Flight number record

DL 545

Delta Air Lines · Atlanta to San Francisco

Route: ATL → SFO
Departs: 20:44
Flights: 263
Period: July 2025 to June 2026

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s DL 545, check with Delta Air Lines.

DL 545 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 263 flights, with a median arrival 3 minutes late.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so DL 545 runs 13 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 131 extra late arrivals.

On time

64.5%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 262 completed flights

Avg delay

64 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.38%

National rate is 1.81%

1 hour+ late

10.7%

National rate is 8.1%

These figures cover 263 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 10.7% 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 545 flies

DL 545 flies ATL to SFO without a single fixed slot. Its most common scheduled departure was 20:44, used on 53 of 263 flights, with 20:53 (35 flights) next. Carriers retime flights through the season, so the rates here blend slightly different positions in the aircraft's day.

Departs 20:4453 flights20.2%
Departs 20:5335 flights13.3%

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 20:44 departure sits in the 8pm–5am window. Across every US flight scheduled in that window the on-time rate is 70.5%, and DL 545 runs 6 points worse at 64.5%. 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 545 next to ATL to SFO

Every carrier on ATL to SFO combined arrived on time 71.4% of the time across 3,354 flights, so DL 545 is 7 points behind it. Delta flew 2,410 flights on the same city pair under all its flight numbers, including this one, and those ran 70.2% on time. Across its whole network Delta Air Lines managed 81.6%, which this flight trails by 17 points.

DL 545 against its route and carrier
Compared with	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
DL 545thin sample	263	64.5%	64 min	0.38%	D+
All Delta Air Lines on ATL–SFO	2,410	70.2%	55 min	0.62%	C+
All carriers on ATL–SFO	3,354	71.4%	58 min	0.63%	C+
Delta Air Lines, whole network	1,038,570	81.6%	71 min	1.62%	B

Across the year

DL 545 quarter by quarter

DL 545 did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Jul–Sep 2025 at 70.8% on time and its weakest Apr–Jun 2026 at 50.0%, a swing of 21 points on roughly 88 flights a quarter. The twelve-month rate averages over that, so if you are flying in a weak quarter the quarter's own figure is the better guide.

Jul–Sep 202590 flights70.8%
Oct–Dec 202559 flights69.5%
Jan–Mar 202624 flights—
Apr–Jun 202690 flights50.0%

Scale runs 40% to 75%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

By weekday, DL 545 did best on Thursday at 71.1% on time and worst on Sunday at 46.3%. Each day rests on about 38 flights, so a gap of 25 points is worth noticing but could still narrow in another year.

Delay causes

Why DL 545 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 5,901 reported delay minutes.

National Airspace System
38%
Carrier
37%
Late-arriving aircraft
19%
Extreme weather
6%

38% of delay minutes are charged to the National Airspace System: air traffic volume, runway configuration, ground stops. No carrier can price its way out of that, which is why airport choice moves the number here more than carrier choice does. That is 2,236 minutes out of 5,901, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 5,901 delay minutes reported on DL 545.

Cancellations are rare at 0.38%, below the national 1.81% and low enough to earn the plus on the grade. Roughly one flight in 100 is called off; the risk here is arriving late, not not arriving.

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. 10.7% 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.

At 2,139 miles this is transcontinental flying, and long routes get a quiet structural advantage. Scheduled block time on a flight this length carries more padding in absolute minutes, so a twenty-minute late departure often still becomes an on-time arrival. Read the on-time rate here as slightly flattering next to a short-haul route with the same operational quality.

The same number turns up on three other city pairs in the data, including LAS to ATL (25), MSP to ATL (6) and JFK to PSP (5), but none flew often enough under DL 545 to report a rate for. Carriers move flight numbers between routes, so the figures on this page apply to ATL to SFO only.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 263 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 545

For a booking, DL 545 is one of the weaker ways to fly ATL to SFO: 7 points below the route as a whole. If the schedule allows, compare it with the other departures listed on the route page before settling on this one.

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