Carrier route record
NKDFW→BWI
Spirit Airlines · Dallas-Fort Worth to Baltimore
- Flights
- 121
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 9%
- Carriers
- 4
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Spirit Airlines.
Spirit on DFW to BWI sits in the middle of the pack with a C+. About seven flights in ten arrive on time by the DOT's definition, 6 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. The late ones land about an hour behind schedule. That rests on 121 flights, with a median arrival 2 minutes early.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Spirit on DFW to BWI runs 6 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 59 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
71.7%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 120 completed flights
Avg delay
62 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.83%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
69.3%
Every carrier on DFW to BWI, 1,329 flights
These figures cover 121 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 13.3% 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
Spirit against every carrier on DFW to BWI
Spirit flew 121 of the 1,329 flights on DFW to BWI, about 9% of it. Its 71.7% on time is 2 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 69.3%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Envoy at 100.0% to American at 69.0%. Two of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
Only one carrier clears this site's 365-flight floor here, so there is no comparison to draw. The table below is the full picture.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Envoy Airthin sample | 3 | 100.0% | — | 0.00% | A+ |
| Spirit Airlines (this page)thin sample | 121 | 71.7% | 62 min | 0.83% | C+ |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 267 | 69.1% | 81 min | 2.62% | C |
| American Airlines | 938 | 69.0% | 66 min | 3.30% | C− |
Departure window
When Spirit 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 121 flights.
There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Spirit's DFW to BWI record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 71.7% is the reliable figure here.
Across the year
Spirit on DFW to BWI through the year
- Jul–Sep 202570 flights69.6%
- Oct–Dec 202544 flights72.7%
- Jan–Mar 20267 flights—
Scale runs 60% to 80%. 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 71.7% on time across 121 flights.
Split by quarter, Spirit on DFW to BWI logged 70 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 44 flights in Oct–Dec 2025 and 7 flights in Jan–Mar 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 71.7% annual figure is the one to use.
Delay causes
Why Spirit 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 2,099 reported delay minutes.
- 37%National Airspace System
- 30%Carrier
- 28%Late-arriving aircraft
- 4%Extreme weather
- 1%Security
37% 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 783 minutes out of 2,099, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 2,099 reported delay minutes.
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
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 13.3% 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.
The 1,217 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 84.8% on time across 126 flights, 13 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 13 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 121 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 Spirit on DFW to BWI
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 121 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 71.7% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 120 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- DFW to BWI, every carrier
- Spirit on BWI to DFW, the return leg
- Frontier Airlines on DFW to BWI69.1%
- American Airlines on DFW to BWI69.0%
- Spirit Airlines network-wide record
- Dallas/Fort Worth International (DFW) delay statistics
- Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall (BWI) delay statistics
- How often a connection fails at the major US hubs
- Connecting flights: how much buffer the data says you need
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.