Route reliability record
JAX→ORD
Jacksonville to Chicago
- Flights
- 2,062
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 864 mi
- Carriers
- 6
This route lands a B, level with the national rate of 77.6%. Roughly one flight in four arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by an hour and a half on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 2,062 JAX to ORD flights, of which United Airlines flew 893 at 77.8% on time.
Best time to fly JAX to ORD: a 8am–11am departure, ideally on a Saturday. Flights in that window arrived on time 89.4% of the time and Saturday flights 81.7%, against 77.3% for the route overall.
The US average over the same twelve months is 77.6%, so there is little to separate this route from the country as a whole. The variation that matters here is internal: which carrier, and what time of day.
Key figures
On time
77.3%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 2,014 completed flights
Avg delay
91 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.94%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
United
77.8% on time across 893 flights
These figures cover 2,062 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 9.1% 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
Which airline is most reliable on JAX to ORD
The two carriers here are closely matched: half a point 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PSA Airlinesthin sample | 1 | 100.0% | — | 0.00% | A+ |
| Republic Airwaysthin sample | 317 | 79.3% | 71 min | 4.73% | B− |
| United Airlines | 893 | 77.8% | 92 min | 0.67% | B+ |
| American Airlines | 465 | 77.6% | 126 min | 2.80% | B |
| Envoy Airthin sample | 236 | 75.2% | 67 min | 0.42% | B+ |
| SkyWest Airlinesthin sample | 150 | 72.2% | 64 min | 3.33% | C− |
No carrier stands out. United tops the table at 77.8%, half a point clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
Best ways to make this trip
The most reliable ways to fly Jacksonville to Chicago
Every airline on this route, ranked by how often a scheduled flight actually operated and arrived on time, with its best departure time and most punctual flight number. No nearby airport pair beat these.
| Option | Airline | Success | On time | Cancelled | Best departure | Most punctual flight |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. JAX → ORDJacksonville to Chicago | United Airlines | 77.3% | 77.8% | 0.67% | 5am–8am, Thu | — |
| 2. JAX → ORDJacksonville to Chicago | American Airlines | 75.4% | 77.6% | 2.80% | 5am–8am, Wed | — |
Success is the share of scheduled flights that operated and arrived less than 15 minutes late, so a cancelled flight counts against it. “(route)” means the best time comes from every carrier on the route rather than this airline alone.
Departure window
The best time of day to leave
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 25 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am447 flights87.6%
- 8am–11am276 flights89.4%
- 11am–2pm618 flights79.0%
- 2pm–5pm366 flights64.5%
- 5pm–8pm339 flights64.4%
- 8pm–5am16 flights—
Scale runs 55% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 64.4% on time, against 89.4% for the 8am–11am slot. By evening the aircraft flying these rotations have absorbed a full day of small delays and there is no slack left to recover in. The 11am–2pm window is the busiest, with 618 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 17 points from best month to worst, which is wide. An annual average tells you very little about the week you are actually flying, so read the strip rather than the headline if your dates are fixed.
January is the weak month at 67.3% on time, against 84.4% in April. Winter delays cluster: a single storm system can account for most of a month's shortfall, so an average December hides both very good weeks and genuinely unflyable days. May was the busiest month here, with 210 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 81.7% on time and Sunday the weakest at 71.5%. 10 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
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 42,000 reported delay minutes.
- 33%Late-arriving aircraft
- 31%National Airspace System
- 31%Carrier
- 4%Extreme weather
The practical consequence: the 8am–11am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 89.4% on time here. The split is drawn from 41,570 reported delay minutes.
No single cause dominates. late-arriving aircraft at 33%, national airspace system at 31% and carrier at 31% split the 42,000 reported delay minutes between them. An even spread like this usually means the operation is running close to its designed capacity with no one obvious weak point, and it is the hardest pattern for a traveller to route around.
Cancellations sit at 1.94% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.39%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here actually costs
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 9.1% 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.
The 864 miles between these two airports put this in the middle of the US network, around two and a half to three hours of block time. That is enough cruise to absorb a ten-minute late pushback and not enough to absorb thirty. It is also long enough that the aircraft usually flies three or four legs a day rather than six, which slows how fast delay compounds.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 72.7% on time across 2,062 flights, 5 points below this direction. Departure banks, aircraft rotations and the congestion at each end all differ, so scoring the two directions together would average away a real 5 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 2,062 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.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in ORD after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. April runs 84.4% on time and January 67.3%, a swing of 17 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of January before you think about anything else. 2,014 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
JAX to ORD questions
How often is JAX to ORD delayed?
Roughly one flight in four arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 22.7% of the 2,062 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by an hour and a half on average.
Which airline is most reliable on JAX to ORD?
United Airlines leads at 77.8% on time across 893 flights. American Airlines is at the other end on 77.6%, a gap of half a point. Sample size matters as much as the percentage: a rate built from a few hundred flights moves around far more than one built from ten thousand.
What time of day has the fewest delays on JAX to ORD?
The 8am–11am departure window is the strongest at 89.4% on time. The 5pm–8pm window is the weakest at 64.4%, 25 points behind. Later departures inherit delays from earlier flights the same aircraft has already flown, which is why the curve slopes the way it does.
How bad are January delays on JAX to ORD?
January is the weakest month at 67.3% on time, compared with 84.4% in April. Across the year that is 17 points between the best and worst months. Moving flexible dates out of that month is one of the few things that reliably helps.
Related
Where to go next
- ORD to JAX — the return legseparate record
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- Republic Airways on JAX to ORD79.3%
- United Airlines on JAX to ORD77.8%
- American Airlines on JAX to ORD77.6%
- Envoy Air on JAX to ORD75.2%
- SkyWest Airlines on JAX to ORD72.2%
- JAX to ATL, a related route84.9%
- LGA to ORD, a related route67.3%
- JAX to CLT, a related route80.8%
- PSA Airlines on-time record100.0%
- Republic Airways on-time record79.3%
- United Airlines on-time record77.8%
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- How often a connection fails at the major US hubs
Direction matters. JAX to ORD and ORD to JAX are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
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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.