Carrier route record
F9DEN→TPA
Frontier Airlines · Denver to Tampa
- Flights
- 603
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 19%
- 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 TPA 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 a little over an hour on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 603 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 1,186 at 81.4% on time.
Set against the rest of the country, Frontier's DEN to TPA 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.
Key figures
On time
81.6%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 598 completed flights
Avg delay
72 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.83%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
76.6%
Every carrier on DEN to TPA, 3,098 flights
These figures cover 603 flights between July 2025 and June 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.
Carrier by carrier
Frontier against every carrier on DEN to TPA
Frontier flew 603 of the 3,098 flights on DEN to TPA, about 19% of it. Its 81.6% on time is 5 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 76.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Frontier at 81.6% to Southwest at 70.0%.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. United Airlines arrives on time 81.4% of the time; Southwest Airlines manages 70.0%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 1,309 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Frontier Airlines (this page) | 603 | 81.6% | 72 min | 0.83% | B+ |
| United Airlines | 1,186 | 81.4% | 67 min | 0.17% | B+ |
| Southwest Airlines | 1,309 | 70.0% | 58 min | 0.23% | 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 matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 13 points, against 11 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am160 flights85.5%
- 8am–11am90 flights78.4%
- 11am–2pm48 flights72.9%
- 2pm–5pm46 flights84.8%
- 5pm–8pm—
- 8pm–5am259 flights81.3%
Scale runs 65% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The weak window here is the middle of the day, not the evening: 11am–2pm runs 72.9% on time against 85.5% for 5am–8am. That shape usually means a departure bank rather than an accumulating delay, so the recovery later in the afternoon is real rather than noise. The 8pm–5am window is the busiest, with 259 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Frontier on DEN to TPA through the year
November is the best month on the calendar at 93.9% on time. Shoulder season thins the schedule and takes the summer weather with it, and the operation gets its margin back. March was the busiest month here, with 74 flights.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 88.4% on time and Tuesday the weakest at 72.7%. 16 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
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 7,955 reported delay minutes.
- 40%Carrier
- 39%Late-arriving aircraft
- 19%National Airspace System
- 2%Extreme weather
39% 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 7,955 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 19 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 7,955 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 40%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. Unlike weather, that is a management outcome, and it is the category where the gap between two carriers on the same schedule is genuinely earned. It accounts for 3,180 of the 7,955 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations are rare at 0.83%, below the national 1.81% 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
5.0% 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 a little over an hour, which a normal layover absorbs.
At 1,506 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 79.3% on time across 604 flights, within 2 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. 603 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 TPA
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 603 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. 598 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- DEN to TPA, every carrier
- Frontier on TPA to DEN, the return leg
- United Airlines on DEN to TPA81.4%
- Southwest Airlines on DEN to TPA70.0%
- Frontier Airlines network-wide record
- Denver International (DEN) delay statistics
- Tampa International (TPA) 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, July 2025 to June 2026. Last updated 15 September 2026; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.