San Francisco → Madrid flights

Median fare is $349 — most days cluster near the low end

Key takeaways

• $349 median fare across 30 daily snapshots, with a floor of $326
• The bottom quartile ($348) sits almost at the median, meaning cheap fares aren't rare outliers — they're the norm
• A high of $516 shows occasional spikes, but the 58% spread is driven by a small number of expensive days, not a wide typical range
• Middle 50% of fares fall between $348-$368, a narrow $20 band — pricing here is unusually stable
• No consistent carrier or weekday pattern surfaced in this data, so timing within the window looks less important than avoiding outlier spike days

30-day price trend

See full numbers and stats on the SFO → MAD price history page.

The full picture

Over 30 days of cached fare snapshots, SFO-to-Madrid pricing centers tightly around $349, with the 25th-75th percentile range spanning just $348 to $368. That's a notably narrow band for an intercontinental route — half of all observed days priced within $20 of each other. The headline 58% spread is real, but it's a function of a $516 ceiling on a handful of days rather than broad day-to-day volatility. In practice, this means most snapshots you'd encounter while shopping this route land close to the median, not scattered across the full $326-$516 range.

We can't point to a specific booking window that reliably softens prices — this dataset is 30 rolling snapshots of cached fares, not a purchase-lead-time study, so we don't have visibility into how price changes as departure approaches. What the data does support is that the bulk of fares you'll see quoted are clustered near $349, and the p25/p75 band suggests the 'normal' price zone is $348-$368. If you're quoted something meaningfully above $368, you're likely looking at one of the pricier snapshot days rather than typical market pricing — worth checking a few more searches or dates before committing.

No dominant carrier or weekday pattern was visible in this data, so we can't make claims about specific airlines or days of the week being cheaper. The honest caveat: with a tight interquartile range but a high ceiling nearly 50% above median, this route occasionally throws expensive outlier fares — the data doesn't tell us why (seasonality, specific dates, or fare-class exhaustion are all plausible) or how predictable those spikes are. Treat $349-368 as the fair-price zone based on what we've observed, and be skeptical of quotes well above that.

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