Burning Man · getting in and out
Burning Man Gate Wait Times
How long the line is, hour by hour, getting into Black Rock City and getting back out — a 2-year average of hourly community reports (2024–2025). Hours are playa time. The short version: arrive early in the morning, and leave Sunday overnight if you can.
Arrival: Thu–Fri beforeExodus: Sun–Mon
Arrival: Thursday–Friday before the event
Gravel-to-gate wait, the Thursday and Friday before opening.
Thursday before (n=6, 2024 only)
Friday before (n=30, 2024+2025)
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Read: Friday's line bottoms out at 6–9am (42–65 min), then climbs almost straight through the day to 4+ hours by 9–11pm as the Saturday-before crowd starts stacking up. That matches Burning Man's own guidance that "the shortest lines are usually 3am–10am." Thursday's few readings (all 2024, all midday — there are no early-morning Thursday reports in this dataset) sit lower still (20–90 min), consistent with build week generally being lighter than the day before opening, but there's no same-hour comparison to confirm an early Thursday beats an early Friday.
Exodus: Temple Sunday and Labor Day Monday
Gate-road-to-gravel wait leaving Black Rock City.
Temple Sunday (n=56)
Labor Day Monday (n=52)
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Read: leaving at dawn is a good plan only on Sunday. Sunday's floor is midnight–10am, 30–45 min — flat and low, since most people haven't started leaving yet (the Temple burns Sunday night, and plenty of people stay for it). Monday never gets that low. Its best hour is ~7am at 112 min — still 2–4× Sunday's overnight floor — and it's essentially the only good hour: by 9am it's back over 150 min, and it's 4–6 hours for most of the afternoon and evening as the holiday-weekend crowd all leaves at once. (The data caps at "360" = 6+ hours, so the real peak is likely higher.)
So: if you can leave Sunday, any overnight-to-mid-morning hour beats any hour of Monday. If it has to be Monday, ~7am is the least-bad window, not a good one. And if you're flexible: Tuesday afternoon (1–6pm, ~25 min) is the best exodus window in the whole dataset.
So: if you can leave Sunday, any overnight-to-mid-morning hour beats any hour of Monday. If it has to be Monday, ~7am is the least-bad window, not a good one. And if you're flexible: Tuesday afternoon (1–6pm, ~25 min) is the best exodus window in the whole dataset.
Source: hourly community reports aggregated by @bmantraffic, compiled at bmantravel.com. A historical average from two years — not an official or predictive forecast. Actual waits in any year depend on weather, road conditions and traffic management on the day.