What Every Code on Your Boarding Pass Actually Means

A boarding pass looks simple, but it is one of the most information-dense documents you will hold. Among the airport codes and your name sits a set of short letters, numbers and symbols that affect your journey, from the group you board with to whether you get an extra security check. Once you know how to read them, you will not look at a boarding pass the same way again.

The Anatomy of a Boarding Pass

The layout of a boarding pass differs from airline to airline, but the barcode follows a global standard set by IATA. At a glance you will nearly always find your name, the route (two three-letter airport codes), the flight number, the date, the departure time, a gate, a seat, and a barcode. Around those obvious fields sit a few short codes that most travelers ignore. Those are the interesting ones.

The PNR: Your Booking's True Name

The PNR (Passenger Name Record), often labelled “Booking Reference” or “Confirmation Code”, is a code of usually six characters, such as 7Q2X4P. It is the key to your reservation. With it and your last name, someone can often look up your booking on the airline's website and sometimes change it, which is why you should not post a photo of your boarding pass online. The barcode holds the same code in machine-readable form. To learn more, read what a PNR is.

Fare Class: The Single Letter That Says a Lot

The letter next to your cabin, such as Y, J, F or W, is your booking class, and it says more than “economy” or “business”. Airlines split each cabin into many fare buckets, each with its own price and rules. By common convention Y is full-fare economy, J is business and F is first, but the exact letters and their meaning depend on the airline. Deep-discount economy fares often use letters such as Q or N, though the same letter can belong to another cabin at a different airline.

The letter can determine how many frequent-flyer miles you earn, whether you can change your ticket, and your chances of an upgrade, again depending on the airline.

The Sequence Number

Printed as SEQ followed by a number such as 042, the sequence number is the order in which passengers checked in: you were the 42nd person to check in for this flight. Gate staff use it, and some airlines take check-in order into account when choosing who gives up a seat on an oversold flight.

SSSS: The Four Letters You Don't Want

If you see SSSS on your pass, you have been selected for Secondary Security Screening Selection. It means a more thorough check at the gate or security, for example a hand search, swabs and questions. It applies to flights to, from and within the United States, where the TSA decides who is selected. Part of the selection is random, and the TSA does not publish its other criteria. TSA PRE, by contrast, is the mark you do want: it grants expedited screening.

Zones, Groups, and Boarding Order

The GROUP or ZONE field (Group 1, Zone B, and so on) sets the order in which you are invited to board. It follows your fare, your loyalty status and the airline's own rules, and at some airlines the type or location of your seat. That is why two people in the same row can board many minutes apart.

Gate, Boarding Time, and Departure Time

Two times appear on most passes, and they are not the same. Boarding time is when boarding opens, often 30 to 45 minutes before departure, depending on the airline and the aircraft. Departure time is the scheduled push-back from the gate, not the moment of takeoff. The gate is the field most likely to change after your pass is issued, so trust the airport screens over your pass for the gate number.

The Barcode: A Boarding Pass Inside Your Boarding Pass

The square or stripe printed on the pass is the IATA Bar Coded Boarding Pass (BCBP). It is usually a PDF417, Aztec, QR or Data Matrix code. It packs the passenger name, PNR, route, airline, flight number, date, cabin letter, seat and sequence number into a single string that a gate reader can decode instantly, without an internet connection.

One detail matters if you log your flights: the barcode stores the date as a day of the year (for example 195), without the year. A pass found in a drawer therefore does not say which year it is from. The printed text and your own memory have to fill that in.

Let Your Phone Read It for You

Decoding all of this by hand is fun once. After that, you will want to automate it. FlightLog reads the barcode of a paper or digital boarding pass, and the printed text too when you give it a photo, then fills in the flight number, route, date and seat in your logbook, plus the cabin when the pass states it clearly, and you review the result before saving. Your passenger name and booking reference are stored on your phone only and are never synced to a server. See the step-by-step guide to scanning a boarding pass.

The next time you fly, take ten seconds to read your boarding pass, then let FlightLog remember the details. You can download FlightLog for free on iOS and Android and start logging flights in minutes.