Carrier route record
NKLGA→MIA
Spirit Airlines · New York to Miami
- Flights
- 418
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 7%
- Carriers
- 5
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Spirit Airlines.
Spirit on LGA to MIA draws a C−. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is a little over an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 418 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, American Airlines, flew 3,549 at 71.5% on time.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Spirit on LGA to MIA runs 12 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 115 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
66.1%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 389 completed flights
Avg delay
79 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
6.94%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
70.6%
Every carrier on LGA to MIA, 6,006 flights
These figures cover 418 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 15.9% 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
Spirit against every carrier on LGA to MIA
Spirit flew 418 of the 6,006 flights on LGA to MIA, about 7% of it. Its 66.1% on time is 5 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 70.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from Republic at 75.0% to Spirit at 66.1%. Two of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The two carriers here are closely matched: about 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Republic Airwaysthin sample | 4 | 75.0% | 107 min | 0.00% | B+ |
| American Airlines | 3,549 | 71.5% | 93 min | 3.69% | C− |
| Delta Air Lines | 1,916 | 70.2% | 69 min | 3.97% | C− |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 119 | 67.3% | 247 min | 10.08% | C− |
| Spirit Airlines (this page) | 418 | 66.1% | 79 min | 6.94% | C− |
Delta Air Lines cancels 4.0% 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 Spirit runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 20 points, against about a point between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am—
- 8am–11am95 flights77.7%
- 11am–2pm98 flights58.0%
- 2pm–5pm3 flights—
- 5pm–8pm19 flights—
- 8pm–5am203 flights64.7%
Scale runs 50% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The weak window here is the middle of the day, not the evening: 11am–2pm runs 58.0% on time against 77.7% for 8am–11am. That shape usually means a departure bank rather than an accumulating delay, so the recovery later in the afternoon is real rather than noise. The 8pm–5am window is the busiest, with 203 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Spirit on LGA to MIA through the year
- Jul–Sep 202595 flights81.9%
- Oct–Dec 2025114 flights57.4%
- Jan–Mar 2026178 flights61.8%
- Apr–Jun 202631 flights70.0%
Scale runs 50% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Monthly volumes are too low here to break the year into twelve reliable readings. What the twelve-month total says is 66.1% on time across 418 flights.
Spirit on LGA to MIA did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Jul–Sep 2025 at 81.9% on time and its weakest Oct–Dec 2025 at 57.4%, a swing of 25 points on roughly 105 flights a quarter. The twelve-month rate averages over that, so if you are flying in a weak quarter the quarter's own figure is the better guide.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 75.9% on time and Sunday the weakest at 56.9%. 19 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why Spirit runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. National Airspace System accounts for 59% of the 10,000 delay minutes carriers reported, and the remaining four split what is left. The split is by minutes rather than by flights, so a few very long delays count for as much as many short ones.
- 59%National Airspace System
- 29%Late-arriving aircraft
- 12%Carrier
- 0%Security
59% 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 6,088 minutes out of 10,000, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 10,384 reported delay minutes.
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 77.7% on time here.
Cancellations run at 6.94%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about one flight in fifteen 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. 15.9% 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 1,096 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 59.0% on time across 422 flights, 7 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 7 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 418 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 Spirit on LGA to MIA
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 6.94% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you a little over an hour; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 8am–11am departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 389 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- LGA to MIA, every carrier
- Spirit on MIA to LGA, the return leg
- American Airlines on LGA to MIA71.5%
- Delta Air Lines on LGA to MIA70.2%
- Frontier Airlines on LGA to MIA67.3%
- Spirit Airlines network-wide record
- LaGuardia (LGA) delay statistics
- Miami International (MIA) 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.