Route reliability record
ORD→MSP
Chicago to Minneapolis
- Flights
- 6,324
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 334 mi
- Carriers
- 8
This route sits in the middle of the pack with a C. About seven flights in ten arrive on time by the DOT's definition, 8 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. The late ones land a little over an hour behind schedule. That rests on 6,324 flights, of which Envoy Air flew 1,084 at 74.2% on time.
Envoy Air is the most reliable of the five carriers covered here at 74.2% on time across 1,084 flights.
Key figures
On time
69.7%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 6,169 completed flights
Avg delay
81 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
2.28%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
Envoy
74.2% on time across 1,084 flights
These figures cover 6,324 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 12.1% 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
Which airline is most reliable on ORD to MSP
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Envoy Air arrives on time 74.2% of the time; SkyWest Airlines manages 67.1%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 702 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Envoy Air | 1,084 | 74.2% | 66 min | 2.77% | C |
| Republic Airways | 533 | 72.0% | 75 min | 6.19% | C− |
| United Airlines | 2,401 | 69.5% | 70 min | 1.04% | C |
| Delta Air Lines | 1,411 | 69.0% | 96 min | 1.98% | C |
| PSA Airlinesthin sample | 43 | 68.3% | 81 min | 4.65% | C− |
| SkyWest Airlines | 702 | 67.1% | 99 min | 3.42% | C− |
| American Airlinesthin sample | 137 | 51.1% | 118 min | 0.73% | F+ |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 13 | 50.0% | 52 min | 7.69% | F− |
Republic Airways cancels 6.2% 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
The best time of day to leave
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 29 points, against 7 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am768 flights86.9%
- 8am–11am1,263 flights78.7%
- 11am–2pm877 flights70.6%
- 2pm–5pm1,371 flights66.2%
- 5pm–8pm943 flights57.7%
- 8pm–5am1,102 flights60.6%
Scale runs 50% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 57.7% on time, against 86.9% 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 2pm–5pm window is the busiest, with 1,371 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 28 points from best month to worst, which is wide. An annual average tells you very little about the week you are actually flying, so read the strip rather than the headline if your dates are fixed.
December is the weak month at 50.1% on time, against 78.2% in May. 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. April was the busiest month here, with 583 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 73.0% on time and Friday the weakest at 67.5%. 6 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
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 151,000 reported delay minutes.
- 40%Late-arriving aircraft
- 30%Carrier
- 18%National Airspace System
- 12%Extreme weather
Extreme weather accounts for 12% of delay minutes, well above the single-digit share typical across the system. Weather delays are lumpy: they arrive as whole bad days rather than as a steady drag, so the monthly strip above is the more useful view of the risk. The national share is 6%, so this operation carries roughly 2.0 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 151,334 reported delay minutes.
40% 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 151,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 3 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.
Cancellations sit at 2.28% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.17%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here actually costs
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 12.1% 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.
At 334 miles this is a short hop, and stage length matters more than it looks. A flight this short spends under two hours in the air, which leaves almost nothing to claw back a late pushback with. Delay here is decided on the ground, in the turn, which is why the 5am–8am window matters as much as it does.
The return leg runs 69.9% on time across 6,324 flights, within half 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 6,324 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 this route
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. May runs 78.2% on time and December 50.1%, a swing of 28 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of December before you think about anything else. 6,169 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
ORD to MSP questions
How often is ORD to MSP delayed?
Roughly one flight in three arrive at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 30.3% of the 6,324 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by a little over an hour on average.
Which airline is most reliable on ORD to MSP?
Envoy Air leads at 74.2% on time across 1,084 flights. SkyWest Airlines is at the other end on 67.1%, a gap of 7 points. Sample size matters as much as the percentage: a rate built from a few hundred flights moves around far more than one built from ten thousand.
What time of day has the fewest delays on ORD to MSP?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 86.9% on time. The 5pm–8pm window is the weakest at 57.7%, 29 points behind. Later departures inherit delays from earlier flights the same aircraft has already flown, which is why the curve slopes the way it does.
How bad are December delays on ORD to MSP?
December is the weakest month at 50.1% on time, compared with 78.2% in May. Across the year that is 28 points between the best and worst months. Moving flexible dates out of that month is one of the few things that reliably helps.
Related
Where to go next
- MSP to ORD — the return legseparate record
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- Minneapolis-St Paul International (MSP) delay statistics
- Envoy Air on-time record74.2%
- Republic Airways on-time record72.0%
- United Airlines on-time record69.5%
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
Direction matters. ORD to MSP and MSP to ORD are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, July 2025 to June 2026. Updated monthly. How this data is collected.