Carrier route record
WNDEN→LGA
Southwest Airlines · Denver to New York
- Flights
- 1,467
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 31%
- Carriers
- 4
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Southwest Airlines.
Southwest on DEN to LGA draws a D. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is about an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 1,467 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Delta Air Lines, flew 1,036 at 79.0% on time.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Southwest on DEN to LGA runs 14 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 136 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
64.0%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,416 completed flights
Avg delay
60 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
2.66%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
71.5%
Every carrier on DEN to LGA, 4,672 flights
These figures cover 1,467 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 12.6% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule. That is the number that wrecks a connection, and it is not visible in an on-time percentage alone.
Carrier by carrier
Southwest against every carrier on DEN to LGA
Southwest flew 1,467 of the 4,672 flights on DEN to LGA, about 31% of it. Its 64.0% on time is 8 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 71.5%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number three of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 79.0% to Frontier at 61.6%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The two carriers here are closely matched: 5 points separate the best from the worst. At that spread, schedule and price are better tie-breakers than reliability. Sample sizes are shown so you can see which rows are worth weighing.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Delta Air Lines | 1,036 | 79.0% | 81 min | 4.44% | B− |
| United Airlines | 2,017 | 74.0% | 69 min | 1.83% | C |
| Southwest Airlines (this page) | 1,467 | 64.0% | 60 min | 2.66% | D |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 152 | 61.6% | 76 min | 3.95% | D− |
Delta Air Lines cancels 4.4% of what it schedules here, the highest in the table. A cancelled flight never appears in an on-time rate, so read that column alongside the punctuality one rather than after it.
Departure window
When Southwest runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 47 points, against 5 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am282 flights93.5%
- 8am–11am387 flights69.7%
- 11am–2pm213 flights58.7%
- 2pm–5pm263 flights46.9%
- 5pm–8pm322 flights47.8%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 40% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 93.5% of the time, against 46.9% for the afternoon window. That is 47 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 387 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Southwest on DEN to LGA through the year
June is the worst month at 49.6% on time, 30 points below February, the best at 79.4%. Summer afternoon convection and peak-season schedules land on the same weeks every year, so this is a pattern you can book around rather than a run of bad luck. June was the busiest month here, with 142 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 74.4% on time and Sunday the weakest at 52.5%. 22 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why Southwest runs late on this route
Carriers report a reason for every delay minute they cause, in five DOT categories. The split below is by minutes, not by number of flights, so a handful of very long weather delays weighs as much as many short ones. It covers 31,000 reported delay minutes.
- 38%National Airspace System
- 34%Carrier
- 27%Late-arriving aircraft
- 1%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
38% of delay minutes are charged to the National Airspace System: air traffic volume, runway configuration, ground stops. No carrier can price its way out of that, which is why airport choice moves the number here more than carrier choice does. That is 12,000 minutes out of 31,000, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 30,593 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations run at 2.66%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about one flight in 40 cancelled outright. A cancelled flight is invisible in every on-time figure on this page, so the punctuality numbers above describe only the flights that actually operated.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 12.6% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% nationally. A 45-minute layover does not survive that, and no amount of walking quickly changes it. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.
At 1,620 miles this is transcontinental flying, and long routes get a quiet structural advantage. Scheduled block time on a flight this length carries more padding in absolute minutes, so a twenty-minute late departure often still becomes an on-time arrival. Read the on-time rate here as slightly flattering next to a short-haul route with the same operational quality.
The return leg runs 61.1% on time across 1,467 flights, within 3 points of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.
The sample behind these figures is 1,467 flights, enough that the headline rate is stable to within roughly a point. The hour-block and month splits divide that further, so read the thinner bars with more caution than the headline.
What to do with this
Booking Southwest on DEN to LGA
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. February runs 79.4% on time and June 49.6%, a swing of 30 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of June before you think about anything else. 1,416 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- DEN to LGA, every carrier
- Southwest on LGA to DEN, the return leg
- Delta Air Lines on DEN to LGA79.0%
- United Airlines on DEN to LGA74.0%
- Frontier Airlines on DEN to LGA61.6%
- Southwest Airlines network-wide record
- Denver International (DEN) delay statistics
- LaGuardia (LGA) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- What a cancellation rate actually tells you (and what it hides)
Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, July 2025 to June 2026. Last updated 15 September 2026; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.