Carrier route record
B6TPA→LGA
JetBlue Airways · Tampa to New York
- Flights
- 478
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 17%
- Carriers
- 5
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with JetBlue Airways.
JetBlue on TPA to LGA draws a D−. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is a little over an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 478 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, American Airlines, flew 690 at 78.5% on time.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so JetBlue on TPA to LGA runs 13 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 131 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
64.5%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 459 completed flights
Avg delay
79 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
3.77%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
72.7%
Every carrier on TPA to LGA, 2,841 flights
These figures cover 478 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 14.8% 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
JetBlue against every carrier on TPA to LGA
JetBlue flew 478 of the 2,841 flights on TPA to LGA, about 17% of it. Its 64.5% on time is 8 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 72.7%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number three of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from American at 78.5% to Southwest at 33.3%. Two of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The two 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| American Airlines | 690 | 78.5% | 122 min | 3.04% | B− |
| Delta Air Lines | 1,666 | 72.8% | 84 min | 3.30% | C− |
| JetBlue Airways (this page) | 478 | 64.5% | 79 min | 3.77% | D− |
| Republic Airwaysthin sample | 4 | 50.0% | 40 min | 0.00% | F+ |
| Southwest Airlinesthin sample | 3 | 33.3% | 49 min | 0.00% | F+ |
Delta Air Lines cancels 3.3% 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 JetBlue runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 17 points, against 6 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am—
- 8am–11am95 flights68.1%
- 11am–2pm158 flights73.7%
- 2pm–5pm—
- 5pm–8pm224 flights56.3%
- 8pm–5am1 flights—
Scale runs 50% to 80%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 56.3% on time, against 73.7% 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 224 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
JetBlue on TPA to LGA through the year
July is the worst month at 43.9% on time, 42 points below September, the best at 85.4%. Summer afternoon convection and peak-season schedules land on the same weeks every year, so this is a pattern you can book around rather than a run of bad luck. January was the busiest month here, with 62 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 74.6% on time and Sunday the weakest at 49.2%. 25 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why JetBlue runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 43% 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.
- 43%Late-arriving aircraft
- 34%National Airspace System
- 21%Carrier
- 2%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
43% 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 13,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 27 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 12,934 reported delay minutes.
34% 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 4,461 minutes out of 13,000, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations run at 3.77%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about one flight in 25 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. 14.8% 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 1,010 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 runs 66.8% on time across 477 flights, within 2 points of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 478 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 JetBlue on TPA to LGA
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 3.77% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you a little over an hour; 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. 459 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- TPA to LGA, every carrier
- JetBlue on LGA to TPA, the return leg
- American Airlines on TPA to LGA78.5%
- Delta Air Lines on TPA to LGA72.8%
- JetBlue Airways network-wide record
- Tampa International (TPA) delay statistics
- LaGuardia (LGA) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
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.