Delayed vs Cancelled: Different Villains (2025 to 2026)
Weather barely delays flights but is the main reason they get cancelled. Delays come from the airlines themselves; cancellations come from the sky.
Key findings
- Delays and cancellations are not the same problem. Weather caused just 6.4% of delay minutes in 2025 and 2026, but 64.3% of cancellations.
- When your flight is merely late, it is overwhelmingly the airline's own operation: late-arriving aircraft and carrier-controlled causes together accounted for 72.2% of all delay minutes.
- When your flight is cancelled outright, it is mostly the sky: weather is the single biggest cancellation cause by a wide margin, ahead of airline and airspace reasons.
- So the fix differs by outcome. Late flights trace back to how airlines schedule and run their fleets; cancelled flights trace back to the weather.
"Flight problems" get lumped together, but the data pulls them apart. For delayed flights, airlines report how many minutes each cause contributed; for cancelled flights, they report a single reason code. This compares the two for every applicable U.S. flight from January 2025 through August 2026. The result is a clean contrast: delay minutes are dominated by the airlines' own cascade of late aircraft and carrier issues, while cancellations are dominated by weather. One caveat worth noting: the weather delay bucket counts only delay blamed directly on extreme weather, so some weather effect is also hidden inside the late-aircraft and airspace buckets. BTS is a near-census of domestic airline operations, so these are exact counts.
Weather: a tale of two outcomes
What causes delay minutes
| Category | Share of delay minutes |
|---|---|
| Late-arriving aircraft | 39.5% |
| Airline (carrier-controlled) | 32.6% |
| National Airspace System | 21.3% |
| Weather | 6.4% |
| Security | 0.1% |
What causes cancellations
| Category | Share of cancellations |
|---|---|
| Weather | 64.3% |
| Airline (carrier-controlled) | 20.8% |
| National Airspace System | 14.9% |
| Security | 0.1% |
Delay minutes vs cancellations, by cause
| Cause | Share of delay minutes | Share of cancellations |
|---|---|---|
| Weather | 6.4% | 64.3% |
| Airline (carrier-controlled) | 32.6% | 20.8% |
| National Airspace System | 21.3% | 14.9% |
| Security | 0.1% | 0.1% |
| Late-arriving aircraft | 39.5% | n/a (not a cancel code) |
Delay shares are of total delay minutes on flights 15+ minutes late; cancellation shares are of coded cancellations. "Late-arriving aircraft" is a delay cause only; it is not a cancellation reason code. Exact counts; no sampling margins of error.
Data Sources & Methodology
The figures on this page are computed directly from the source data below. Narrative text accompanies the figures but never generates them.
Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) Reporting Carrier On-Time Performance
- Vintage:
- 2025 to 2026
- Access:
- BigQuery
- Cadence:
- monthly
Flight-level on-time performance records for domestic flights operated by large U.S. air carriers, reported monthly to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Each row is one scheduled flight, with scheduled and actual departure and arrival times, delay minutes broken out by cause, taxi times, and cancellation and diversion flags. It is a near-census of U.S. domestic airline operations by the reporting carriers.
Air carriers that account for at least one percent of domestic scheduled passenger revenue must report on-time data for every domestic flight they operate. The monthly file is a frozen extract of those flight records for the reporting month.
The file is administrative data covering the reporting carriers’ domestic flights, not a probability sample. Statistics are exact counts and shares over the reported flights; there are no sampling weights and no sampling margins of error.
A flight is counted as delayed when it arrives 15 or more minutes late. For such flights, the delay minutes are attributed across five causes: air carrier, extreme weather, National Airspace System, security, and late-arriving aircraft, following BTS reporting rules.
Each flight carries origin and destination airport codes, which roll up to city, state, and metropolitan area. Scheduled and actual times are local to each airport.
- Coverage is limited to reporting carriers (large U.S. airlines) and their domestic flights; some regional, charter, and foreign operations fall outside the reporting thresholds.
- Delay-cause minutes are reported only for flights that arrive 15 or more minutes late and follow the BTS attribution rules, so cause breakdowns are not available for every late flight.
- Cancelled and diverted flights have no arrival-delay value and should be analyzed through their own flags rather than as delays.
- Times are local to each airport, so computing elapsed times across time zones requires care.
How these figures were produced
- Estimate type:
- Administrative near-census (exact counts)
- Weighting:
- None (not a weighted sample)
Suggested citation
U.S. Department of Transportation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, 2025 to 2026 Reporting Carrier On-Time Performance. Analysis by Matt George, itsmattgeorge.com. Retrieved 2026-10-22.