Carrier route record
NKORD→LGA
Spirit Airlines · Chicago to New York
- Flights
- 330
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 3%
- Carriers
- 6
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Spirit Airlines.
Spirit on ORD to LGA earns a D−, which is as low as this site's scale goes for a reason. Only 55.3% of flights arrive inside the 15-minute window, 22 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. Late arrivals average an hour and a half. Treat any tight connection here as a coin flip. That rests on 330 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Republic Airways, flew 1,297 at 71.0% on time.
Republic Airways is the most reliable of the four carriers covered here at 71.0% on time across 1,297 flights.
Key figures
On time
55.3%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 300 completed flights
Avg delay
99 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
8.48%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
67.3%
Every carrier on ORD to LGA, 11,625 flights
These figures cover 330 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 24.7% 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
Spirit against every carrier on ORD to LGA
Spirit flew 330 of the 11,625 flights on ORD to LGA, about 3% of it. Its 55.3% on time is 12 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 67.3%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of six carriers on the route, where the range runs from Republic at 71.0% to Spirit at 55.3%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Republic Airways arrives on time 71.0% of the time; American Airlines manages 64.7%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 2,948 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Republic Airways | 1,297 | 71.0% | 69 min | 8.64% | C− |
| Delta Air Lines | 2,296 | 70.3% | 98 min | 4.79% | C− |
| United Airlines | 4,662 | 67.4% | 81 min | 3.41% | C− |
| American Airlines | 2,948 | 64.7% | 80 min | 4.31% | D− |
| SkyWest Airlinesthin sample | 92 | 61.0% | 69 min | 16.30% | D− |
| Spirit Airlines (this page)thin sample | 330 | 55.3% | 99 min | 8.48% | D− |
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.
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 49 points, against 6 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am46 flights87.0%
- 8am–11am3 flights—
- 11am–2pm73 flights69.1%
- 2pm–5pm75 flights47.1%
- 5pm–8pm133 flights38.1%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 30% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 38.1% on time, against 87.0% 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 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 202577 flights88.2%
- Oct–Dec 2025133 flights51.7%
- Jan–Mar 202691 flights34.2%
- Apr–Jun 202629 flights—
Scale runs 25% to 95%. 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 55.3% on time across 330 flights.
Spirit on ORD to LGA did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Jul–Sep 2025 at 88.2% on time and its weakest Jan–Mar 2026 at 34.2%, a swing of 54 points on roughly 110 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 64.4% on time and Sunday the weakest at 48.7%. 16 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 52% of the 13,000 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.
- 52%National Airspace System
- 24%Carrier
- 21%Late-arriving aircraft
- 3%Extreme weather
52% 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 6,931 minutes out of 13,000, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 13,249 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations run at 8.48%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about one flight in twelve 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. 24.7% 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 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. 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 62.1% on time across 330 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. 330 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 8.48% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you an hour and a half; 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. 300 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 LGA71.0%
- Delta Air Lines on ORD to LGA70.3%
- United Airlines on ORD to LGA67.4%
- American Airlines on ORD to LGA64.7%
- 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 7.04 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.