Carrier route record
UADEN→BFL
United Airlines · Denver to Bakersfield
- Flights
- 102
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Share of route
- 14%
- Carriers
- 2
Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with United Airlines.
United on DEN to BFL earns an F+, which is as low as this site's scale goes for a reason. Only 53.0% of flights arrive inside the 15-minute window, 24 points worse than the national rate of 77.3%. Late arrivals average an hour and a half. Treat any tight connection here as a coin flip. That rests on 102 flights, with a median arrival 12 minutes late.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.3%, so United on DEN to BFL runs 24 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 243 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
53.0%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 100 completed flights
Avg delay
86 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.00%
National rate is 1.89%
Whole route
78.9%
Every carrier on DEN to BFL, 730 flights
These figures cover 102 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 27.0% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.
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Carrier by carrier
United against every carrier on DEN to BFL
United flew 102 of the 730 flights on DEN to BFL, about 14% of it. Its 53.0% on time is 26 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 78.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of two carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 83.0% to United at 53.0%.
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 | 628 | 83.0% | 64 min | 0.16% | B+ |
| United Airlines (this page)thin sample | 102 | 53.0% | 86 min | 0.00% | F+ |
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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 102 flights.
There are not enough flights in each departure window to split United's DEN to BFL record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 53.0% is the reliable figure here.
Across the year
United on DEN to BFL through the year
- Apr–Jun 202641 flights62.5%
- Jul–Sep 202661 flights46.7%
Scale runs 40% to 70%.
Monthly volumes are too low here to break the year into twelve reliable readings. What the twelve-month total says is 53.0% on time across 102 flights.
Split by quarter, United on DEN to BFL logged 41 flights in Apr–Jun 2026 and 61 flights in Jul–Sep 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 53.0% annual figure is the one to use.
Arrival by arrival
How late United on DEN to BFL runs when it is late
When United on DEN to BFL is late it tends to be very late: 27 of its 47 late arrivals were an hour or more behind, and 11 were two hours or more.
- 15+ min early15 flights15.0%
- Within 15 min38 flights38.0%
- 15–29 min late11 flights11.0%
- 30–59 min late9 flights9.0%
- 1–2 hours late16 flights16.0%
- 2+ hours late11 flights11.0%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of 100 completed flights by arrival against schedule.
Time lost at the gate mostly stays lost. Of 50 departures that left 15 minutes late or more, only 4 made it up before arrival. Only 1 left on time and still arrived late.
The worst days
Worst days for United on DEN to BFL
The latest arrival of the period was on 17 July 2026, 5 hours 20 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as a late-arriving aircraft. Three of the five worst days fell in July 2026.
| Date | Arrived late by | Largest filed cause |
|---|---|---|
| 17 July 2026 | 5 hours 20 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 14 August 2026 | 4 hours 14 minutes | Carrier |
| 22 July 2026 | 4 hours 8 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 13 August 2026 | 3 hours 23 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 28 July 2026 | 2 hours 59 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
Delay causes
Why United runs late on this route
Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 62% of the 4,020 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.
- 62%Late-arriving aircraft
- 32%Carrier
- 6%National Airspace System
62% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 4,020 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 62 to one. The split is drawn from 4,020 reported delay minutes.
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 stage length
What a delay here costs
27.0% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum for a connection here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.
The 845 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 94.0% on time across 101 flights, 41 points above 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 41 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 102 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 DEN to BFL
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 102 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 53.0% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 100 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
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.