Flight number record
UA 489
United Airlines · Denver to Houston
- Route
- DEN → IAH
- Departs
- 15:35
- Flights
- 340
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s UA 489, check with United Airlines.
UA 489 lands a B+, level with the national rate of 77.3%. Roughly one flight in five arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by about an hour on average. That rests on 340 flights, with a median arrival 2 minutes early.
Key figures
On time
77.9%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 340 completed flights
Avg delay
61 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.00%
National rate is 1.89%
1 hour+ late
8.5%
National rate is 8.3%
These figures cover 340 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 8.5% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.
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Schedule
When UA 489 flies
UA 489 flies DEN to IAH without a single fixed slot. Its most common scheduled departure was 15:35, used on 179 of 340 flights, with 15:41 (55 flights) and 15:42 (38 flights) next.
- Departs 15:35179 flights52.6%
- Departs 15:4155 flights16.2%
- Departs 15:4238 flights11.2%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of scheduled departures at each local time. Times used on fewer than one flight in ten are not listed.
A 15:35 departure sits in the 2pm–5pm window. Across every US flight scheduled in that window the on-time rate is 71.9%, and UA 489 runs 6 points better at 77.9%. Midday slots inherit some of the morning's delays without yet carrying the full weight of the evening's.
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Against the route
UA 489 next to DEN to IAH
Every carrier on DEN to IAH combined arrived on time 79.6% of the time across 4,728 flights, so UA 489 is 2 points behind it. United flew 3,894 flights on the same city pair under all its flight numbers, including this one, and those ran 79.7% on time. Across its whole network United Airlines managed 78.8%, close to this flight's figure.
| Compared with | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| UA 489thin sample | 340 | 77.9% | 61 min | 0.00% | B+ |
| All United Airlines on DEN–IAH | 3,894 | 79.7% | 63 min | 0.26% | B+ |
| All carriers on DEN–IAH | 4,728 | 79.6% | 62 min | 0.30% | B+ |
| United Airlines, whole network | 830,825 | 78.8% | 73 min | 1.02% | B |
Across the year
UA 489 quarter by quarter
Quarter by quarter UA 489 held fairly steady: 78.0% in Oct–Dec 2025, 80.0% in Jan–Mar 2026, 76.9% in Apr–Jun 2026 and 75.8% in Jul–Sep 2026. A spread of 4 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 202591 flights78.0%
- Jan–Mar 202690 flights80.0%
- Apr–Jun 202691 flights76.9%
- Jul–Sep 202662 flights75.8%
Scale runs 65% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
By weekday, UA 489 ranged from 72.9% on Thursday to 81.6% on Friday. With about 49 flights behind each day, a spread of 9 points is inside normal variation, so the day you fly is not worth changing for this flight.
Arrival by arrival
How late UA 489 runs when it is late
The 75 late arrivals split 29 under half an hour, 17 between 30 and 60 minutes, and 29 an hour or more.
- 15+ min early50 flights14.7%
- Within 15 min215 flights63.2%
- 15–29 min late29 flights8.5%
- 30–59 min late17 flights5.0%
- 1–2 hours late19 flights5.6%
- 2+ hours late10 flights2.9%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of 340 completed flights by arrival against schedule.
11 of 52 late departures made up the time and arrived on time, 21% of them. In the other direction, 34 flights left on time yet arrived 15 minutes late or more, so that delay built up after pushback: in the air, in a holding pattern or on the ground at IAH.
The worst days
Worst days for UA 489
The latest arrival of the period was on 11 March 2026, 4 hours 26 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as a late-arriving aircraft. Three of the five worst days fell in March 2026.
| Date | Arrived late by | Largest filed cause |
|---|---|---|
| 11 March 2026 | 4 hours 26 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 2 June 2026 | 3 hours 43 minutes | National Airspace System |
| 7 March 2026 | 3 hours 7 minutes | National Airspace System |
| 16 October 2025 | 2 hours 46 minutes | National Airspace System |
| 16 March 2026 | 2 hours 35 minutes | National Airspace System |
Delay causes
Why UA 489 runs late
National Airspace System accounts for 58% of the 4,576 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.
- 58%National Airspace System
- 22%Late-arriving aircraft
- 18%Carrier
- 2%Extreme weather
58% 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 2,674 minutes out of 4,576, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 4,576 delay minutes reported on UA 489.
Cancellations are rare at 0.00%, below the national 1.89% and low enough to earn the plus on the grade. Almost no flights are called off; the risk here is arriving late, not not arriving.
Connections and routes
What a delay on this flight costs
8.5% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.3%, so a 60 to 75 minute layover is reasonable here while anything under 45 minutes is a bet. Most delays on this route last about an hour, which a normal layover absorbs.
The 861 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.
The same number turns up on six other city pairs in the data, including SNA to DEN (201), MSP to DEN (39) and IAH to OMA (37), but none flew often enough under UA 489 to report a rate for. Carriers move flight numbers between routes, so the figures on this page apply to DEN to IAH only.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 340 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 489
For a booking, read UA 489 as 77.9% on time with 0.00% cancelled over 340 flights. Those are rates from the past twelve months, not a forecast for any particular day.
Related
Where to go next
- DEN to IAH, every carrier and departure
- IAH to DEN, the return direction
- United Airlines 1720 on the same route90.1%
- United Airlines 475 on the same route74.1%
- United Airlines 320 on the same route96.7%
- United Airlines 1829 on the same route71.2%
- United Airlines 2419 on the same route78.9%
- Frontier Airlines 2996 on the same route73.9%
- Denver International (DEN) delay statistics
- George Bush Intercontinental (IAH) delay statistics
- United Airlines on-time record
- Every United Airlines flight number with a record
- The most and least reliable flight numbers in the US
- Connecting flights: how much buffer the data says you need
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, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated ; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.