American Airlines Mishandled 251,976 Bags in Six Months, the Worst Rate in the DOT’s Data. Allegiant Mishandled Fewer Than 1 in 800. All 13 Airlines, Ranked

The federal government counts every bag a US airline loses, damages or delays. Six months of 2026 data show a sixfold gap between the worst airline and the best, and the clearest pattern in it comes from route maps, not baggage rooms.

American Airlines mishandled 251,976 checked bags between January and June 2026, according to the Department of Transportation’s Air Travel Consumer Report. That is 0.73 bags for every 100 it carried, the highest rate of the 13 airlines that report to the DOT.

Allegiant Air sat at the other end of the table with 0.12 per 100. Put another way, American mishandled about one bag in 137, and Allegiant about one in 854.

Across all 13 airlines, 1,052,493 bags went wrong out of 213,072,877 checked, a rate of 0.49 per 100. That is down from 0.52 in the first half of 2025.

Why American and United Lose More Bags Than Allegiant

The biggest single source of mishandled bags is the connection. In its latest baggage report, published in June 2026, the airline IT company SITA found that transfers caused 39% of all mishandled bags worldwide in 2025, more than any other source.

Every connection is a second chance to miss the plane. A bag has to be pulled off one aircraft, sorted, driven across the ramp and loaded onto another before the doors close.

American runs its network through 10 hubs, anchored by Dallas Fort Worth, its largest, plus Charlotte, Chicago O’Hare, Miami, Philadelphia and five more. A hub network is built on connections, so a hub airline handles transfer bags all day.

Allegiant is the opposite. It “sells only point-to-point nonstop itineraries and does not offer connecting service,” flying a fleet built mostly around Airbus A320 family jets nonstop from smaller cities. With no connections, a checked bag gets loaded once and unloaded once.

All 13 Airlines, Ranked by Mishandled Bags

The measure below is the DOT’s own: mishandled bags per 100 checked bags, January through June 2026. Only airlines with at least 0.5% of US domestic scheduled passenger revenue have to report, which is why the list stops at 13.

Rank	Airline	Bags checked	Bags mishandled	Per 100 bags
1	American Airlines	34,541,265	251,976	0.73
2	Envoy Air	5,224,762	37,723	0.72
3	United Airlines	29,253,054	192,191	0.66
4	SkyWest Airlines	14,734,864	81,434	0.55
5	Republic Airways	4,887,188	25,990	0.53
6	Alaska Airlines	14,126,041	74,896	0.53
7	Frontier Airlines	4,816,542	24,733	0.51
8	Spirit Airlines	1,870,785	8,719	0.47
9	PSA Airlines	6,044,565	26,731	0.44
10	Delta Air Lines	40,560,183	153,022	0.38
11	Southwest Airlines	46,350,429	148,875	0.32
12	JetBlue Airways	7,188,577	22,135	0.31
13	Allegiant Air	3,474,622	4,068	0.12

American’s 251,976 bags work out to about 1,392 a day across the 181 days of the period. It carried 16% of all checked bags in the data and accounted for 24% of the mishandled ones.

The size gap matters less than people assume. Southwest checked 46.4 million bags, 11.8 million more than American, and still mishandled 103,101 fewer. Delta checked 6 million more bags than American and mishandled 98,954 fewer.

Two rows need a footnote. Alaska’s figure now includes Hawaiian Airlines. Spirit’s covers only about four months, because the airline stopped flying on May 2, 2026.

Add American’s Regional Airlines and the Count Hits 316,430

Envoy Air, second worst at 0.72, and PSA Airlines, ninth at 0.44, are both wholly owned subsidiaries of American Airlines Group. They fly under the American Eagle brand, and the DOT lists them separately.

Add them back and the American group mishandled 316,430 bags out of 45.8 million in the first half of 2026. That is 30% of every mishandled bag in the DOT’s data, from a group that checked 21% of the bags.

It is not a one-year blip either. In calendar 2025, American mishandled 489,612 bags, the highest count of any US airline in a Squaremouth analysis of DOT data, ahead of Southwest at 418,350 and United at 397,709.

For a passenger, the rate is the number that matters, and it compounds. A family of four checking four bags on American faces roughly a 3% chance that at least one goes astray, against under 0.5% on Allegiant.

Bags are only one line in an airline’s record, and American’s shows up elsewhere too: it drew 9,046 DOT complaints in the same six months, the most of any US airline. Our ranking of the worst airlines in the US by delays and complaints puts the bag numbers next to the rest.

Fewer Bags Are Going Missing in 2026

The overall trend is good news. US airlines mishandled 1,052,493 bags in the first half of 2026, down 99,982 from 1,152,475 a year earlier, about 8.7% fewer.

June alone shows the same direction. Airlines checked more than 39.3 million bags that month and mishandled 194,063, down from 221,543 in June 2025, with American again the largest at 52,460.

The global picture is improving faster. SITA put the worldwide rate at 4.9 mishandled bags per 1,000 passengers in 2025, down 23%, and still estimated the cost to the industry at $6.3 billion, or about $260 per bag.

Passengers pay first, though, because most big US airlines now charge to check a bag at all. It is worth knowing what each US airline charges for a checked bag before deciding a carry-on is not enough.

For anyone choosing between airlines on a connecting trip, the table points to one simple move: book the nonstop when the price is close. It is the same logic behind our list of the best airlines to fly in the US, where reliability counts as much as the fare.

The DOT publishes the numbers every month in the Air Travel Consumer Report. The next half-year table will show whether American can get off the top of it.