Carrier route record

F9JFK→ORD

Frontier Airlines · New York to Chicago

Flights: 116
Period: September 2025 to August 2026
Share of route: 5%
Carriers: 5

Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Frontier Airlines.

Frontier on JFK to ORD earns an F−, which is as low as this site's scale goes for a reason. Only 51.4% of flights arrive inside the 15-minute window, 26 points worse than the national rate of 77.3%. Late arrivals average close to two hours. Treat any tight connection here as a coin flip. That rests on 116 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Republic Airways, flew 830 at 76.3% on time.

Republic Airways is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 76.3% on time across 830 flights.

On time

51.4%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 111 completed flights

Avg delay

101 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

4.31%

National rate is 1.89%

Whole route

70.4%

Every carrier on JFK to ORD, 2,136 flights

These figures cover 116 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 25.2% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.

Fare search by Aviasales, a Travelpayouts partner. Booking through it may earn this site a commission at no cost to you; it changes no figure here.

Carrier by carrier

Frontier against every carrier on JFK to ORD

Frontier flew 116 of the 2,136 flights on JFK to ORD, about 5% of it. Its 51.4% on time is 19 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 70.4%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from Republic at 76.3% to Frontier at 51.4%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Republic Airways arrives on time 76.3% of the time; JetBlue Airways manages 64.0%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 634 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on JFK to ORD
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Republic Airways	830	76.3%	77 min	5.78%	B−
American Airlines	542	73.1%	91 min	5.17%	C−
JetBlue Airways	634	64.0%	85 min	7.57%	D−
Delta Air Linesthin sample	14	61.5%	266 min	0.00%	D+
Frontier Airlines (this page)thin sample	116	51.4%	101 min	4.31%	F−

JetBlue Airways cancels 7.6% 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.

Timetable by Aviasales, a Travelpayouts partner. Booking through it may earn this site a commission at no cost to you; it changes no figure here.

Departure window

When Frontier runs best on this route

Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 34 points, against 12 points between the best and worst carrier.

5am–8am—
8am–11am—
11am–2pm68 flights65.2%
2pm–5pm48 flights31.1%
5pm–8pm—
8pm–5am—

Scale runs 25% to 70%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The best window here is not the first bank but the 11am–2pm slot at 65.2% on time, ahead of 2pm–5pm at 31.1%. Where the curve peaks mid-day rather than at dawn, the constraint is usually congestion at one end rather than the aircraft's own rotation. The 11am–2pm window is the busiest, with 68 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Frontier on JFK to ORD through the year

Oct–Dec 202557 flights61.8%
Jan–Mar 202659 flights41.1%

Scale runs 35% to 65%.

Monthly volumes are too low here to break the year into twelve reliable readings. What the twelve-month total says is 51.4% on time across 116 flights.

Split by quarter, Frontier on JFK to ORD logged 57 flights in Oct–Dec 2025 and 59 flights in Jan–Mar 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 51.4% annual figure is the one to use.

Arrival by arrival

How late Frontier on JFK to ORD runs when it is late

When Frontier on JFK to ORD is late it tends to be very late: 28 of its 54 late arrivals were an hour or more behind, and 18 were two hours or more.

15+ min early17 flights15.3%
Within 15 min40 flights36.0%
15–29 min late8 flights7.2%
30–59 min late18 flights16.2%
1–2 hours late10 flights9.0%
2+ hours late18 flights16.2%

Scale runs 0% to 100%.

Share of 111 completed flights by arrival against schedule.

Time lost at the gate mostly stays lost. Of 45 departures that left 15 minutes late or more, only 1 made it up before arrival. In the other direction, 10 flights left on time yet arrived 15 minutes late or more, so that delay built up after pushback: in the air, in a holding pattern or on the ground at ORD.

The worst days

Worst days for Frontier on JFK to ORD

The latest arrival of the period was on 26 January 2026, 8 hours 4 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as a late-arriving aircraft. Three of the five worst days fell in January 2026.

The latest arrivals of Frontier on JFK to ORD in the period
Date	Arrived late by	Largest filed cause
26 January 2026	8 hours 4 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft
15 March 2026	6 hours 11 minutes	National Airspace System
24 December 2025	4 hours 2 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft
30 January 2026	3 hours 59 minutes	National Airspace System
3 January 2026	3 hours 47 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft

Delay causes

Why Frontier runs late on this route

Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 72% of the 5,465 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.

Late-arriving aircraft
72%
National Airspace System
25%
Carrier
4%

72% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 5,465 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 72 to one. The split is drawn from 5,465 reported delay minutes.

Cancellations run at 4.31%, against 1.89% nationally. That is about one flight in 25 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

25.2% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum for a connection here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.

The 740 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.

The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 59.8% on time across 117 flights, 8 points above 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 8 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 116 flights over twelve months is enough to clear this site's floor but not enough to pin the rate down tightly, and a single bad week moves it by more than a point. Treat the grade as a rough reading.

What to do with this

Booking Frontier on JFK to ORD

Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 4.31% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you close to two hours; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 11am–2pm departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 111 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Where to go next

Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated 22 October 2026; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.

Key figures