Carrier route record
WNORD→AUS
Southwest Airlines · Chicago to Austin
- Flights
- 207
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 7%
- Carriers
- 6
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Southwest Airlines.
Southwest on ORD to AUS draws a D+. Roughly one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is about an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 207 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 1,471 at 77.9% on time.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Southwest on ORD to AUS runs 15 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 153 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
62.3%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 204 completed flights
Avg delay
60 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.97%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
72.0%
Every carrier on ORD to AUS, 3,169 flights
These figures cover 207 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 14.7% 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
Southwest against every carrier on ORD to AUS
Southwest flew 207 of the 3,169 flights on ORD to AUS, about 7% of it. Its 62.3% on time is 10 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 72.0%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of six carriers on the route, where the range runs from United at 77.9% to Southwest at 62.3%. Three of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. United Airlines arrives on time 77.9% of the time; American Airlines manages 67.0%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 1,190 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United Airlines | 1,471 | 77.9% | 67 min | 1.09% | B |
| Envoy Airthin sample | 88 | 73.3% | 68 min | 2.27% | C |
| Republic Airwaysthin sample | 95 | 68.9% | 54 min | 5.26% | C− |
| American Airlines | 1,190 | 67.0% | 82 min | 2.86% | C |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 118 | 66.1% | 122 min | 5.08% | C− |
| Southwest Airlines (this page)thin sample | 207 | 62.3% | 60 min | 0.97% | D+ |
United leads American by 11 points. Real, but small enough that a better departure time on the weaker carrier can outweigh it.
Departure window
When Southwest 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 207 flights.
There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Southwest's ORD to AUS record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 62.3% is the reliable figure here.
Across the year
Southwest on ORD to AUS through the year
- Jul–Sep 202592 flights62.6%
- Oct–Dec 202532 flights84.4%
- Jan–Mar 202627 flights—
- Apr–Jun 202656 flights49.1%
Scale runs 40% to 90%. 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 62.3% on time across 207 flights.
Southwest on ORD to AUS did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Oct–Dec 2025 at 84.4% on time and its weakest Apr–Jun 2026 at 49.1%, a swing of 35 points on roughly 69 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, Monday is the strongest day at 66.7% on time and Tuesday the weakest at 58.1%. 9 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why Southwest runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 60% of the 4,598 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.
- 60%Late-arriving aircraft
- 19%Carrier
- 17%National Airspace System
- 3%Extreme weather
60% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. That is a cascade, and cascades start small and grow through the day. Across 4,598 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 23 to one. It is the strongest argument for booking the first departure of the morning, when the aircraft has been sitting at the gate overnight with nothing to inherit. The split is drawn from 4,598 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations sit at 0.97% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.48%.
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. 14.7% 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 977 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 68.8% on time across 207 flights, 7 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 7 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 207 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 Southwest on ORD to AUS
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 207 flights over twelve months is enough to clear this site's floor and not enough to be confident to better than a couple of points. The 62.3% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 204 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- ORD to AUS, every carrier
- Southwest on AUS to ORD, the return leg
- United Airlines on ORD to AUS77.9%
- American Airlines on ORD to AUS67.0%
- Frontier Airlines on ORD to AUS66.1%
- Southwest Airlines network-wide record
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- Austin-Bergstrom International (AUS) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- Same route, different airline: where the carrier you pick matters most
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.