In this article we discuss the influence of temporal stability on the value obtained for dielectric properties of materials measured by terahertz time-domain spectroscopy with particular emphasis on attenuated total reflection. The stability of three different terahertz attenuated total reflection spectroscopy systems is carefully characterized. The formalism for the complex refractive index extraction is presented and the effect of delay errors is calculated numerically. We found that good thermal stability of the terahertz system helps to minimize delay fluctuations and therefore the uncertainty of the resulting complex refractive index.