Route reliability record
DFW→CLE
Dallas-Fort Worth to Cleveland
- Flights
- 1,612
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Distance
- 1,021 mi
- Carriers
- 3
This route draws a C. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is about an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 1,612 DFW to CLE flights, with a median arrival right on schedule.
Best time to fly DFW to CLE: a 5am–8am departure, ideally on a Tuesday. Flights in that window arrived on time 86.8% of the time and Tuesday flights 74.8%, against 65.8% for the route overall.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.3%, so this route runs 12 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 115 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
65.8%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,575 completed flights
Avg delay
65 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
2.23%
National rate is 1.89%
Best carrier
American
63.7% on time across 1,420 flights
These figures cover 1,612 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 11.3% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.
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Carrier by carrier
Which airline is most reliable on DFW to CLE
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 | 24 | 100.0% | — | 8.33% | A− |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 168 | 78.3% | 96 min | 1.19% | B |
| American Airlines | 1,420 | 63.7% | 63 min | 2.25% | D |
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Departure window
The best time of day to leave
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 31 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier.
- 5am–8am190 flights86.8%
- 8am–11am371 flights74.3%
- 11am–2pm289 flights62.8%
- 2pm–5pm198 flights58.8%
- 5pm–8pm381 flights57.2%
- 8pm–5am183 flights56.1%
Scale runs 50% to 90%.
The 8pm–5am window is where this operation falls apart: 56.1% on time, against 86.8% for the 5am–8am slot. By evening the aircraft flying these rotations have absorbed a full day of small delays and there is no slack left to recover in. The 5pm–8pm window is the busiest, with 381 flights scheduled in it.
Explore
Filter DFW to CLE by airline, time, month and day
Pick a breakdown and a carrier. The dashed mark on each row is the same slice for every US flight.
On DFW to CLE, the best departure window is 5am–8am at 86.8% on time and the worst is 8pm–5am at 56.1%, a wide gap of 30.7 points. All US flights leaving 5am–8am ran 89.3%.
- 5–8am86.8%
- 8–11am74.3%
- 11am–2pm62.8%
- 2–5pm58.8%
- 5–8pm57.2%
- 8pm–5am56.1%
best all US flightsScale 50% to 95%.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 22 points from best month to worst, which is wide. An annual average tells you very little about the week you are actually flying, so read the strip rather than the headline if your dates are fixed.
September is the best month on the calendar at 76.1% on time. Shoulder season thins the schedule and takes the summer weather with it, and the operation gets its margin back. June was the busiest month here, with 148 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 74.8% on time and Sunday the weakest at 54.9%, a spread of 20 points.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 50% of the 35,000 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.
- 50%Late-arriving aircraft
- 32%Carrier
- 13%National Airspace System
- 4%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
50% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 35,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 11 to one. The split is drawn from 34,901 reported delay minutes.
The practical consequence: the 5am–8am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 86.8% on time here.
Cancellations sit at 2.23% against a national 1.89%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.06%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here actually costs
11.3% 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 1,021 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 76.1% on time across 1,615 flights, 10 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 10 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,612 flights, enough that the headline rate is stable to within roughly a point. The hour-block and month splits divide that further, so read the thinner bars with more caution than the headline.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in CLE after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. September runs 76.1% on time and March 54.3%, a swing of 22 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of March before you think about anything else. 1,575 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
DFW to CLE questions
How often is DFW to CLE delayed?
About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 34.2% of the 1,612 flights in this analysis, against 22.7% nationally. Delayed flights are late by about an hour on average.
How reliable is DFW to CLE compared with the rest of the country?
65.8% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.3%, a difference of 12 points against it. That is worth a C on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on DFW to CLE?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 86.8% on time. The 8pm–5am window is the weakest at 56.1%, 31 points behind. Later departures inherit delays from earlier flights the same aircraft has already flown, which is why the curve slopes the way it does.
How bad are March delays on DFW to CLE?
March is the weakest month at 54.3% on time, compared with 76.1% in September. Across the year that is 22 points between the best and worst months. Moving flexible dates out of that month is one of the few things that reliably helps.
Related
Where to go next
- CLE to DFW — the return legseparate record
- Dallas/Fort Worth International (DFW) delay statistics
- Cleveland Hopkins International (CLE) delay statistics
- Frontier Airlines on DFW to CLE78.3%
- American Airlines on DFW to CLE63.7%
- DFW to ORD, a related route68.8%
- ORD to CLE, a related route70.8%
- DFW to ATL, a related route75.6%
- Envoy Air on-time record100.0%
- Frontier Airlines on-time record78.3%
- American Airlines on-time record63.7%
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.05 million flight records
Direction matters. DFW to CLE and CLE to DFW are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
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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.