The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will cap daily flights at Chicago O’Hare International Airport this summer, the agency said in an order issued on April 16.
The FAA will limit flights to 2,708 arrivals and departures per day from May 17 through Oct. 24. The agency said the restriction will keep delays from worsening beyond last summer’s already poor performance.
The cap follows weeks of tense negotiations with airlines.
Carriers had scheduled more than 3,000 daily flights for peak summer days—nearly 15 percent higher than the year before—despite ongoing construction and other constraints at one of the nation’s busiest hubs. Only about 56 percent of departures and 58 percent of arrivals left on time at O’Hare during the 2025 summer season.
O’Hare’s congestion problems have intensified in recent months as airlines pushed aggressive growth plans. The airport is in the midst of an $8.2 billion expansion known as O’Hare 21 and its next phase, ORDNext.
The project aims to modernize the airport’s infrastructure with a new $1.3 billion Concourse D, scheduled to open in late 2028, and a future Global Terminal. Construction began in 2025. The expansion is scheduled for completion in the early to mid-2030s and is expected to add 25 percent more gate capacity and improve overall efficiency.
Last summer’s on-time numbers already signaled trouble, with construction projects slowing traffic across the airfield. The FAA warned that unchecked overscheduling would only make delays worse this year.
In March, Southwest Airlines announced it would end service at O’Hare, citing challenging operating conditions. The pullback came amid broader FAA efforts to manage capacity at the airport.
Travelers have felt the impact through repeated delays and cancellations that ripple across the national system.
Chicago O’Hare has faced chronic capacity and staffing issues for years, with federal interventions becoming routine during periods of stress.
In late 2025, for example, the FAA raised air-travel reductions to 6 percent because of government funding impasses and air-traffic-controller shortages. O’Hare was hit hardest, recording dozens of cancellations and hundreds of delays in a single day. Winter storms and other disruptions pushed total U.S. flight cancellations and delays into the thousands, with O’Hare consistently among the worst-affected airports.
Those earlier episodes highlighted the same underlying pressures now prompting the summer cap: too many flights, too few controllers at times, and persistent infrastructure work. The FAA has repeatedly stepped in with temporary measures at O’Hare and other major hubs to safeguard safety and on-time performance.
The latest order continues that pattern while airlines and the agency search for longer-term fixes.
