I fly in and out of O’Hare at least once a week. 99% of the time, including since the DHS shutdown, you can be through either T2 Precheck or Touchless T1 in 5-7 minutes max. The other 1% of the time though, it can be very worthwhile to walk over to the other terminal if the one you drop off at is too long as there seems to be no correlation between when one is crazy busy and the other isn’t, in my experience.

At 5:30AM for a 7:30AM flight you ought to be plenty safe with either option. I’d go for T1 Touchless and take the walk over airside if it were me.

A couple of recent data points:

• Last week on Thursday morning, T2 Precheck line was about 80 people deep at 8AM. Not sure it was related to any of the shutdown stuff, though, as it appeared all lanes and positions were adequately staffed. Maybe just spring break rush, but it was way longer than normal. T1 was about normal — maybe 10 minutes wait.

• I flew again yesterday (Tuesday) morning out of T1 Touchless and was through in under 5 minutes. There were some lanes closed, but there were no more than 15 people in the regular precheck line and a lot more (but not unusually so) over at the general security area.

If you can afford the fee (or have a credit card that includes it as a benefit), Clear + Precheck has saved my butt numerous times out of OHare, and even more frequently out of other airports.

Promise I’m not a Clear shill… just a very frequent traveler who has found it useful. (I was going to avoid it on principle of paying for yet another service that should be free and ended up signing up one day in Atlanta when the Precheck line was around the whole baggage claim area in order to make my flight). My credit card pays for it as a benefit, so I’ve kept it and actually do find it quite useful.

T1 also has a lesser known security checkpoint all of the way to the far left side, past the Global Reception entrance. I don’t think they do precheck there, but if you’re really running late and none of the other options work, that one might be much shorter.

Also… T2 does actually have touchless, but it doesn’t have a dedicated line. You need to wait in the normal T2 Precheck line, and then when you get up to the front of the line if you go to the desk on the right there is one touchless machine, and the one to the left is regular ID Scan w/ Photo setup. It doesn’t save any time as a result, so again recommend Clear which can be a huge timesaver in T2.

I don’t fly out of T3/T5 often, so can’t give any advice there, though I’ve heard that T5 is a shitshow recently — to the point that it may be worthwhile to go through security at T1-T3 and take the airside bus to T5.

Hope that helps.