Guide
The most punctual routes in the US, and the least
Of 1,071 US routes with 2,000+ flights a year, Greer (GSP) to Atlanta (ATL) ran best at 90.1% on time and Las Vegas (LAS) to San Francisco (SFO) worst at 58.0%.
The most punctual busy route in the United States over September 2025 to August 2026 was Greer (GSP) to Atlanta (ATL): 90.1% of its flights arrived less than 15 minutes late. The least punctual was Las Vegas (LAS) to San Francisco (SFO), at 58.0%. When this was written, the first was a Delta flight into Atlanta and the second a flight into San Francisco. Those two destination airports, one built to swallow arrivals and one with runways too close together for bad weather, explain much of what follows.
This ranking covers the 1,071 routes flown at least 2,000 times in the year, roughly five or more flights a day. Below that, a single bad week moves the figure too much for a league table to mean anything. The median route on the list ran 76.9% on time. Of the 1,071, 311 reached 80% or better and 107 fell below 70%.
Routes on this site are directional, and the DOT judges a flight by its arrival at the destination gate. That turns out to be the key to both ends of the table.
The top of the table: into the hub, early
80.0%95.0%
Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, September 2025 to August 2026.
The list is not what most travellers would guess. It is dominated by one pattern: Delta flights into Atlanta from cities across the Southeast, the Midwest and the Mid-Atlantic. Greer (GSP) to Atlanta (ATL), Louisville (SDF) to Atlanta (ATL) and Greensboro (GSO) to Atlanta (ATL) fill the first three places, at 90.1%, 89.6% and 89.2%.
The same city pairs in the other direction run noticeably worse. Atlanta to Greer ran 83.7% against 90.1% for the flight in. The pipeline keeps the two directions as separate records for exactly this reason, and on some pairs they differ by ten points. Departures from Atlanta as a whole ran 77.9%, because an airport's figure on this site covers the flights leaving it. The inbound flights count towards their origin airports instead, which is why the Atlanta arrivals ranking and the Atlanta airport figure tell different stories.
Several mechanisms are consistent with that gap. Many of these inbound flights are the aircraft's first leg of the day, after a night parked at the spoke, so there is no earlier delay to inherit: Greer to Atlanta ran 95.5% on time between 5am and 8am. The top 20 as a group lean towards early departures much more than the national schedule does. Atlanta has five parallel runways and one of the highest arrival rates of any airport in the world, so in good weather the arrival queue is short. And a hub airline has every reason to build generous block times into the flights that feed its connecting banks, because a late inbound breaks dozens of onward connections.
The rest of the top 20 is mostly Western: Portland to Salt Lake City at 89.1% and its reverse, San Diego to Los Angeles at 87.4%, and Los Angeles to Reno. Dry climates, few afternoon thunderstorms and, at Salt Lake City, an unusually punctual hub all help. Long flights into Charlotte from Phoenix and Las Vegas also appear, another case of flying into a hub rather than out of one.
Where Hawaii sits
Hawaii's inter-island routes are the obvious candidates for this list, and they do rank well: Honolulu to Kona ran 85.3% and Honolulu to Kahului 84.1%. That places them in the top tenth of the busy routes, not the top 20.
Where they lead is on the size of the delays. The busy routes with the smallest share of flights arriving an hour or more late were Honolulu (HNL) to Kailua-Kona (KOA), Honolulu (HNL) to Kahului (OGG) and Honolulu (HNL) to Hilo (ITO), at 2.4% to 2.5%. The shortest average delays were also on inter-island routes, led by Honolulu (HNL) to Kailua-Kona (KOA) at 38.8 minutes per late flight. An inter-island flight is slightly more likely than an Atlanta feeder to be a few minutes late, and much less likely to be very late. For a traveller with a connection, that second measure is often the one that matters, and it is the one I would weight more heavily. The Hawaii guide covers those routes in full.
The bottom of the table: into San Francisco, out of the big hubs
50.0%70.0%
Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, September 2025 to August 2026.
Most of the weakest end falls into two groups.
The first is flights into San Francisco, from Las Vegas, Dallas/Fort Worth, Seattle, Los Angeles, Burbank, San Diego, Palm Springs and Denver. Los Angeles to San Francisco, one of the busiest routes in the country, ran 60.1%. San Francisco's two pairs of parallel runways sit so close together that in low cloud they cannot be used side by side, and the arrival rate drops sharply. Air traffic control then holds San Francisco-bound flights on the ground at their origin. The spring made it worse: from April to July 2026 several routes into San Francisco fell to roughly 35 to 50% on time. I suspected my own aggregation first; the raw month files show the same drop, and the data does not say why. The cause codes show where the minutes were charged: 56% of Los Angeles to San Francisco delay minutes were charged to the National Aviation System, the DOT category for traffic volume and air traffic control, against a national share of 21%.
The second group is flights leaving two of the weakest big hubs in the data, where departures ran 70.8% on time at O'Hare and 72.8% at Dallas/Fort Worth. O'Hare's short regional routes to Milwaukee, Fort Wayne and South Bend appear, as do Dallas/Fort Worth's flights to Orlando, San Diego and San Francisco. Chicago O'Hare to Milwaukee, a 67-mile hop, ran 64.3% and cancelled 4.68% of its flights. These departures inherit their hub's afternoon: late inbound aircraft, departure queues and, in summer, thunderstorms.
Share of all delay minutes. Darker is a bigger share. Air traffic is the National Airspace System category; weather is extreme weather only.
| Late aircraft | Airline | Air traffic | Weather | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GSP–ATL | 43 | 31 | 21 | 5 |
| PIT–ATL | 34 | 43 | 18 | 5 |
| PDX–SLC | 50 | 36 | 10 | 5 |
| HNL–OGG | 36 | 52 | 8 | 4 |
| LAX–SFO | 24 | 18 | 56 | 1 |
| SEA–SFO | 18 | 21 | 58 | 4 |
| ORD–MKE | 30 | 36 | 17 | 16 |
| DFW–MCO | 50 | 29 | 17 | 5 |
Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, September 2025 to August 2026.
The cause split separates the two ends. On the best routes, the minutes that exist are mostly charged to the airline or to late-arriving aircraft, the ordinary friction of running a schedule. On the San Francisco routes, the air traffic system dominates. On the O'Hare and Dallas departures, late aircraft and airline causes dominate: the delay arrived with the plane.
Cancellations are a different list
0.00%8.00%
Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, September 2025 to August 2026.
The routes that cancel most are largely a different set from the ones that run latest. New York (LGA) to Richmond (RIC) cancelled 7.16% of its flights, and the rest of the top ten is mostly short flights touching LaGuardia, Washington National and JFK. When a Northeast airport's arrival rate is cut, airlines thin out the short routes first, because passengers can be rebooked onto a later flight or a train. The median busy route cancelled 1.66%. The cancellations guide ranks every route on that measure.
How I use this before booking
Look at the direction. The same city pair can sit near the top in one direction and in the middle in the other. Check the route page for the flight you are actually taking.
Flying into a big hub has often been easier than flying out of one. At Atlanta and Charlotte, the inbound flights from the spokes outperformed the outbound ones on nearly every pair in the top 20.
Anything landing at San Francisco needs slack. At 60.1% for the Los Angeles shuttle, I would not put a tight connection or an evening commitment behind it. If your trip ends in the Bay Area, Oakland or San Jose sidestep that particular runway problem.
Check the very-late rate as well as the on-time rate. A route that runs a few minutes late often is less dangerous for a connection than one that runs very late occasionally.
Compare carriers on the route. Where two or more airlines fly the same pair, the gap between them can be larger than the gap between routes. The same route, different airline guide explains how to read it, and the compare tool puts any two routes side by side.
Compare the routes: Greer to Atlanta · Portland to Salt Lake City · Honolulu to Kahului · Los Angeles to San Francisco · Chicago to Milwaukee · Compare any US route