Carrier route record
F9DEN→MEM
Frontier Airlines · Denver to Memphis
- Flights
- 145
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Share of route
- 10%
- Carriers
- 4
Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Frontier Airlines.
Frontier on DEN to MEM earns a B+. More than four flights in five arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 7 points better than the national rate of 77.3%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about an hour. That rests on 145 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 727 at 82.9% on time.
Set against the rest of the country, Frontier's DEN to MEM record is 7 points better than the US average of 77.3%. That gap is worth roughly 74 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
84.7%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 144 completed flights
Avg delay
57 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.69%
National rate is 1.89%
Whole route
76.4%
Every carrier on DEN to MEM, 1,395 flights
These figures cover 145 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. The median arrival is 10 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.
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Carrier by carrier
Frontier against every carrier on DEN to MEM
Frontier flew 145 of the 1,395 flights on DEN to MEM, about 10% of it. Its 84.7% on time is 8 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 76.4%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 100.0% to Southwest at 64.9%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. United Airlines arrives on time 82.9% of the time; Southwest Airlines manages 64.9%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 522 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkyWest Airlinesthin sample | 1 | 100.0% | — | 0.00% | A+ |
| Frontier Airlines (this page)thin sample | 145 | 84.7% | 57 min | 0.69% | B+ |
| United Airlines | 727 | 82.9% | 73 min | 0.83% | B+ |
| Southwest Airlines | 522 | 64.9% | 60 min | 1.15% | D |
The spread between United and Southwest is 18 points, wide enough that it should decide the booking. On a hundred trips that is 18 more arrivals inside the on-time window.
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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 145 flights.
There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Frontier's DEN to MEM record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 84.7% is the reliable figure here.
Across the year
Frontier on DEN to MEM through the year
- Jul–Sep 202512 flights—
- Oct–Dec 202539 flights89.7%
- Jan–Mar 202637 flights77.8%
- Apr–Jun 202632 flights87.5%
- Jul–Sep 202625 flights—
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 84.7% on time across 145 flights.
Frontier on DEN to MEM did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Oct–Dec 2025 at 89.7% on time and its weakest Jan–Mar 2026 at 77.8%, a swing of 12 points on roughly 48 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, Sunday is the strongest day at 87.9% on time and Thursday the weakest at 83.9%, a spread of 4 points.
Arrival by arrival
How late Frontier on DEN to MEM runs when it is late
Frontier on DEN to MEM often beats the schedule: 52 of 144 completed flights, 36%, arrived 15 minutes or more early. The 22 late arrivals split 8 under half an hour, 5 between 30 and 60 minutes, and 9 an hour or more.
- 15+ min early52 flights36.1%
- Within 15 min70 flights48.6%
- 15–29 min late8 flights5.6%
- 30–59 min late5 flights3.5%
- 1–2 hours late7 flights4.9%
- 2+ hours late2 flights1.4%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of 144 completed flights by arrival against schedule.
3 of 20 late departures made up the time and arrived on time, 15% of them. 5 flights left on time and still arrived late.
The worst days
Worst days for Frontier on DEN to MEM
The latest arrival of the period was on 19 March 2026, 2 hours 49 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as a late-arriving aircraft. The five worst days are spread across March, July, June and August, with no single month standing out.
| Date | Arrived late by | Largest filed cause |
|---|---|---|
| 19 March 2026 | 2 hours 49 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 29 July 2026 | 2 hours 12 minutes | Extreme weather |
| 8 June 2026 | 1 hour 47 minutes | National Airspace System |
| 1 June 2026 | 1 hour 36 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 14 August 2026 | 1 hour 30 minutes | Extreme weather |
Delay causes
Why Frontier runs late on this route
Carriers report a reason for every delay minute they cause, in five DOT categories. The split below is by minutes, not by number of flights, so a handful of very long weather delays weighs as much as many short ones. It covers 1,247 reported delay minutes.
- 39%Late-arriving aircraft
- 26%National Airspace System
- 20%Carrier
- 15%Extreme weather
Extreme weather accounts for 15% 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 2.6 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 1,247 reported delay minutes.
39% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 1,247 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 3 to one.
Cancellations are rare at 0.69%, below the national 1.89% 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
6.2% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.3%, so 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 872 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 75.5% on time across 145 flights, 9 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 9 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 145 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 MEM
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 145 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 84.7% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 144 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- DEN to MEM, every carrier
- Frontier on MEM to DEN, the return leg
- United Airlines on DEN to MEM82.9%
- Southwest Airlines on DEN to MEM64.9%
- Frontier Airlines network-wide record
- Denver International (DEN) delay statistics
- Memphis International (MEM) delay statistics
- Same route, different airline: where the carrier you pick matters most
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
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.