Data from OnTimeIndex
Morning Flights Arrived On Time 88% of the Time. Evening Flights, 69%.
From Aug. 2025 to July 2026, flights scheduled 5–8:59 a.m. arrived on time 88.1% of the time; 6–10:59 p.m. flights, 69.3%. Morning led at all 37 big airports.
From August 2025 through July 2026, U.S. airline flights scheduled to leave between 5:00 and 8:59 a.m. arrived on time 88.1% of the time. Flights scheduled to leave between 6:00 and 10:59 p.m. arrived on time 69.3% of the time. That is a gap of 18.8 percentage points, from the federal on-time record behind OnTimeIndex, Veraino’s flight-reliability site.
The gap is not a few big airports pulling an average. Among the 37 airports with enough flights in both windows to measure, the morning rate beat the evening rate at all 37.
88.1% vs 69.3%on-time arrivals for flights scheduled 5:00–8:59 a.m. versus 6:00–10:59 p.m.
37 of 37large airports had a higher on-time rate for morning departures than evening ones.
91.7% to 68.3%the on-time rate of the 5 a.m. hour against the 8 p.m. hour, the best and worst hours of the day.
What counts as on time
Federal rules define 14 CFR § 234.2 “on-time” as “a flight that arrives less than 15 minutes after its published arrival time.” Every figure here uses that line. The hour is the flight’s scheduled departure hour at the airport it leaves, in local time, and the rate is the share of flights that filed an arrival which met the 15-minute line. Cancelled and diverted flights have no filed arrival and are counted separately.
The day, hour by hour
The on-time rate falls through the day. It is 91.7% for flights scheduled to leave in the 5 a.m. hour, 89.9% at 6, 87.4% at 7 and 85.5% at 8. By noon it is 78.6%, by 5 p.m. 69.8%, and it bottoms out at 68.3% in the 8 p.m. hour. Across the 12 months there were 7,618,111 filed arrivals in all; the two windows above hold 1,800,438 (morning) and 1,603,551 (evening) of them.
Cancellations lean the same way. Of flights scheduled in the morning window, 1.64% were cancelled; in the evening window, 2.54% were.
At the airports that carry the most flights
To keep the comparison fair we required at least 10,000 filed arrivals in each window at an airport over the 12 months, which leaves 37 airports of the 369 in the data. The table shows the 15 of them with the most flights across the two windows, widest gap first.
| Departing airport | 5:00–8:59 a.m. | 6:00–10:59 p.m. | Gap (points) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Orlando (MCO) | 90.8% | 60.2% | 30.7 |
| Boston (BOS) | 87.0% | 61.1% | 25.9 |
| Denver (DEN) | 89.9% | 66.5% | 23.4 |
| New York LaGuardia (LGA) | 86.1% | 64.2% | 21.9 |
| Las Vegas (LAS) | 89.4% | 67.8% | 21.7 |
| Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW) | 84.0% | 64.2% | 19.8 |
| Phoenix (PHX) | 88.7% | 69.4% | 19.4 |
| Chicago O'Hare (ORD) | 82.5% | 63.3% | 19.3 |
| Charlotte (CLT) | 89.0% | 71.7% | 17.4 |
| Atlanta (ATL) | 88.4% | 71.8% | 16.6 |
| San Francisco (SFO) | 89.2% | 74.6% | 14.6 |
| Detroit (DTW) | 83.9% | 71.0% | 12.9 |
| Houston Intercontinental (IAH) | 88.3% | 75.8% | 12.5 |
| Los Angeles (LAX) | 87.4% | 77.4% | 10.0 |
| Seattle (SEA) | 87.4% | 77.9% | 9.5 |
Share of arriving flights less than 15 minutes late, by scheduled departure hour at the listed airport, August 2025 – July 2026, all reporting airlines combined. Source: DOT/BTS on-time filings.
Across all 37 airports the gap was at least 10 points at 32 and at least 20 points at 17. The widest was Dallas Love Field at 33.3 points (90.6% against 57.3%), then Orlando at 30.7. For a look at the early-morning edge on its own, see OnTimeIndex’s guide to early-morning and red-eye flights.
Where the pattern is weaker
- It is not a straight line down. After 8 p.m. the rate recovers a little: 71.2% in the 9 p.m. hour, 72.6% at 10 p.m. and 80.5% at 11 p.m. (59,900 filed arrivals), so the very latest flights run better than the mid-evening ones.
- Some airports show a small gap. Honolulu’s was the narrowest of the 37 at 6.6 points (91.1% against 84.5%), and Salt Lake City, Portland, Seattle and Washington Dulles were under 10. Mornings still came out ahead at each.
- The size of the gap moves with the season. Morning led in each of the 12 months. It was narrowest in January 2026 (85.2% against 74.7%, 10.5 points) and widest in July 2026 (87.8% against 58.0%, 29.8 points).
What this data does not tell you
- Why evenings run later. The filings record when flights arrived, not why the rate changes through the day, so we do not claim a cause.
- Your flight. These are rates across millions of flights. A given airline, route and day can run very differently, and a morning flight can still be late.
- Whether a seat is available or costs more. Fares and schedules are outside the on-time record.
- Airports below the floor. 332 airports did not have 10,000 filed arrivals in both windows and are not in the airport count.
How we ran the numbers
Figures come from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics’ Marketing Carrier On-Time Performance filings for August 2025 through July 2026, as loaded into OnTimeIndex and queried on October 26, 2026. Rates are summed on-time arrivals divided by summed filed arrivals, not averages of monthly or airport percentages. The morning window is scheduled departure hours 5 through 8 and the evening window is hours 18 through 22; flights scheduled outside 5:00 a.m.–10:59 p.m. appear only in the hour-by-hour figures. Airports need at least 10,000 filed arrivals in each window to be counted. We repeated the totals and every airport figure with a separately filtered pull of the same table and the results matched exactly.