Flight number record

UA 487

United Airlines · Houston to San Francisco

Route: IAH → SFO
Departs: 05:00
Flights: 278
Period: July 2025 to June 2026

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s UA 487, check with United Airlines.

UA 487 earns an A+. Nearly every flight arrives inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 19 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs close to two hours. That rests on 278 flights, with a median arrival 18 minutes early.

Set against the rest of the country, UA 487's record is 19 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 191 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

96.7%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 276 completed flights

Avg delay

104 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.36%

National rate is 1.81%

1 hour+ late

1.8%

National rate is 8.1%

These figures cover 278 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 18 minutes early, which is the part an average hides: most flights here are fine, and the on-time rate is decided by a tail of badly late ones. On-time means under 15 minutes late, the DOT's own threshold.

Schedule

When UA 487 flies

UA 487 flies IAH to SFO without a single fixed slot. Its most common scheduled departure was 05:00, used on 74 of 278 flights, with 05:15 (56 flights) and 05:22 (40 flights) next. Carriers retime flights through the season, so the rates here blend slightly different positions in the aircraft's day.

Departs 05:0074 flights26.6%
Departs 05:1556 flights20.1%
Departs 05:2240 flights14.4%

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 05:00 departure sits in the 5am–8am window. Across every US flight scheduled in that window the on-time rate is 89.3%, and UA 487 runs 7 points better at 96.7%. Early departures usually start with an aircraft that has not flown yet that day, which is most of why the window does well.

Against the route

UA 487 next to IAH to SFO

Every carrier on IAH to SFO combined arrived on time 78.6% of the time across 3,600 flights, so UA 487 is 18 points ahead of it. Across its whole network United Airlines managed 79.0%, which this flight beats by 18 points.

UA 487 against its route and carrier
Compared with	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
UA 487thin sample	278	96.7%	104 min	0.36%	A+
All United Airlines on IAH–SFO	3,600	78.6%	66 min	0.47%	B+
All carriers on IAH–SFO	3,600	78.6%	66 min	0.47%	B+
United Airlines, whole network	821,041	79.0%	72 min	1.01%	B

Across the year

UA 487 quarter by quarter

Quarter by quarter UA 487 held fairly steady: 100.0% in Oct–Dec 2025, 96.6% in Jan–Mar 2026 and 93.4% in Apr–Jun 2026. A spread of 7 points is about what a sample of this size moves on its own, so the annual figure is a fair summary.

Jul–Sep 20256 flights—
Oct–Dec 202592 flights100.0%
Jan–Mar 202689 flights96.6%
Apr–Jun 202691 flights93.4%

Scale runs 85% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

By weekday, UA 487 ranged from 92.3% on Monday to 100.0% on Tuesday. With about 40 flights behind each day, a spread of 8 points is inside normal variation, so the day you fly is not worth changing for this flight.

Delay causes

Why UA 487 runs late

One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 76% of the 936 delay minutes carriers reported, and the remaining four split what is left. The split is by minutes rather than by flights, so a few very long delays count for as much as many short ones.

Carrier
76%
Extreme weather
14%
National Airspace System
10%

Extreme weather accounts for 14% of delay minutes, well above the single-digit share typical across the system. Weather delays are lumpy: they arrive as whole bad days rather than as a steady drag, so the quarterly figures above are the more useful view of the risk. The national share is 6%, so this operation carries roughly 2.3 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 936 delay minutes reported on UA 487.

Cancellations are rare at 0.36%, 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

Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 1.8% land an hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% nationally. Connections built on this flight are about as safe as US domestic connections get, though a cancelled flight still ignores every layover you give it.

At 1,635 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 ten other city pairs in the data, including SFO to MFR (117), SFO to IND (53) and ATL to SFO (49), but none flew often enough under UA 487 to report a rate for. Carriers move flight numbers between routes, so the figures on this page apply to IAH to SFO only.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 278 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 487

For a booking, UA 487 has one of the better records a US domestic flight can show: 96.7% on time and 0.36% cancelled. That is a base rate, not a promise about any single day.

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