Carrier route record

F9DEN→IND

Frontier Airlines · Denver to Indianapolis

Flights: 294
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 12%
Carriers: 3

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

Frontier on DEN to IND lands a B+, 4 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. Roughly one flight in five arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by about an hour on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 294 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 841 at 81.6% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, Frontier's DEN to IND record is 4 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 40 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

81.6%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 294 completed flights

Avg delay

59 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.00%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

75.5%

Every carrier on DEN to IND, 2,544 flights

These figures cover 294 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

Frontier against every carrier on DEN to IND

Frontier flew 294 of the 2,544 flights on DEN to IND, about 12% of it. Its 81.6% on time is 6 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 75.5%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from United at 81.6% to Southwest at 70.6%.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. United Airlines arrives on time 81.6% of the time; Southwest Airlines manages 70.6%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 1,409 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on DEN to IND
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
United Airlines	841	81.6%	57 min	0.36%	B+
Frontier Airlines (this page)thin sample	294	81.6%	59 min	0.00%	B+
Southwest Airlines	1,409	70.6%	58 min	0.57%	C+

United leads Southwest by 11 points. Real, but small enough that a better departure time on the weaker carrier can outweigh it.

Departure window

When Frontier 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 294 flights.

5am–8am27 flights—
8am–11am1 flights—
11am–2pm22 flights—
2pm–5pm195 flights81.5%
5pm–8pm—
8pm–5am49 flights77.6%

Scale runs 70% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The 2pm–5pm window is the strongest at 81.5% on time. The full set of windows spans 4 points.

Across the year

Frontier on DEN to IND through the year

Jul–Sep 2025106 flights78.3%
Oct–Dec 202563 flights87.3%
Jan–Mar 202653 flights83.0%
Apr–Jun 202672 flights80.6%

Scale runs 70% to 95%. 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 81.6% on time across 294 flights.

Quarter by quarter Frontier on DEN to IND held fairly steady: 78.3% in Jul–Sep 2025, 87.3% in Oct–Dec 2025, 83.0% in Jan–Mar 2026 and 80.6% in Apr–Jun 2026. A spread of 9 points is about what a sample of this size moves on its own, so the annual figure is a fair summary.

Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 89.2% on time and Friday the weakest at 69.1%. 20 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why Frontier runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 52% of the 3,199 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
52%
National Airspace System
20%
Carrier
19%
Extreme weather
9%

52% 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 3,199 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 6 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 3,199 reported delay minutes.

Cancellations are rare at 0.00%, below the national 1.81% 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

7.5% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.1%. That is the figure that decides a connection, and it says 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 976 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 is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 78.2% on time across 294 flights, 3 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 3 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 294 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 Frontier on DEN to IND

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 294 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 81.6% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 294 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