Carrier route record
NKORD→LGA
Spirit Airlines · Chicago to New York
- Flights
- 284
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Share of route
- 2%
- Carriers
- 6
Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Spirit Airlines.
Spirit on ORD to LGA earns an F−, which is as low as this site's scale goes for a reason. Only 48.8% of flights arrive inside the 15-minute window, 29 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 284 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Republic Airways, flew 1,284 at 71.5% on time.
Republic Airways is the most reliable of the four carriers covered here at 71.5% on time across 1,284 flights.
Key figures
On time
48.8%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 254 completed flights
Avg delay
101 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
9.86%
National rate is 1.89%
Whole route
66.6%
Every carrier on ORD to LGA, 11,630 flights
These figures cover 284 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 28.3% 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
Spirit against every carrier on ORD to LGA
Spirit flew 284 of the 11,630 flights on ORD to LGA, about 2% of it. Its 48.8% on time is 18 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 66.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of six carriers on the route, where the range runs from Republic at 71.5% to Spirit at 48.8%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The four carriers here are closely matched: 6 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Republic Airways | 1,284 | 71.5% | 69 min | 8.64% | C− |
| Delta Air Lines | 2,309 | 68.7% | 96 min | 5.89% | C− |
| United Airlines | 4,671 | 66.1% | 83 min | 3.98% | C− |
| American Airlines | 2,990 | 65.6% | 80 min | 4.65% | C− |
| SkyWest Airlinesthin sample | 92 | 61.0% | 69 min | 16.30% | D− |
| Spirit Airlines (this page)thin sample | 284 | 48.8% | 101 min | 9.86% | F− |
Republic Airways cancels 8.6% 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 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 31 points, against 6 points between the best and worst carrier.
- 5am–8am3 flights—
- 8am–11am—
- 11am–2pm73 flights69.1%
- 2pm–5pm75 flights47.1%
- 5pm–8pm133 flights38.1%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 30% to 75%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 38.1% on time, against 69.1% for the 11am–2pm 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 5pm–8pm window is the busiest, with 133 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Spirit on ORD to LGA through the year
- Jul–Sep 202531 flights83.3%
- Oct–Dec 2025133 flights51.7%
- Jan–Mar 202691 flights34.2%
- Apr–Jun 202629 flights—
Scale runs 25% 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 48.8% on time across 284 flights.
Spirit on ORD to LGA did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Jul–Sep 2025 at 83.3% on time and its weakest Jan–Mar 2026 at 34.2%, a swing of 49 points on roughly 95 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 59.0% on time and Monday the weakest at 40.0%, a spread of 19 points.
Arrival by arrival
How late Spirit on ORD to LGA runs when it is late
When Spirit on ORD to LGA is late it tends to be very late: 72 of its 130 late arrivals were an hour or more behind, and 34 were two hours or more.
- 15+ min early20 flights7.9%
- Within 15 min104 flights40.9%
- 15–29 min late22 flights8.7%
- 30–59 min late36 flights14.2%
- 1–2 hours late38 flights15.0%
- 2+ hours late34 flights13.4%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of 254 completed flights by arrival against schedule.
Time lost at the gate mostly stays lost. Of 114 departures that left 15 minutes late or more, only 5 made it up before arrival. In the other direction, 21 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 LGA.
The worst days
Worst days for Spirit on ORD to LGA
The latest arrival of the period was on 30 March 2026, 13 hours 49 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 carrier-caused (crew, maintenance, fuelling, baggage).
| Date | Arrived late by | Largest filed cause |
|---|---|---|
| 30 March 2026 | 13 hours 49 minutes | National Airspace System |
| 13 November 2025 | 12 hours 15 minutes | Carrier |
| 6 March 2026 | 8 hours 44 minutes | Carrier |
| 30 November 2025 | 6 hours 7 minutes | Carrier |
| 30 October 2025 | 4 hours 37 minutes | National Airspace System |
Delay causes
Why Spirit runs late on this route
National Airspace System accounts for 53% of the 13,000 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.
- 53%National Airspace System
- 23%Carrier
- 21%Late-arriving aircraft
- 3%Extreme weather
53% 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 6,930 minutes out of 13,000, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 13,070 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations run at 9.86%, against 1.89% nationally. That is about one flight in ten 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
28.3% 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 733 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 64.0% on time across 284 flights, 15 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 15 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 284 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 ORD to LGA
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 9.86% 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. 254 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- ORD to LGA, every carrier
- Spirit on LGA to ORD, the return leg
- Republic Airways on ORD to LGA71.5%
- Delta Air Lines on ORD to LGA68.7%
- United Airlines on ORD to LGA66.1%
- American Airlines on ORD to LGA65.6%
- Spirit Airlines network-wide record
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- LaGuardia (LGA) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.05 million flight records
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.