New York → Chicago flights

JFK–Chicago hovers near $136 — prices rarely swing far

Key takeaways

• Median fare sits at $136, with the bottom quartile at $129 and top quartile at $140 — a tight band.
• The high of $144 is only about $8 above median, suggesting limited upside risk in waiting.
• A low outlier of $91 appeared at least once, but that's well below the p25 of $129 and not the norm.
• Reported 58% spread looks large on paper, but it's driven by that single low fare, not a broad range.
• Sample size is thin — only 12 days of snapshots — so treat patterns as directional, not definitive.

30-day price trend

See full numbers and stats on the JFK → ORD price history page.

The full picture

The data shows a fairly stable fare environment on the JFK–Chicago route. With a median of $136 and the middle 50% of fares (p25–p75) landing between $129 and $140, most travelers will see quotes clustered tightly around the mid-$130s. The $144 high is close enough to the median that there's little evidence of a steep late-booking penalty — the ceiling here isn't far from the norm.

The one notable exception is the $91 low, which pulls the calculated spread up to 58%. That's a reminder that averages and spreads can be misleading when a single cheap fare skews the math — in practice, the bulk of the data suggests predictable pricing rather than wild swings. We don't have enough snapshots across a full booking horizon to say definitively when prices soften as departure approaches, so we can't respons­ibly tell you to wait for a specific window.

No dominant carrier or day-of-week pattern is visible in this dataset, so we won't speculate about airline-specific pricing behavior or claim certain weekdays are cheaper to book — that's not supported by what we have. The honest takeaway: this route trades in a narrow, fairly predictable band most of the time, punctuated by occasional low fares that may or may not reappear. With only 12 days of samples, this snapshot is a useful directional read, not a robust seasonal model — treat the $129–$140 range as your realistic planning target, and consider $136 a fair benchmark price to compare any live quote against.

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