Route reliability record
SEA→MFR
Seattle to Medford
- Flights
- 1,243
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 352 mi
- Carriers
- 1
This route earns an A+. Close to nine flights in ten arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 11 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about an hour. That rests on 1,243 SEA to MFR flights, with a median arrival 8 minutes early.
Best time to fly SEA to MFR: a 8pm–5am departure, ideally on a Tuesday. Flights in that window arrived on time 89.3% of the time and Tuesday flights 93.5%, against 88.2% for the route overall.
Set against the rest of the country, this route's record is 11 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 106 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
88.2%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,226 completed flights
Avg delay
64 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.97%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
SkyWest
88.2% on time across 1,243 flights
These figures cover 1,243 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 8 minutes early, which is the part an average hides: most flights here are fine, and the on-time rate is decided by a tail of badly late ones. On-time means under 15 minutes late, the DOT's own threshold.
Carrier by carrier
Which airline is most reliable on SEA to MFR
Only one carrier clears this site's 365-flight floor here, so there is no comparison to draw. The table below is the full picture.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkyWest Airlines | 1,243 | 88.2% | 64 min | 0.97% | A+ |
Flight by flight
Flights on SEA to MFR
The flight numbers below flew this route at least 250 times in the period, busiest first. Each has its own record, with its schedule and delay causes.
Departure window
The best time of day to leave
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 1,243 flights.
- 5am–8am—
- 8am–11am281 flights87.9%
- 11am–2pm148 flights83.4%
- 2pm–5pm418 flights88.9%
- 5pm–8pm37 flights89.2%
- 8pm–5am359 flights89.3%
Scale runs 75% to 95%. 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 83.4% on time against 89.3% for 8pm–5am. 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 2pm–5pm window is the busiest, with 418 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 14 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.
September is the best month on the calendar at 96.7% on time. Shoulder season thins the schedule and takes the summer weather with it, and the operation gets its margin back. May was the busiest month here, with 131 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 93.5% on time and Friday the weakest at 84.4%. 9 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 44% of the 9,265 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.
- 44%Carrier
- 36%Extreme weather
- 11%National Airspace System
- 9%Late-arriving aircraft
- 0%Security
Extreme weather accounts for 36% 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 5.8 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 9,265 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 44%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. Unlike weather, that is a management outcome, and it is the category where the gap between two carriers on the same schedule is genuinely earned. It accounts for 4,048 of the 9,265 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations sit at 0.97% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.40%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here actually costs
Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 4.2% land an hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% nationally. Connections built on this flight are about as safe as US domestic connections get, though a cancelled flight still ignores every layover you give it.
At 352 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 8pm–5am window matters as much as it does.
The return leg runs 91.0% on time across 1,244 flights, within 3 points 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 1,243 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.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in MFR after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. September runs 96.7% on time and May 82.4%, a swing of 14 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of May before you think about anything else. 1,226 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
SEA to MFR questions
How often is SEA to MFR delayed?
About one flight in eight arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 11.8% of the 1,243 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by about an hour on average.
How reliable is SEA to MFR compared with the rest of the country?
88.2% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.6%, a difference of 11 points in its favour. That is worth a A+ on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on SEA to MFR?
The 8pm–5am departure window is the strongest at 89.3% on time. The 11am–2pm window is the weakest at 83.4%, 6 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 May delays on SEA to MFR?
May is the weakest month at 82.4% on time, compared with 96.7% in September. Across the year that is 14 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
- MFR to SEA — the return legseparate record
- Seattle-Tacoma International (SEA) delay statistics
- SEA to LAX, a related route83.4%
- SFO to MFR, a related route79.2%
- SEA to PHX, a related route79.2%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record88.2%
- Worst months to fly in the US, ranked by the data
- Late aircraft, weather, or the airline: what actually causes US flight delays
Direction matters. SEA to MFR and MFR to SEA are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
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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.