Flight number record

UA 404

United Airlines · Houston to Newark

Route: IAH → EWR
Departs: 18:36
Flights: 365
Period: July 2025 to June 2026

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s UA 404, check with United Airlines.

UA 404 draws a C. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is a little over an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 365 flights, with a median arrival right on schedule.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so UA 404 runs 11 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 113 extra late arrivals.

On time

66.3%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 353 completed flights

Avg delay

71 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

2.74%

National rate is 1.81%

1 hour+ late

13.9%

National rate is 8.1%

These figures cover 365 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 13.9% 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 UA 404 flies

UA 404 flies IAH to EWR without a single fixed slot. Its most common scheduled departure was 18:36, used on 80 of 365 flights, with 18:19 (43 flights) and 18:23 (37 flights) next. Carriers retime flights through the season, so the rates here blend slightly different positions in the aircraft's day.

Departs 18:3680 flights21.9%
Departs 18:1943 flights11.8%
Departs 18:2337 flights10.1%

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 18:36 departure sits in the 5pm–8pm window. Across every US flight scheduled in that window the on-time rate is 68.2%, and UA 404 runs level with that at 66.3%. 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

UA 404 next to IAH to EWR

Every carrier on IAH to EWR combined arrived on time 74.6% of the time across 3,800 flights, so UA 404 is 8 points behind it. United flew 3,534 flights on the same city pair under all its flight numbers, including this one, and those ran 74.5% on time. Across its whole network United Airlines managed 79.0%, which this flight trails by 13 points.

UA 404 against its route and carrier
Compared with	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
UA 404	365	66.3%	71 min	2.74%	C
All United Airlines on IAH–EWR	3,534	74.5%	72 min	1.56%	C
All carriers on IAH–EWR	3,800	74.6%	71 min	1.89%	C
United Airlines, whole network	821,041	79.0%	72 min	1.01%	B

Across the year

UA 404 quarter by quarter

UA 404 did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Jan–Mar 2026 at 77.6% on time and its weakest Jul–Sep 2025 at 58.4%, a swing of 19 points on roughly 91 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 202592 flights58.4%
Oct–Dec 202592 flights58.9%
Jan–Mar 202690 flights77.6%
Apr–Jun 202691 flights70.8%

Scale runs 50% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

By weekday, UA 404 did best on Tuesday at 79.2% on time and worst on Thursday at 57.7%. Each day rests on about 52 flights, so a gap of 22 points is worth noticing but could still narrow in another year.

Delay causes

Why UA 404 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 8,401 reported delay minutes.

National Airspace System
41%
Late-arriving aircraft
35%
Carrier
19%
Extreme weather
6%

35% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. That is a cascade, and cascades start small and grow through the day. Across 8,401 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 6 to one. It is the strongest argument for booking the first departure of the morning, when the aircraft has been sitting at the gate overnight with nothing to inherit. The split is drawn from 8,401 delay minutes reported on UA 404.

Cancellations run at 2.74%, against 1.81% nationally. That is roughly one flight in 40 cancelled outright. A cancelled flight is invisible in every on-time figure on this page, so the punctuality numbers above describe only the flights that actually operated.

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. 13.9% 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 1,400 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.

The same number turns up on three other city pairs in the data, including SAT to IAH (139), SFO to IAH (37) and SLC to IAH (19), but none flew often enough under UA 404 to report a rate for. Carriers move flight numbers between routes, so the figures on this page apply to IAH to EWR only.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 365 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 UA 404

For a booking, the cancellation rate is the figure to plan around on UA 404: 2.74% of its 365 scheduled flights did not operate. A late arrival costs a little over an hour, but a cancellation costs the day, so leave a later option open.

Where to go next

A flight number here means United Airlines’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