Carrier route record
DLLGA→DCA
Delta Air Lines · New York to Washington
- Flights
- 117
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Share of route
- 2%
- Carriers
- 3
Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Delta Air Lines.
Delta on LGA to DCA draws a D−. Roughly one flight in two arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is an hour and a half behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 117 flights, with a median arrival 1 minute late.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.3%, so Delta on LGA to DCA runs 19 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 189 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
58.4%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 113 completed flights
Avg delay
84 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
3.42%
National rate is 1.89%
Whole route
65.5%
Every carrier on LGA to DCA, 4,840 flights
These figures cover 117 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 21.2% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.
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Carrier by carrier
Delta against every carrier on LGA to DCA
Delta flew 117 of the 4,840 flights on LGA to DCA, about 2% of it. Its 58.4% on time is 7 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 65.5%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Republic at 65.7% to Delta at 58.4%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
Only one carrier clears this site's 365-flight floor here, so there is no comparison to draw. The table below is the full picture.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Republic Airways | 4,699 | 65.7% | 61 min | 5.83% | C− |
| American Airlinesthin sample | 24 | 60.9% | 110 min | 4.17% | D− |
| Delta Air Lines (this page)thin sample | 117 | 58.4% | 84 min | 3.42% | D− |
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Departure window
When Delta runs best on this route
Departure time is the single lever a traveller controls, and it moves the odds more than most people expect. Each bar below is the on-time rate for flights scheduled to leave inside that window, across 117 flights.
There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Delta's LGA to DCA record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 58.4% is the reliable figure here.
Across the year
Delta on LGA to DCA through the year
- Apr–Jun 202655 flights60.0%
- Jul–Sep 202662 flights56.9%
Scale runs 50% to 65%.
Monthly volumes are too low here to break the year into twelve reliable readings. What the twelve-month total says is 58.4% on time across 117 flights.
Split by quarter, Delta on LGA to DCA logged 55 flights in Apr–Jun 2026 and 62 flights in Jul–Sep 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 58.4% annual figure is the one to use.
Arrival by arrival
How late Delta on LGA to DCA runs when it is late
Delta on LGA to DCA often beats the schedule: 36 of 113 completed flights, 32%, arrived 15 minutes or more early. When Delta on LGA to DCA is late it tends to be very late: 24 of its 47 late arrivals were an hour or more behind, and 11 were two hours or more.
- 15+ min early36 flights31.9%
- Within 15 min30 flights26.5%
- 15–29 min late7 flights6.2%
- 30–59 min late16 flights14.2%
- 1–2 hours late13 flights11.5%
- 2+ hours late11 flights9.7%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of 113 completed flights by arrival against schedule.
12 of 51 late departures made up the time and arrived on time, 24% of them. In the other direction, 8 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 DCA.
The worst days
Worst days for Delta on LGA to DCA
The latest arrival of the period was on 18 July 2026, 4 hours 6 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as national airspace system delay. On three of the five worst days the largest share was filed as a late-arriving aircraft.
| Date | Arrived late by | Largest filed cause |
|---|---|---|
| 18 July 2026 | 4 hours 6 minutes | National Airspace System |
| 27 August 2026 | 3 hours 40 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 12 June 2026 | 3 hours 39 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 6 August 2026 | 3 hours 32 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 14 June 2026 | 3 hours 22 minutes | National Airspace System |
Delay causes
Why Delta 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 3,949 reported delay minutes.
- 41%Late-arriving aircraft
- 35%National Airspace System
- 24%Carrier
- 0%Extreme weather
41% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 3,949 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 41 to one. The split is drawn from 3,949 reported delay minutes.
35% 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 1,376 minutes out of 3,949, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations run at 3.42%, against 1.89% nationally. That is about one flight in 30 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
21.2% 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.
At 214 miles this is a short hop, and stage length matters more than it looks. A flight this short spends under two hours in the air, which leaves almost nothing to claw back a late pushback with. Delay here is decided on the ground, in the turn, which is why the 8pm–5am window matters as much as it does.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 89.3% on time across 116 flights, 31 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 31 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 117 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 Delta on LGA to DCA
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 3.42% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you an hour and a half; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 8pm–5am departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 113 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- LGA to DCA, every carrier
- Delta on DCA to LGA, the return leg
- Republic Airways on LGA to DCA65.7%
- Delta Air Lines network-wide record
- LaGuardia (LGA) delay statistics
- Ronald Reagan Washington National (DCA) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated ; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.