Carrier route record
UACLE→DEN
United Airlines · Cleveland to Denver
- Flights
- 940
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Share of route
- 51%
- Carriers
- 3
Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with United Airlines.
United on CLE to DEN earns an A+. Close to nine flights in ten arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 10 points better than the national rate of 77.3%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs a little over an hour. That rests on 940 flights, with a median arrival 9 minutes early.
Set against the rest of the country, United's CLE to DEN record is 10 points better than the US average of 77.3%. That gap is worth roughly 102 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
87.5%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 935 completed flights
Avg delay
69 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.11%
National rate is 1.89%
Whole route
82.4%
Every carrier on CLE to DEN, 1,845 flights
These figures cover 940 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. The median arrival is 9 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.
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Carrier by carrier
United against every carrier on CLE to DEN
United flew 940 of the 1,845 flights on CLE to DEN, most of the route. Its 87.5% on time is 5 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 82.4%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from United at 87.5% to Southwest at 76.9%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United Airlines (this page) | 940 | 87.5% | 69 min | 0.11% | A+ |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 296 | 77.3% | 59 min | 1.69% | B |
| Southwest Airlines | 609 | 76.9% | 60 min | 0.66% | B+ |
Flight by flight
United flight numbers on CLE to DEN
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Departure window
When United runs best on this route
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 940 flights.
- 5am–8am5 flights—
- 8am–11am428 flights91.5%
- 11am–2pm144 flights87.5%
- 2pm–5pm333 flights82.1%
- 5pm–8pm30 flights86.7%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 75% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the morning departure. Flights leaving between 8am–11am arrive on time 91.5% of the time, against 82.1% for the afternoon window. That is 9 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 428 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
United on CLE to DEN through the year
January is the weak month at 79.1% on time, against 97.7% in September. Winter delays cluster: a single storm system can account for most of a month's shortfall, so an average December hides both very good weeks and genuinely unflyable days. July was the busiest month here, with 92 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 90.6% on time and Thursday the weakest at 85.0%, a spread of 6 points.
Arrival by arrival
How late United on CLE to DEN runs when it is late
United on CLE to DEN often beats the schedule: 295 of 935 completed flights, 32%, arrived 15 minutes or more early. The 117 late arrivals split 44 under half an hour, 34 between 30 and 60 minutes, and 39 an hour or more.
- 15+ min early295 flights31.6%
- Within 15 min523 flights55.9%
- 15–29 min late44 flights4.7%
- 30–59 min late34 flights3.6%
- 1–2 hours late16 flights1.7%
- 2+ hours late23 flights2.5%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of 935 completed flights by arrival against schedule.
17 of 105 late departures made up the time and arrived on time, 16% of them. 29 flights left on time and still arrived late.
The worst days
Worst days for United on CLE to DEN
The latest arrival of the period was on 14 July 2026, 5 hours 56 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as carrier-caused (crew, maintenance, fuelling, baggage). Three of the five worst days fell in July 2026.
| Date | Arrived late by | Largest filed cause |
|---|---|---|
| 14 July 2026 | 5 hours 56 minutes | Carrier |
| 3 February 2026 | 5 hours 6 minutes | Carrier |
| 18 July 2026 | 4 hours 46 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 12 November 2025 | 4 hours 32 minutes | Carrier |
| 22 July 2026 | 4 hours 32 minutes | Carrier |
Delay causes
Why United runs late on this route
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 8,076 reported delay minutes.
- 36%Carrier
- 34%Late-arriving aircraft
- 28%National Airspace System
- 1%Extreme weather
34% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 8,076 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 31 to one. The split is drawn from 8,076 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 36%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. It accounts for 2,945 of the 8,076 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations are rare at 0.11%, below the national 1.89% 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 costs
Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 4.2% land an hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% 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.
The 1,201 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 return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 82.3% on time across 939 flights, 5 points below this direction. Departure banks, aircraft rotations and the congestion at each end all differ, so scoring the two directions together would average away a real 5 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 940 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 United on CLE to DEN
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 940 flights over twelve months is enough to clear this site's floor and not enough to be confident to better than a couple of points. The 87.5% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 935 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- CLE to DEN, every carrier
- United on DEN to CLE, the return leg
- Frontier Airlines on CLE to DEN77.3%
- Southwest Airlines on CLE to DEN76.9%
- United Airlines network-wide record
- Cleveland Hopkins International (CLE) delay statistics
- Denver International (DEN) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.05 million flight records
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.