The major London travel hub that is officially the worst airport in the UK for delays

It may have recently been named the sixth best airport in the UK and the 36th best in the entire world, but London Gatwick is still the worst airport in the country for delays. 

Travel insurance company Go.Compare looked at data from the Civil Aviation Authority for 25 major UK airports between April 2024 and March 2025. It discovered that one in every 10 flights from Gatwick (12 percent) were delayed between 31 minutes to an hour in that period. For comparison, the average delay time for flights across the UK in that time was 16.9 minutes. 

As for cancelled flights, CAA data shows that around 4,050 were called off at Gatwick between April 2024 and March 2025 (1.5 per cent of all flights). 

Gatwick has been named the UK’s worst airport for flight delays for the last two years. Across all of 2024, its average delay time was 23.6 minutes and in 2023 it was 27 minutes. The long delays can partly be put down to the staff shortages it faced at its control tower during summer 2024.

Back in April, a spokesperson for the airport said: ‘Air traffic control restrictions in other parts of Europe have continued to impact the airport. Together with our airlines, we've put in place a robust plan... to improve on-time performance further in 2025.’

CAA’s most recent stats show that of Gatwick’s 24,359 flights in June, 225 were cancelled and 12.5 percent were between 31 and 60 minutes delayed. The average delay that month was 19.9 minutes – an improvement, but still the second longest in the UK after Birmingham International Airport, which saw average delays of 24.6 minutes. 

Did you see that a different London airport was just named second-worst in Britain?

Plus: every London airport ranked from worst to best.