Carrier route record

UACLE→RSW

United Airlines · Cleveland to Fort Myers

Flights: 348
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 38%
Carriers: 3

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

United on CLE to RSW 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 348 flights, with a median arrival 15 minutes early.

Set against the rest of the country, United's CLE to RSW record is 16 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 160 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

93.6%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 344 completed flights

Avg delay

60 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.57%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

83.9%

Every carrier on CLE to RSW, 925 flights

These figures cover 348 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 15 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

United against every carrier on CLE to RSW

United flew 348 of the 925 flights on CLE to RSW, about 38% of it. Its 93.6% on time is 10 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 83.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from United at 93.6% to Frontier at 78.0%. 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.

On-time performance by carrier on CLE to RSW
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
United Airlines (this page)thin sample	348	93.6%	60 min	0.57%	A+
Southwest Airlinesthin sample	5	80.0%	31 min	0.00%	B+
Frontier Airlines	572	78.0%	82 min	1.22%	B

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 348 flights.

5am–8am101 flights97.0%
8am–11am178 flights92.1%
11am–2pm—
2pm–5pm69 flights92.6%
5pm–8pm—
8pm–5am—

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

The early departures do better, though not dramatically: 97.0% on time for the 5am–8am window against 92.1% for 8am–11am. Worth taking if the schedule allows, not worth an extra connection. The 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 178 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

United on CLE to RSW through the year

Jul–Sep 202542 flights97.6%
Oct–Dec 202562 flights87.1%
Jan–Mar 2026134 flights93.2%
Apr–Jun 2026110 flights96.3%

Scale runs 80% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Monthly volumes are too low here to break the year into twelve reliable readings. What the twelve-month total says is 93.6% on time across 348 flights.

United on CLE to RSW did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Jul–Sep 2025 at 97.6% on time and its weakest Oct–Dec 2025 at 87.1%, a swing of 11 points on roughly 87 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.

Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 98.1% on time and Saturday the weakest at 84.9%. 13 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why United runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 47% of the 1,308 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.

Late-arriving aircraft
47%
National Airspace System
39%
Carrier
10%
Extreme weather
4%

47% 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 1,308 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 11 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 1,308 reported delay minutes.

39% 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 506 minutes out of 1,308, against a national NAS share of 21%.

Cancellations are rare at 0.57%, 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 costs

Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 2.3% 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.

The 1,025 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 return leg runs 92.5% on time across 348 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.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 348 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 RSW

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 348 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 93.6% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 344 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Where to go next

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