San Francisco → Tokyo flights

SFO–Tokyo fares hover near $294 — bottom quartile is under $287

Key takeaways

• Median fare of $294 across 30 daily snapshots — a reliable benchmark for this route.
• Bottom quartile sits at $287 or below, meaning roughly a quarter of observed days already hit near-floor pricing.
• Middle 50% of fares ($287–$310) form a tight band, suggesting most days land close to typical price rather than at extremes.
• High of $384 vs. low of $238 shows real spread (61%), so timing still matters even if the median is stable.
• No single carrier dominance is visible in this data, so we can't attribute pricing patterns to a specific airline.

30-day price trend

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

The full picture

Over the 30-day window we tracked, SFO–Tokyo fares show a median of $294, with a fairly tight interquartile range of $287–$310. That means on a typical day, shoppers are seeing prices within about $23 of each other — a relatively narrow band for an international long-haul route. The wider range, however, tells a different story: fares spiked as high as $384 and dipped as low as $238, a 61% spread from top to bottom, so outliers do happen in both directions.

Because most days cluster near the median rather than near the extremes, there isn't strong evidence in this dataset for a specific 'sweet spot' within the booking window — we only have 30 daily snapshots, not a long-run seasonal history, so we can't speak to how fares behave months out from departure. What we can say is that the bottom quartile ($287 and under) occurs often enough that it's a realistic target rather than a rare fluke. If you see a fare at or below $287, that's a genuinely good price relative to this route's recent history; anything above $310 is paying a premium versus what roughly half of shoppers saw.

We don't have reliable day-of-week or carrier-specific patterns in this data — no single airline's fares dominate the cached results clearly enough to generalize, and 30 daily price pulls aren't enough to isolate weekday effects with confidence. The honest takeaway: this route's pricing is moderately stable most of the time (the $287–$310 band), but the 61% high-low spread means it's still worth checking fares across several days before booking rather than assuming the first price you see is representative. Treat $294 as your benchmark, and treat anything meaningfully above $310 as a signal to wait or keep searching.

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