Carrier route record
UADEN→LIT
United Airlines · Denver to Little Rock
- Flights
- 103
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Share of route
- 7%
- Carriers
- 4
Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with United Airlines.
United on DEN to LIT 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 103 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, SkyWest Airlines, flew 986 at 85.7% on time.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.3%, so United on DEN to LIT runs 14 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 136 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
63.7%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 102 completed flights
Avg delay
81 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.97%
National rate is 1.89%
Whole route
82.6%
Every carrier on DEN to LIT, 1,574 flights
These figures cover 103 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 18.6% 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 LIT
United flew 103 of the 1,574 flights on DEN to LIT, about 7% of it. Its 63.7% on time is 19 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 82.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 85.7% to United at 63.7%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The two carriers here are closely matched: 4 points separate the best from the worst. At that spread, schedule and price are better tie-breakers than reliability. Sample sizes are shown so you can see which rows are worth weighing.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkyWest Airlines | 986 | 85.7% | 78 min | 0.61% | A+ |
| Southwest Airlines | 365 | 81.3% | 43 min | 0.55% | B+ |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 120 | 77.5% | 91 min | 0.00% | B+ |
| United Airlines (this page)thin sample | 103 | 63.7% | 81 min | 0.97% | D+ |
No carrier stands out. SkyWest tops the table at 85.7%, 4 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
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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 103 flights.
There are not enough flights in each departure window to split United's DEN to LIT record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 63.7% is the reliable figure here.
Across the year
United on DEN to LIT through the year
- Apr–Jun 202642 flights59.5%
- Jul–Sep 202661 flights66.7%
Scale runs 50% to 70%.
Monthly volumes are too low here to break the year into twelve reliable readings. What the twelve-month total says is 63.7% on time across 103 flights.
Split by quarter, United on DEN to LIT logged 42 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 63.7% annual figure is the one to use.
Arrival by arrival
How late United on DEN to LIT runs when it is late
When United on DEN to LIT is late it tends to be very late: 19 of its 37 late arrivals were an hour or more behind, and 4 were two hours or more.
- 15+ min early14 flights13.7%
- Within 15 min51 flights50.0%
- 15–29 min late11 flights10.8%
- 30–59 min late7 flights6.9%
- 1–2 hours late15 flights14.7%
- 2+ hours late4 flights3.9%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of 102 completed flights by arrival against schedule.
4 of 33 late departures made up the time and arrived on time, 12% of them. In the other direction, 8 flights left on time yet arrived 15 minutes late or more, so that delay built up after pushback: in the air, in a holding pattern or on the ground at LIT.
The worst days
Worst days for United on DEN to LIT
The latest arrival of the period was on 8 July 2026, 11 hours 16 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as extreme weather. The five worst days are spread across July, June and August, with no single month standing out.
| Date | Arrived late by | Largest filed cause |
|---|---|---|
| 8 July 2026 | 11 hours 16 minutes | Extreme weather |
| 8 June 2026 | 4 hours 5 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 14 August 2026 | 3 hours 49 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 9 July 2026 | 2 hours 6 minutes | Carrier |
| 24 August 2026 | 1 hour 50 minutes | Extreme weather |
Delay causes
Why United runs late on this route
Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 48% of the 2,994 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.
- 48%Late-arriving aircraft
- 22%Carrier
- 16%National Airspace System
- 14%Extreme weather
Extreme weather accounts for 14% of delay minutes, well above the single-digit share typical across the system. Weather delays are lumpy: they arrive as whole bad days rather than as a steady drag, so the monthly strip above is the more useful view of the risk. The national share is 6%, so this operation carries roughly 2.3 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 2,994 reported delay minutes.
48% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 2,994 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 3 to one.
Cancellations sit at 0.97% against a national 1.89%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
18.6% 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 771 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 83.2% on time across 102 flights, 20 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 20 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 103 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 LIT
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 103 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 63.7% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 102 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- DEN to LIT, every carrier
- United on LIT to DEN, the return leg
- SkyWest Airlines on DEN to LIT85.7%
- Southwest Airlines on DEN to LIT81.3%
- Frontier Airlines on DEN to LIT77.5%
- United Airlines network-wide record
- Denver International (DEN) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- How often a connection fails at the major US hubs
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.