The NYC Fare Index
We analysed 1,451 real cached airfares across 69 routes from New York's three airports to answer the questions the fare charts never quite do: which day is genuinely cheapest to leave, and which routes give you the most flight for your money.
Tue
Cheapest day to depart
avg $215
$30
Lowest fare found
NYC → Fort Lauderdale
18.8¢
Avg cost per mile
US routes
69
Routes analysed
1,451 fares
The cheapest day to fly out of NYC is Tue
Averaged across all 69 routes, a Tue departure runs about $215 — 13 dollars less than the most expensive day, Sun ($228). The old "fly midweek" rule holds up in the real numbers, but the gap is smaller than most advice implies: about 6% between the best and worst day, not the 30–40% often quoted.
The cheapest places to fly right now
Lowest cached one-way fares found in the next ~30 days of departures from collection date, as of July 25, 2026.
| Route | Lowest fare | Per mile |
|---|---|---|
| New York → Fort Lauderdale | $30 | 2.8¢ |
| New York → Miami | $48 | 4.4¢ |
| New York → Orlando | $59 | 6.21¢ |
| New York → Dallas | $64 | 4.6¢ |
| New York → Nashville | $70 | 9.21¢ |
| New York → Raleigh | $71 | 16.71¢ |
| New York → Charlotte | $78 | 14.44¢ |
| New York → Atlanta | $87 | 11.45¢ |
| New York → Boston | $88 | 46.32¢ |
| New York → Pittsburgh | $94 | 27.65¢ |
Where you get the most flight per dollar
Cost per mile — the lowest fare divided by the great-circle distance — is the fairest way to compare a $30 hop against a $330 long-haul. International routes win on this measure (8.2¢/mile on average versus 18.8¢ domestic), because distance grows faster than price once you leave the country.
Best-value US routes
- Fort Lauderdale2.8¢/mi · $30
- Miami4.4¢/mi · $48
- Dallas4.6¢/mi · $64
- San Francisco5¢/mi · $129
- Los Angeles5.29¢/mi · $131
- Honolulu5.42¢/mi · $269
Where dates matter most
On some routes the cheapest and most expensive days in the same month are hundreds of dollars apart — those are the ones where flexible dates and a fare alert pay off most.
How we collected this
The figures above come from 1,451 real cached fares pulled from our fare-data partner, Travelpayouts, across 69 of the 76 routes we track from New York City (JFK, LaGuardia and Newark). Data was collected on July 25, 2026.
What this is: the cheapest cached one-way fare for each departure date in the next ~30 days of departures from collection date. Cost per mile uses each route's great-circle distance from New York. Weekday averages pool every fare by the day of the week it departs.
What this is not: a live quote, a guaranteed price, or a full-year study. Cached fares are typically a few days old, and this snapshot looks only at the coming month — so it is a strong read on near-term booking patterns, not a forecast. 7 routes returned no cached data at collection time and are excluded. For a bookable price on any route, use the live search on the route page.
Free to cite with attribution to FlyNYC (flynyc.online/reports/nyc-fare-index). Analysis and dataset by Mohit Sawhney.
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