Southwest’s Checked Bag Fees Mean Boarding Will Start 5 Minutes Earlier — And Could Cost $800 Million

Effective August 1, 2026 Southwest Airlines will begin boarding Boeing 737-800 and 737 MAX 8 aircraft 5 minutes earlier. The airline has not announced the change, but the flight attendants union put out the word to cabin crew. I wrote that this was inevitable in February 2025 as a result of checked bag fees. Operation Flight-attendant report time Change Domestic 737-800/MAX 8 T-35 Five minutes earlier Domestic 737-700 T-30 No change International/Hawaii T-45 No change As of June 30, Southwest’s fleet consisted of 803 aircraft. 515 aircraft, or 64.1% of the fleet, are in the affected group. 192 737-800s 323 737 MAX 8s 288 737-700s Southwest eliminated two free checked bags for most newly booked passengers beginning May 28, 2025. More passengers consequently carried bags aboard, producing fuller bins, more bin-searching and more gate-checking. This slows down the boarding process. Assigned seating began January 27, 2026. Passengers no longer rush on, scrambling for the best seats. And instead of spreading themselves according to available space, passengers reach their assigned rows, discover full bins and move about the crowded aisle looking for space. That also takes time. In March, the airline encouraged crews to begin boarding early whenever all required flight attendants were present. Their union, TWU Local 556, objected because Southwest flight attendants do not receive separate boarding pay. The 2024 flight attendant contract permits variable aircraft report times from T-30 through T-45, requires 90 days’ union notice, and says the selected times must appear in bid materials and remain consistent during the bid period. The union’s annotation says T-45 flexibility was first negotiated in 2016 but was not implemented because of technology problems. This change means passengers have to show up at the gate earlier, and spend more time onboard, if they want overhead bin space. It also reduces time available for cleaning planes between flights And where the schedule has a tight turn, that means adjustments need to be made pushing departure times five minutes later – or more aircraft to accommodate the same number of flights. Southwest historically built its model around roughly 25-minute turns. Early in its history, when they were struggling financially and had to give back one of their aircraft to Boeing, they invented the ’10-minute turn’ to keep their schedule depsite having one less plane. Passengers deplaned out the back stairs while the next flight was boarding at the front. Greg Wells, then Southwest’s Senior Vice President of Operations, once explained that schedule padding “would cost us approximately eight to 10 airplanes of flying per day” if “we were to add just a couple of minutes of block time to each flight in our schedule.” At the time, Southwest had 548 aircraft. Since then there’s been 46.5% growth in the fleet, so 8-10 aircraft in 2010 scales to 12-15 planes today. At $55 million per aircraft that’s a cost of $660 to $825 million. That’s a hidden cost of Southwest’s checked bag fees that nobody calculates. Last year, American Airlines started boarding most domestic flights at T-40 instead of T-35. That brought them closer to industry standard, but meant that each trip became five minutes longer. Southwest’s 30-minute boarding window was one of the last great benefits of flying the airline, respecting passenger time. Topics on this page