By Jennifer Williams

The government shutdown pushed airlines off their financial targets late last year. But for United Airlines, a conservative approach to guidance helped it come in as planned as other major U.S. airlines cut or missed their expectations.

United bakes in plenty of the unexpected when setting financial targets: It accounts for one so-called act of God each time it provides guidance. That helps the airline avoid overpromising and being forced to later cut its expectations.

"We put a healthy dose of realism that something's going to be imperfect, weather is going to happen somewhere, there's going to be some fuel spike or some sort of macro, exogenous event that hits us," said United Chief Financial Officer Mike Leskinen. "So we build room for that."

Uncertainty is a constant for airlines and last year was no exception: Weather events and the government shutdown, which spurred regulators to order flight restrictions at 40 major airports, disrupted travel for millions last year. The flight cancellation rate among four major U.S. airlines -- United, Delta Air Lines, American Airlines and Southwest Airlines -- ticked up in 2025 compared with the previous two years, according to Cirium, an aviation analytics company.

Leskinen got to work changing how the company sets financial expectations soon after becoming finance chief in 2023. United started providing less guidance than many other airlines, focusing on earnings per share instead of breaking out other metrics like capacity and fuel costs. It also began figuring in one major disruptive event, be it an act of God or man-made incident, each time it provides guidance. These can include major storms, geopolitical upheaval or a widespread virus.

"A guidance policy is only as good as your ability to hit it," the CFO said at an event in 2024 after the changes went into effect. "If we give a bunch of guidance, you don't believe it, it's actually worse than not having guidance."

United hasn't missed its quarterly guidance in nearly three years. And the carrier held its expectations for the end of last year while others including Alaska Air Group and Southwest cut theirs following the government shutdown. Alaska Air ultimately hit its original target for the last three months of the year.

JetBlue slightly reduced its capacity expectations in part because of the shutdown while noting that bookings for the end of the year were trending in line with expectations. American held firm only to miss its earnings-per-share estimates for the year, in part because of a $325 million hit to its fourth-quarter revenue from the shutdown.

United's total revenue for the three months ended Dec. 31, at $15.4 billion, was up about 5% from a year earlier. While pretax earnings took a roughly $250 million hit from the government shutdown, the company reported a profit of more than $1 billion for the period. United generated more revenue and profit than American and Southwest last year, while Delta posted higher figures for both metrics.

Recent weather events have hit U.S. airlines hard, such as a fierce winter storm this week that grounded thousands of flights. So have geopolitical events, such as the travel disruption across the Caribbean because of U.S. military action in Venezuela, which Leskinen counts as among the forces of nature events baked into United's expectations.

"We try to set it in a way that the vast majority of the time we will hit it," he said. "But if you get hit with a hurricane and an asteroid in the same period, we'll miss. And that's OK."

United does well setting and meeting expectations, analysts said. But last year's outcome may have been helped by a labor agreement, which was expected to add pressure to United's 2025 finances, being pushed into this year, analysts said. They also said investors could stop believing in guidance that is too conservative, just as they may disregard overly rosy projections.

So far, United isn't in that category. "A lot of companies would like to position themselves to beat," said Tom Fitzgerald, an analyst at TD Cowen. "I think United definitely keeps that in mind as they set the guide, but I wouldn't view it as some egregiously low bar that they're setting for themselves."

Write to Jennifer Williams at jennifer.williams@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 25, 2026 06:00 ET (11:00 GMT)

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