Route reliability record
ABQ→SLC
Albuquerque to Salt Lake City
- Flights
- 1,153
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 493 mi
- Carriers
- 1
This route earns an A+. Nearly every flight arrives inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 16 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about an hour. That rests on 1,153 ABQ to SLC flights, with a median arrival 12 minutes early.
Best time to fly ABQ to SLC: a 5am–8am departure, ideally on a Monday. Flights in that window arrived on time 96.8% of the time and Monday flights 95.2%, against 93.8% for the route overall.
Set against the rest of the country, this route's record is 16 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 162 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
93.8%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,152 completed flights
Avg delay
64 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.09%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
SkyWest
93.8% on time across 1,153 flights
These figures cover 1,153 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 12 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.
Carrier by carrier
Which airline is most reliable on ABQ to SLC
Only one carrier clears this site's 365-flight floor here, so there is no comparison to draw. The table below is the full picture.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkyWest Airlines | 1,153 | 93.8% | 64 min | 0.09% | A+ |
Flight by flight
Flights on ABQ to SLC
The flight numbers below flew this route at least 250 times in the period, busiest first. Each has its own record, with its schedule and delay causes.
Departure window
The best time of day to leave
Departure time is the single lever a traveller controls, and it moves the odds more than most people expect. Each bar below is the on-time rate for flights scheduled to leave inside that window, across 1,153 flights.
- 5am–8am189 flights96.8%
- 8am–11am177 flights96.6%
- 11am–2pm364 flights95.1%
- 2pm–5pm21 flights—
- 5pm–8pm381 flights89.2%
- 8pm–5am21 flights—
Scale runs 80% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The early departures do better, though not dramatically: 96.8% on time for the 5am–8am window against 89.2% for 5pm–8pm. Worth taking if the schedule allows, not worth an extra connection. The 5pm–8pm window is the busiest, with 381 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 13 points from best month to worst, which is wide. An annual average tells you very little about the week you are actually flying, so read the strip rather than the headline if your dates are fixed.
September is the best month on the calendar at 97.8% on time. Shoulder season thins the schedule and takes the summer weather with it, and the operation gets its margin back. July was the busiest month here, with 119 flights.
The day of the week is close to irrelevant here: 4 points separates the best day from the worst. Weekly demand peaks are not what drives the delays on this operation.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 81% of the 4,631 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.
- 81%Carrier
- 15%Extreme weather
- 4%National Airspace System
Extreme weather accounts for 15% 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 monthly strip above is 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 4,631 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 81%, 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 3,763 of the 4,631 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations are rare at 0.09%, 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 stage length
What a delay here actually 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 493 miles this is a short hop, and stage length matters more than it looks. A flight this short spends under two hours in the air, which leaves almost nothing to claw back a late pushback with. Delay here is decided on the ground, in the turn, which is why the 5am–8am window matters as much as it does.
The return leg runs 92.6% on time across 1,153 flights, within about a point of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.
The sample behind these figures is 1,153 flights, enough that the headline rate is stable to within roughly a point. The hour-block and month splits divide that further, so read the thinner bars with more caution than the headline.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in SLC after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. September runs 97.8% on time and March 84.8%, a swing of 13 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of March before you think about anything else. 1,152 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
ABQ to SLC questions
How often is ABQ to SLC delayed?
About one flight in fifteen arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 6.2% of the 1,153 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by about an hour on average.
How reliable is ABQ to SLC compared with the rest of the country?
93.8% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.6%, a difference of 16 points in its favour. That is worth a A+ on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on ABQ to SLC?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 96.8% on time. The 5pm–8pm window is the weakest at 89.2%, 8 points behind. Later departures inherit delays from earlier flights the same aircraft has already flown, which is why the curve slopes the way it does.
How bad are March delays on ABQ to SLC?
March is the weakest month at 84.8% on time, compared with 97.8% in September. Across the year that is 13 points between the best and worst months. Moving flexible dates out of that month is one of the few things that reliably helps.
Related
Where to go next
- SLC to ABQ — the return legseparate record
- Salt Lake City International (SLC) delay statistics
- ABQ to PHX, a related route82.4%
- DEN to SLC, a related route77.5%
- ABQ to DEN, a related route82.1%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record93.8%
- Worst months to fly in the US, ranked by the data
- Late aircraft, weather, or the airline: what actually causes US flight delays
Direction matters. ABQ to SLC and SLC to ABQ are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
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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.