Carrier route record

F9DEN→LGA

Frontier Airlines · Denver to New York

Flights: 152
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 3%
Carriers: 4

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

Frontier on DEN to LGA draws a D−. Roughly one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is a little over an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 152 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Delta Air Lines, flew 1,036 at 79.0% on time.

Delta Air Lines is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 79.0% on time across 1,036 flights.

On time

61.6%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 146 completed flights

Avg delay

76 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

3.95%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

71.5%

Every carrier on DEN to LGA, 4,672 flights

These figures cover 152 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 15.1% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule. That is the number that wrecks a connection, and it is not visible in an on-time percentage alone.

Carrier by carrier

Frontier against every carrier on DEN to LGA

Frontier flew 152 of the 4,672 flights on DEN to LGA, about 3% of it. Its 61.6% on time is 10 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 71.5%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 79.0% to Frontier at 61.6%.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Delta Air Lines arrives on time 79.0% of the time; Southwest Airlines manages 64.0%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 1,467 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on DEN to LGA
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Delta Air Lines	1,036	79.0%	81 min	4.44%	B−
United Airlines	2,017	74.0%	69 min	1.83%	C
Southwest Airlines	1,467	64.0%	60 min	2.66%	D
Frontier Airlines (this page)thin sample	152	61.6%	76 min	3.95%	D−

Delta Air Lines cancels 4.4% of what it schedules here, the highest in the table. A cancelled flight never appears in an on-time rate, so read that column alongside the punctuality one rather than after 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 152 flights.

There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Frontier's DEN to LGA record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 61.6% is the reliable figure here.

Across the year

Frontier on DEN to LGA through the year

Jul–Sep 202584 flights58.0%
Oct–Dec 202552 flights63.3%
Jan–Mar 202611 flights—
Apr–Jun 20265 flights—

Scale runs 50% to 70%. 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 61.6% on time across 152 flights.

Split by quarter, Frontier on DEN to LGA logged 84 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 52 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 11 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 5 flights in Apr–Jun 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 61.6% annual figure is the one to use.

Delay causes

Why Frontier runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. National Airspace System accounts for 57% of the 4,263 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.

National Airspace System
57%
Late-arriving aircraft
25%
Carrier
11%
Extreme weather
8%

57% 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 2,410 minutes out of 4,263, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 4,263 reported delay minutes.

Cancellations run at 3.95%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about one flight in 25 cancelled outright. A cancelled flight is invisible in every on-time figure on this page, so the punctuality numbers above describe only the flights that actually operated.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 15.1% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% nationally. A 45-minute layover does not survive that, and no amount of walking quickly changes it. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.

At 1,620 miles this is transcontinental flying, and long routes get a quiet structural advantage. Scheduled block time on a flight this length carries more padding in absolute minutes, so a twenty-minute late departure often still becomes an on-time arrival. Read the on-time rate here as slightly flattering next to a short-haul route with the same operational quality.

The return leg runs 64.4% on time across 152 flights, within 3 points 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. 152 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 LGA

Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 3.95% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you a little over an hour; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 2pm–5pm departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 146 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