Oct. Fare history for this route is still thin, so we make no seasonal call yet.
The cheapest itinerary we are tracking makes one stop and takes about 6.5 hours outbound, on a 4-night trip — ticketed under Frontier Airlines, which on a connecting fare need not operate every leg. At $278 for 3,919 km each way, that works out to about $35 per 1,000 km flown. That is below the $39 typical of medium-haul fares here. Across the 3 departure cities we track at a similar distance from Washington, this fare ranks 2nd — 39% above the $200 from Los Angeles. It is also the 3rd cheapest of the 6 routes of similar length we watch out of San Francisco. We have 2 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.
Day-level prices for the next 3 months
Tap any day → live search
The median cached fare across this calendar is unchanged since tracking began on Aug 8 — $414 then versus $416 now, across 8 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 $250, on Sep 16.
Cached day-level data for this route is sparse — 13 of 93 days priced, from 19 tracked fares. The days below are shown as found, with no cheapest-day or below-median call.
November 2026
Route facts
- Airports
- SFO · Oakland (OAK) · San José (SJC) ↔ Dulles (IAD) · Reagan National (DCA) · Baltimore (BWI)
- Flight time
- ~6.5 hours outbound
- Distance
- ~3,919 km each way
- Airlines on the board
- Frontier Airlines
- Itineraries
- Connections on current fares
- Best months to visit
- Apr–May · Sep–Oct
SF → WAS, answered.
How far in advance should I book SF → Washington?
We do not publish a number for this, because we cannot measure it yet.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 Washington?
The current cheapest fares involve a connection, ticketed under Frontier 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 Washington?
Lock the flight first — then compare stays for Oct 1 – Oct 5 · 4 nights.
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Missed it?
Cached fares expire. This route has a feed of its own — follow it and the next SF → WAS drop reaches you as soon as we find it.
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