Long Island MacArthur Airport is back on the ballot for the best small airport in America, and this time it starts from the highest finish it has ever posted. The Ronkonkoma airport is one of 20 nominees in USA Today's 10Best Readers' Choice Awards for 2026, and the poll is open now. Anyone can vote once a day, every day, until the voting closes at noon on Monday, October 5.

One spot short last October

Last year's contest ended with MacArthur in second place nationally, the best result in five nominations. The airport had climbed steadily: fifth place in an earlier appearance, third in 2024, then runner-up in 2025. The only airport ahead of it was Gerald R. Ford International in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Ford is on the ballot again this year, so the rematch is direct. So is Rhode Island's T.F. Green International, which took third last year. The rest of the field runs from Savannah to Santa Barbara, and it includes two upstate New York rivals, Albany International and Rochester's Frederick Douglass Greater Rochester International. Long Island's airport is the only nominee in the New York metropolitan area.

What the judges put on the card

The 10Best format works in two stages. A panel of travel editors and industry experts selects the 20 nominees, then readers decide the order. The nominee page makes the case for MacArthur in terms any Long Islander will recognize: it is the airport you use when you refuse to sit on the Belt Parkway for two hours to reach a runway.

The panel's write-up points to the things that have quietly accumulated at ISP over the past few years. Six airlines now fly from Ronkonkoma: Southwest, JetBlue, Frontier, Breeze, Avelo and Cape Air. There is a new baggage claim area, a modern ground transportation center, close-in parking that does not require a shuttle bus, and a pub pouring Long Island craft beer before the security line fills up. The LIRR's Ronkonkoma station sits next door, which means the airport has something almost no small airport in the country can claim, a one-seat train ride from a major city's downtown.

The momentum is real, not just ballot copy

The nomination lands in the middle of a genuine growth run. In July, Breeze Airways made Tampa its tenth nonstop destination from MacArthur, deepening a route map that has become the airport's biggest story since Southwest arrived a generation ago. JetBlue added new nonstop flights of its own in December. For an airport that spent years fighting the perception that it was a one-carrier operation, a six-airline roster with double-digit nonstops from a single carrier is a different place altogether.

That growth is why the contest matters beyond bragging rights. Small airports live and die on whether airlines believe the local market will show up. A national ranking is marketing the airport does not have to buy, and it is the kind of thing route planners see when they are deciding where the next city pair goes. Every daily vote is, in a small way, a signal flare aimed at an airline network office.

How to vote, and when it ends

Voting happens on the 10Best site at 10best.usatoday.com, under the Best Small Airport award. The poll accepts one vote per person per day until noon on Monday, October 5. The winners are announced by USA Today in mid-October, which is exactly when Long Island found out last year that it had come one spot short.

The airport has asked for exactly this kind of help before. When the town promoted the vote last September, Long Islanders carried ISP to second place in a field of 20. The gap to first place is one position, and the contest resets to zero every year.

What it means for the people who actually fly from here

A readers' choice title does not add a gate or a route by itself. What it does is compound the story MacArthur has been building: that a mid-sized airport 50 miles from Manhattan, with a train station beside it and six airlines inside it, is the easiest way on or off Long Island by air. Every ranking that says so out loud makes the next route announcement a little more likely.

If you have ever walked from the Ronkonkoma platform to a gate in less time than the AirTrain takes to leave JFK, the ballot is open until October 5, and it will take you about ten seconds a day.