Flight number record

DL 31

Delta Air Lines · Atlanta to Dallas-Fort Worth

Route: ATL → DFW
Departs: 20:30
Flights: 341
Period: July 2025 to June 2026

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s DL 31, check with Delta Air Lines.

DL 31 draws a D. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is about an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 341 flights, with a median arrival 3 minutes late.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so DL 31 runs 13 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 130 extra late arrivals.

On time

64.6%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 333 completed flights

Avg delay

60 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

2.05%

National rate is 1.81%

1 hour+ late

13.5%

National rate is 8.1%

These figures cover 341 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 13.5% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule. That is the number that wrecks a connection, and it is not visible in an on-time percentage alone.

Schedule

When DL 31 flies

DL 31 flies ATL to DFW without a single fixed slot. Its most common scheduled departure was 20:30, used on 63 of 341 flights, with 19:30 (50 flights) and 20:10 (44 flights) next. Carriers retime flights through the season, so the rates here blend slightly different positions in the aircraft's day.

Departs 20:3063 flights18.5%
Departs 19:3050 flights14.7%
Departs 20:1044 flights12.9%

Scale runs 0% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Share of scheduled departures at each local time. Times used on fewer than one flight in ten are not listed.

A 20:30 departure sits in the 8pm–5am window. Across every US flight scheduled in that window the on-time rate is 70.5%, and DL 31 runs 6 points worse at 64.6%. By that time of day most aircraft have flown several legs already, and whatever went wrong earlier is still in the schedule.

Against the route

DL 31 next to ATL to DFW

Every carrier on ATL to DFW combined arrived on time 74.3% of the time across 6,698 flights, so DL 31 is 10 points behind it. Delta flew 2,791 flights on the same city pair under all its flight numbers, including this one, and those ran 75.4% on time. Across its whole network Delta Air Lines managed 81.6%, which this flight trails by 17 points.

DL 31 against its route and carrier
Compared with	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
DL 31thin sample	341	64.6%	60 min	2.05%	D
All Delta Air Lines on ATL–DFW	2,791	75.4%	57 min	2.51%	B
All carriers on ATL–DFW	6,698	74.3%	80 min	2.76%	C
Delta Air Lines, whole network	1,038,570	81.6%	71 min	1.62%	B

Across the year

DL 31 quarter by quarter

Quarter by quarter DL 31 held fairly steady: 60.9% in Jul–Sep 2025, 70.3% in Oct–Dec 2025, 61.4% in Jan–Mar 2026 and 65.7% in Apr–Jun 2026. A spread of 9 points is about what a sample of this size moves on its own, so the annual figure is a fair summary.

Jul–Sep 202592 flights60.9%
Oct–Dec 202592 flights70.3%
Jan–Mar 202690 flights61.4%
Apr–Jun 202667 flights65.7%

Scale runs 50% to 75%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

By weekday, DL 31 did best on Wednesday at 85.4% on time and worst on Sunday at 48.9%. Each day rests on about 49 flights, so a gap of 37 points is worth noticing but could still narrow in another year.

Delay causes

Why DL 31 runs late

Carriers report a reason for every delay minute they cause, in five DOT categories. The split below is by minutes, not by number of flights, so a handful of very long weather delays weighs as much as many short ones. It covers 7,091 reported delay minutes.

Carrier
37%
National Airspace System
27%
Late-arriving aircraft
26%
Extreme weather
10%

The largest share of delay minutes, 37%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. Unlike weather, that is a management outcome, and it is the category where the gap between two carriers on the same schedule is genuinely earned. It accounts for 2,644 of the 7,091 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 7,091 delay minutes reported on DL 31.

Cancellations sit at 2.05% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.29%.

Connections and routes

What a delay on this flight costs

For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 13.5% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% nationally. A 45-minute layover does not survive that, and no amount of walking quickly changes it. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.

The 731 miles between these two airports put this in the middle of the US network, around two and a half to three hours of block time. That is enough cruise to absorb a ten-minute late pushback and not enough to absorb thirty. It is also long enough that the aircraft usually flies three or four legs a day rather than six, which slows how fast delay compounds.

Every one of the 341 flights under DL 31 in the data flew ATL to DFW. The number was not reused on any other city pair, which makes this a clean record of one route.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 341 flights over twelve months is enough to clear this site's floor but not enough to pin the rate down tightly, and a single bad week moves it by more than a point. Treat the grade as a rough reading.

What to do with this

Booking DL 31

For a booking, DL 31 is a flight to put a long connection behind. 13.5% of its completed flights arrived an hour or more late, which a short layover will not absorb. If the onward flight is on a separate ticket, the risk sits with you.

Where to go next

A flight number here means Delta Air Lines’s own number as it reports to the DOT. How the figures are computed is on the methodology page.

Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, July 2025 to June 2026. Last updated 15 September 2026; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.

Key figures