What Is the Best Day to Fly in the US? Delays by Day of the Week

Matt — Founder & Airline Pilot. Published October 23, 2026. 7 min read.

Figures checked against DelayGuard BTS tables on 2026-10-23.

Short version: Tuesday. In BTS on-time data for January 2023 to December 2025, 18.6% of Tuesday departures from 39 large US airports arrived 15 or more minutes late. Sunday was the worst day, at 25.0%. Across all seven days the rate was 22.2%.

The day you fly does matter, but less than most people think, and less than the time of day you pick. Below is the full table, why the days differ, and how I'd use it when booking.

Short Answers

What is the best day to fly to avoid delays? Tuesday. 18.6% of Tuesday flights arrived 15+ minutes late, the lowest of any day of the week (BTS, January 2023 to December 2025).

What is the worst day to fly? Sunday. 25.0% of Sunday flights arrived 15+ minutes late, against 22.2% across all days.

Is Tuesday the least delayed day to fly? Yes. Tuesday ranked first of the seven days at 18.6%, with Wednesday close behind at 19.9%.

Does the day matter more than the time of day? No. The best and worst days are 6.4 points apart. Early-morning and evening departures are 17.7 points apart. Pick the departure time first, then the day.

Which Day of the Week Has the Fewest Delays?

The table shows the share of flights that arrived 15 or more minutes late, by day of the week. It covers 14,323,347 US domestic departures from 39 large US airports between January 2023 and December 2025.

Source: BTS On-Time Reporting, January 2023 to December 2025, day of the scheduled local departure. Cancelled and diverted flights are excluded.

Tuesday and Wednesday are the two cleanest days, at 18.6% and 19.9%. Thursday and Friday climb to 23.4% and 24.1%. The weekend splits: Saturday is third-best at 21.2%, while Sunday is the worst day of the week at 25.0%.

These are averages for 39 large airports, not every US airport, though the order of the days comes out the same when you run it for all US airports. They don't compare the same route on different days, and a few bad-weather weeks can nudge a day's number up or down.

Why Some Days Run Later Than Others

There's nothing special about a Thursday as such. What changes from day to day is how many flights are scheduled, who's on them, and how full the system is when something goes wrong.

Schedule volume. Airlines don't fly the same schedule every day. On a busy day, more flights are lined up for the same runways and the same airspace. When the weather drops the arrival rate at a big hub, there's a longer queue to work through, so holds get longer. In our table, the three days with the fewest flights (Saturday, Tuesday and Wednesday) were also the three days with the fewest delays.

Knock-on delays. Most aircraft fly several legs a day, and each one depends on the one before. If the first leg leaves 40 minutes late, the next one usually does too, unless there's slack in the schedule to soak it up. On a heavy day there's less slack. BTS tracks this as its own delay cause, "late-arriving aircraft", and it's the same chain that makes evening flights run later than morning ones.

Aircraft and crew rotations. This is the part you see from the flight deck. A crew is built into a trip that can last a few days, and the aircraft and the crew don't always stay together. When an inbound flight is late, it can hold up a different aircraft whose crew is still on the late one. Crews also have legal duty limits. If a long delay pushes a crew past their limit, the airline needs a replacement crew, and on a busy day the reserve crews may already be out flying. That's how a two-hour weather delay in the morning can still be causing cancellations in the evening.

Weather doesn't know what day it is. Thunderstorms, snow and low cloud hit whatever day they hit. Over three years that mostly evens out across the seven days.

Day of the Week vs. Time of Day

If you only change one thing, change the time. Across all US domestic flights in the same three years, flights scheduled to leave before 8 AM arrived late 11.0% of the time, against 28.7% for flights after 8 PM. That's a 17.7-point gap, almost three times the 6.4 points between Tuesday and Sunday. Those two time-of-day figures cover every US airport, a wider sample than the 39-airport day table, but the gap is about the same size at the 39 airports alone.

The reason is the same chain from above. The first flight of the day usually leaves with an aircraft that sat at the gate overnight and a crew that just signed on. Nothing earlier can make it late. By evening, the same aircraft may have flown four or five legs. The full breakdown by hour and by airport is in morning vs. evening flight delays.

We don't have a single figure for an early Tuesday flight versus a Sunday evening one, so read the two tables side by side rather than adding them up.

How to Use This When Booking

• Pick the time first. An early departure on your second-choice day usually beats an evening departure on the "best" day.
• If your dates are flexible, lean toward Tuesday or Wednesday. They were the two best days, and moving a leisure trip by a day is often easy.
• Be careful with Sunday evenings. Sunday is the worst day and evening is the worst time of day. If you have to fly then, avoid a tight connection and leave a gap before anything you can't miss.
• Holidays override the weekly pattern. Thanksgiving week and the days around Christmas run on their own schedule. Treat them separately (see the Thanksgiving and Christmas delay guide).
• Put the riskier leg first on a connection. If one leg goes through a busy hub or a weather-prone airport, fly it early, so there are more later flights to rebook onto if it goes wrong.

Check Your Specific Flight

Day of the week and time of day give you a baseline. Your route, airline, airport, season and the forecast move it up or down. DelayGuard's free predictor puts those together into a delay risk for your exact flight, across 80 US airports and 14 US airlines.

If you're flying today, live FAA delays and ground stops shows what's already happening at US airports.

FAQ

What is the best day to fly domestic in the US? For on-time arrival, Tuesday. 18.6% of Tuesday flights arrived 15+ minutes late in BTS data for January 2023 to December 2025, against 22.2% across all days.

Is Tuesday the cheapest day to fly? We don't track fares, so we can't say. On delays, Tuesday was the best day of the week, with 18.6% of flights arriving 15+ minutes late.

What is the worst day of the week to fly? Sunday, with 25.0% of flights arriving 15+ minutes late. Friday was next at 24.1%.

Is it better to fly on a weekday or a weekend? Weekdays averaged 21.8% and weekends 23.2%. Sunday pulls the weekend figure up. Saturday on its own was the third-best day, so you don't need to avoid both weekend days.

Are Sunday flights more likely to be delayed? Yes. Sunday flights arrived late 25.0% of the time, the highest of the seven days and 6.4 points above Tuesday.

What's the best day and time to fly to avoid delays? An early-morning flight on a Tuesday. Tuesday had the lowest delay rate of any day, and flights scheduled before 8 AM had the lowest rate of any time of day, at 11.0%. We don't have one combined figure for the two together.

Data: BTS On-Time Reporting, January 2023 to December 2025. Delay means arriving 15 or more minutes after the scheduled arrival time. Cancelled and diverted flights are excluded. Day of the week is the scheduled local departure day. The day-of-week rates cover departures from 39 large US airports. The before-8 AM and after-8 PM rates cover all US domestic flights.

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