San Diego Global Entry Appointments: What Two Years of Data Show About Otay Mesa and the Airport

We log every change in the number of open appointments at every enrollment center. In this post, “appointments open” means more than 10 open slots at a center, checked every hour. A day with “nothing to book” is a Pacific-time day on which no hourly check found more than 10. “Typical life of a new opening” is the median time from an appointment appearing to its first booking, over the 30 days to each date shown.

We read the public scheduling system. We cannot see staffing, budgets, policy decisions, or how many people are waiting for an interview, so only CBP can say why things changed.

Charts start in November 2024. Our slot records begin in June 2024, and in the first months some slots we saw open but never saw booked stay counted as open until their date passes. That made every center look fully open in late 2024, which was an artifact of how the record begins, so we leave those months out.

Otay Mesa was close to 100% for most of the record, apart from a dip in spring 2025, and was 22% in September 2026. The lowest earlier reading was 30%, in the 30 days to April 5, 2025. The airport sits near the bottom of the chart for most of the period.

Counting whole days: Otay Mesa had nothing to book on 16 of 31 days in August and 17 of 30 days in September. The worst 30-day stretch was 25 days, to September 12; the worst before this summer was 17 days, to April 3, 2025. So the spring 2025 squeeze was similar in kind, and this one went further.

The longest unbroken run with 10 or fewer open slots was about 8 days from August 19, against 6.5 days in March 2025; releases that lasted only a few hours broke up the rest.

Share of hourly checks in the 30 days to each date with more than 10 open appointments at least an hour away; one point per week from November 2024. Map outlines: Natural Earth.

The schedule is refilled in batches rather than a steady flow. The release in late September took Otay Mesa to about 2,968 open appointments around September 23, and the schedule was back to 10 or fewer by September 29. Between releases the line sits on the floor: a schedule with nothing in it.

Highest hourly count of open appointments in each three hours. The two charts have different vertical scales: the airport’s releases are much smaller.

This number is mostly a symptom of how empty the schedule is. When many appointments are open, a newly freed slot sits there for a while; when nothing else is open, it is taken almost immediately. The table groups Otay Mesa’s openings by how many appointments were already open when they appeared.

Otay Mesa’s latest weekly median was shorter than in 96% of weeks in our record. The airport’s (about 6 minutes) was shorter than in 60%: the airport has been tight for most of the record, so its figure today is less unusual.

The airport’s jump in mid-2025, from 2 minutes to 40 minutes between late May and mid-June, followed a single release of about 949 slots on May 31, 2025, after a spring in which its schedule had run dry. Our monitoring ran normally across that week, so this is a change in the schedule, not in how we measure.

All openings from August 2024. The weekly 25th and 75th percentiles are in the CSV.

Fewer new slots. In August 2026 about 3,606 slots were released; every other month since November 2024 had at least 5,781, and most had 8,363 or more. Slots released includes slots that reopen after a cancellation.

Fewer interviews per time slot. From June 2025 to June 2026 each time slot at Otay Mesa typically held 5.8 to 7.1 appointments. For August and September 2026 it was about 4.8. Per weekday, that is about 559 appointments before and about 424 now. (The count per slot is the highest number we saw open for that slot.)

Faster booking. Taking only times when more than 500 appointments were open: in 2025 Q4 a new opening at Otay Mesa lasted about 8 hours; in 2026 Q3, about 10 minutes. Calexico shows the same shift; LAX a smaller one.

Median life of a new opening when more than 500 appointments were already open. Quarters with fewer than 30 such openings are blank; the latest quarter is incomplete. We can see bookings but not applicants, so we cannot say whether more people are applying, the same people are trying harder, or both.

For long stretches there was nothing to book at all (the longest was about 75 days from March 2025). There have been 11 releases of 300 or more slots since May 2025. Capacity per weekday rose from about 9 appointments in early 2025, to roughly 10 to 15 through most of the second half of 2025, to about 42 to 46 on most weekdays since January 2026.

88% of Otay Mesa’s releases of 20 or more appointments appeared between 6 a.m. and 3 p.m. Pacific; we saw none on weekends.

Single cancellations are a different matter. Since April 2026, a freed-up Otay Mesa slot during the working day lasted a median of about 11 minutes. Overnight (1 to 4 a.m. Pacific) they lasted 77 to 156 minutes, which fits fewer people looking at that hour.

Releases of 20+ appointments in one check, August 2024 to October 2026.

Records begin in June 2024; charts and the CSV start in November 2024 (see “How we measured”), so two autumns is the most we can compare. “Appointments open” is sampled every hour and uses a 10-slot threshold we chose. The count per time slot is the highest we saw open. Slots released includes cancellations that reopen a slot. We measure the public schedule, not applicants, staffing or policy.