Carrier route record
DLLGA→FLL
Delta Air Lines · New York to Fort Lauderdale
- Flights
- 1,597
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 34%
- Carriers
- 4
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Delta Air Lines.
Delta on LGA to FLL carries a cancellation problem, not just a delay problem: 3.8% of scheduled flights never operate, against 1.8% nationally. Of the ones that do fly, about seven flights in ten arrive on time, worth a C− overall. The punctuality figure counts only flights that actually departed, so it flatters an operation that cancels this often. That rests on 1,597 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, American Airlines, flew 481 at 70.3% on time.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Delta on LGA to FLL runs 6 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 62 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
71.4%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,529 completed flights
Avg delay
67 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
3.76%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
68.8%
Every carrier on LGA to FLL, 4,655 flights
These figures cover 1,597 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 11.6% 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
Delta against every carrier on LGA to FLL
Delta flew 1,597 of the 4,655 flights on LGA to FLL, about 34% of it. Its 71.4% on time is 3 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 68.8%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 71.4% to JetBlue at 65.3%.
The three 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 (this page) | 1,597 | 71.4% | 67 min | 3.76% | C− |
| American Airlines | 481 | 70.3% | 78 min | 3.95% | C− |
| Spirit Airlines | 981 | 69.7% | 81 min | 6.63% | C− |
| JetBlue Airways | 1,596 | 65.3% | 85 min | 3.63% | C− |
Spirit Airlines cancels 6.6% 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.
Flight by flight
Delta flight numbers on LGA to FLL
Departure window
When Delta runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 22 points, against 5 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am365 flights82.8%
- 8am–11am126 flights68.6%
- 11am–2pm417 flights74.3%
- 2pm–5pm358 flights65.9%
- 5pm–8pm263 flights62.8%
- 8pm–5am68 flights60.9%
Scale runs 50% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 8pm–5am window is where this operation falls apart: 60.9% on time, against 82.8% for the 5am–8am 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 417 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Delta on LGA to FLL through the year
December is the weak month at 59.9% on time, against 87.7% in August. 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. March was the busiest month here, with 151 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 77.3% on time and Sunday the weakest at 61.9%. 15 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
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 29,000 reported delay minutes.
- 38%National Airspace System
- 32%Carrier
- 27%Late-arriving aircraft
- 4%Extreme weather
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 11,000 minutes out of 29,000, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 29,262 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations run at 3.76%, against 1.81% 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
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 11.6% 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.
The 1,076 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 runs 72.7% on time across 1,598 flights, within about a point 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 1,597 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 Delta on LGA to FLL
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 3.76% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you about an hour; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 5am–8am departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 1,529 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- LGA to FLL, every carrier
- Delta on FLL to LGA, the return leg
- American Airlines on LGA to FLL70.3%
- Spirit Airlines on LGA to FLL69.7%
- JetBlue Airways on LGA to FLL65.3%
- Delta Air Lines network-wide record
- LaGuardia (LGA) delay statistics
- Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International (FLL) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
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.