Aeromexico landed 90.02% of its flights on time in 2025, topping Cirium's global ranking of the world's largest airlines. Here is who got passengers there on time in 2025 and 2026, region by region.
Why this matters: on-time rankings are one of the few hard measures travellers can use to compare airlines before booking. They also show which regions and airports are getting more reliable, and which are slipping.
Key Takeaways
- Aeromexico was the world's most punctual airline for the second year running, at 90.02% on time in Cirium's 2025 review. Iberia Express led Europe at 88.94%.
- In Europe, Norway's Wideroe arrived 60+ minutes late on just 1.62% of flights over the past 12 months, the lowest rate among 28 major airlines and well under the 4.4% average.
- US punctuality is slipping: 74.7% of domestic flights arrived on time from January to August 2026, down from 79.0% in 2019.
The World's Most Punctual Airlines in 2025
Cirium, the aviation data company, ranks airlines each year by the share of flights reaching the gate within 15 minutes of schedule. These are its ten best global airlines for 2025.
Source: Cirium, On-Time Performance Review 2025, published 2 January 2026.
Aeromexico led with 90.02% of almost 189,000 flights on time, more than three points clear of Saudia in second place. Latin America and the Middle East account for six of the top ten, with Aeromexico, Azul, LATAM and Avianca from Latin America alone. SAS, Iberia and Turkish Airlines were the European entries, and Delta made the list with 1.8 million flights, almost ten times Aeromexico's total. Cirium gave its separate Platinum Award to Qatar Airways, which kept 84.42% of flights on time across six continents.
The Most Punctual Airline in Each Region
Cirium also names a winner for each world region. Some regional champions fly smaller networks than the global top ten and post even higher scores.
Source: Cirium, On-Time Performance Review 2025, published 2 January 2026.
South Africa's low-cost airline Safair had the highest score of any regional winner, at 91.06%. Copa Airlines won Latin America for the 11th time, and Delta topped North America for the fifth year in a row. Asia-Pacific had the lowest winning score: Philippine Airlines took the region for the first time with 83.12%. Delta's winning score of 80.90% means no North American airline reached 81% on time.
Europe's Most Punctual Airlines
Europe's top ten mixes network carriers, low-cost airlines and one long-haul specialist. Spanish and Nordic airlines take seven of the ten places.
Source: Cirium, On-Time Performance Review 2025, published 2 January 2026.
Iberia Express won Europe for the third year in a row, with almost 89% of flights on time. SAS came second in Europe and third in the world. Virgin Atlantic won Cirium's first Most Improved award, rising from 74.01% in 2024 to 83.45%. UK figures point the same way: among the 50 airlines with the most flights at UK airports in 2025, SAS had the best on-time rate, at 84.6%, according to the Civil Aviation Authority. Ryanair, easyJet and Wizz Air, Europe's three largest low-cost airlines, are all missing from Cirium's European top ten.
How the Leaders Changed from 2024 to 2025
Most of the world's top airlines were more punctual in 2025 than a year earlier. Compare the two bars for each airline.
Source: Cirium, On-Time Performance Review 2025 (2 January 2026) and On-Time Performance Review 2024 (January 2025).
SAS made the biggest jump among these airlines, up 4.7 points, followed by Aeromexico and Azul. Delta went the other way, falling from 83.46% to 80.90%, and lost its place on the global podium. Delta's fall matches a wider decline in US punctuality, covered below. In Europe the whole leading group improved: Iberia Express rose from 84.69% to 88.94% and Austrian from 78.72% to 83.74%.
Europe's Most Punctual Airlines in AirAdvisor's Data
AirAdvisor's flight database tracks every departure from 31 European countries. Here we rank major airlines by how rarely they arrived an hour or more late, the kind of delay passengers remember, over the 12 months to 31 October 2026.
Source: AirAdvisor's flight database, flights departing airports in the EU, UK, Switzerland, Norway and Iceland, 1 November 2025 to 31 October 2026.
Wideroe, Norway's regional airline, ran 60+ minutes late on 1.62% of flights, about one in 60. Spain's Binter, which flies mainly between the Canary Islands, followed at 2.31%. Both also had the lowest rate of 3+ hour delays, at 0.09%. The big network groups Swiss, Lufthansa and SAS all stayed below 3%. SAS, Austrian, Finnair, Iberia and Vueling appear in both this list and Cirium's European top ten, even though the two rankings use different delay thresholds. For the airlines at the other end of the table, see our average flight delay statistics by airline.
The Most Reliable Airlines: Delays and Cancellations Together
A cancelled flight never shows up as late, so a delay ranking alone can flatter airlines that cancel more. This chart adds the two together: the share of flights that either arrived 60+ minutes late or did not fly at all.
Source: AirAdvisor's flight database, flights departing airports in the EU, UK, Switzerland, Norway and Iceland, 1 November 2025 to 31 October 2026.
Wideroe stays first, with only 2.16% of flights disrupted, and Binter second. The order changes further down: Lufthansa drops to 7th place because it cancelled 1.59% of its flights, one of the highest rates in the table, while LOT and TAP move up thanks to low cancellation rates. Jet2 is left out of this chart because AirAdvisor's database records almost no cancellations for it. Low-cost airlines show the opposite profile to network carriers: Ryanair cancelled just 0.28% of flights, the lowest of any major airline, but ran late far more often.
What Counts as On Time, and How Punctual Flying Is Overall
Almost every official measure calls a flight on time if it arrives less than 15 minutes after schedule. The US Department of Transportation and OAG also count cancelled and diverted flights as not on time. With that shared yardstick, the big markets look similar.
Source: EUROCONTROL, European Aviation Overview 2025 Review (23 January 2026); AirAdvisor analysis of US Bureau of Transportation Statistics data for 2025; UK Civil Aviation Authority, 2025 On Time Performance Tables.
About three flights in four arrived on time in Europe and the US in 2025. EUROCONTROL's figure was 76.1%, up 3.5 points on 2024 but still 2 points below 2019. UK airports did worse at 72.7%, although that was a clear gain on 66.9% in 2024, with Heathrow improving from 67.3% to 76.7%. These averages set the bar for the rankings above: Aeromexico's 90.02% means roughly one late flight in ten, against one in four for the average European or US flight.
US Airlines: Who Is On Time in 2026
The US Department of Transportation publishes on-time data for every flight by the largest US airlines. We compared the first eight months of 2026 with the same months of 2025, the latest data available.
Source: AirAdvisor analysis of US Bureau of Transportation Statistics on-time data (airline delay cause dataset), all reporting carriers, accessed 13 November 2026.
Alaska Airlines and Delta were the most punctual large US airlines so far in 2026, both at about 78.8%. Alaska improved by four points, while Delta held steady. Southwest fell by more than four points and JetBlue by more than five, with JetBlue now the least punctual of the large airlines, at 67.3%. For full-year 2025, Hawaiian Airlines had the best record of any US airline, at 81.95%, ahead of Delta at 79.12%; it no longer appears separately in the 2026 data. Spirit Airlines is not shown, as it reported only five months of 2026. Our North American airlines late arrivals page has more detail on the region.
US Punctuality Trend Since 2019
The yearly average for all reporting US airlines shows the direction of travel. Watch the last two bars.
Source: AirAdvisor analysis of US Bureau of Transportation Statistics on-time data (airline delay cause dataset), all reporting carriers, accessed 13 November 2026.
US punctuality has fallen two years in a row. The on-time rate dropped from 78.1% in 2024 to 76.4% in 2025, and to 74.7% in the first eight months of 2026, one point below the same period of 2025. Cancellations rose too: 2.27% of flights were cancelled from January to August 2026, compared with 1.63% a year earlier. January 2026 alone saw 4.82% of flights cancelled. July was the weakest month for punctuality, with only 69.5% of flights on time.
What Makes an Airline Punctual
Punctual airlines tend to fly from punctual airports. Cirium's 2025 ranking of the world's most on-time large airports reads like a list of the top airlines' home bases.
Source: Cirium, On-Time Performance Review 2025, published 2 January 2026. Airports are ranked by flights departing within 15 minutes of schedule.
Mexico City is Aeromexico's main hub, Riyadh is a hub for Saudia, Doha is Qatar Airways' base, and Oslo, Copenhagen and Stockholm are the three SAS hubs. Salt Lake City is a Delta hub, and Santiago and Lima are LATAM bases. The data shows the pattern but does not settle which comes first: a dominant airline running on time lifts its airport's score, and an uncongested airport helps its airline. Knock-on delay is the other big factor. EUROCONTROL found that 46% of delay minutes in Europe in 2024 came from aircraft arriving late from a previous flight, so an airline that keeps its first flights of the day on time protects the rest of its schedule. Read more on how quickly airlines bounce back in our airline delay recovery time statistics.
Monthly results show the same airlines near the top in 2026. In September 2026, OAG ranked Wideroe eighth in the world with 92.80% of flights on time, the only European airline above 90%, while Austrian was Europe's next best at 86.8%. In July 2026, OAG named SAS Europe's most punctual airline at 84.2%. On-time rates and cancellations can tell different stories, though: OAG noted that Jet2 operated more than 15,000 flights in July 2026 without a single cancellation, yet its on-time rate was in the low 60s.
References and Sources
- AirAdvisor's flight database, airline departures from 31 European countries, 1 November 2025 to 31 October 2026, accessed 13 November 2026.
- Cirium, Aeromexico Repeats as Most On-Time Global Airline; Qatar Airways Claims Platinum Award (On-Time Performance Review 2025), 2 January 2026: cirium.com
- Cirium, Aeromexico Named the Most On-Time Global Airline in 2024 (On-Time Performance Review 2024), January 2025: businesswire.com
- OAG, Northeast Asia Dominates a Disrupted September for On-Time Performance, 8 October 2026: oag.com
- OAG, On-time performance: July's most punctual airlines, 6 August 2026: oag.com
- US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Airline On-Time Statistics and Delay Causes, data for 2019 to August 2026, accessed 13 November 2026: transtats.bts.gov
- UK Civil Aviation Authority, UK flight punctuality statistics 2025 (On Time Performance Tables): caa.co.uk
- EUROCONTROL, European Aviation Overview: 2025 Review, 23 January 2026: eurocontrol.int
- EUROCONTROL, All-causes delay to air transport in Europe, Annual 2024, 25 July 2025: eurocontrol.int
Methodology
Global and regional rankings come from Cirium's annual On-Time Performance Reviews, which count a flight as on time when it reaches the arrival gate within 14 minutes 59 seconds of schedule, and rank airports by departures within the same window. OAG monthly figures use a 15-minute arrival threshold and count cancellations as not on time. All external figures are quoted as published; 2024 and 2025 Cirium figures come from the two annual press releases.
European airline rankings come from AirAdvisor's flight database for 12 full months, 1 November 2025 to 31 October 2026, covering flights departing airports in the 27 EU member states plus the UK, Switzerland, Norway and Iceland. A flight counts as late when it reached the arrival gate 60 or more minutes after schedule; late flights exclude cancellations, so the delay and cancellation shares can be added. Only airlines with at least 100,000 flight records were ranked, giving 28 airlines. Condor was left out because its figures look anomalous, and Jet2 is excluded from cancellation comparisons because almost no cancellations are recorded for it. The database lists codeshare flights under each airline that sells them, so we publish percentages only. The 4.4% average is weighted by flight records across the 28 airlines.
US figures are AirAdvisor's calculation from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics delay cause dataset, which covers domestic flights by all reporting operating carriers, including regional airlines. On-time share equals flights minus those arriving 15 or more minutes late, cancelled or diverted, divided by all scheduled flights; this method reproduces the BTS national figure of 71.53% for August 2026. Airline figures are for the mainline operating carrier. The EUROCONTROL figure covers arrival punctuality across its network; the UK figure covers arrivals and departures at reporting UK airports. All data is historical, and figures are rounded.
