Carrier route record
F9DFW→SFO
Frontier Airlines · Dallas-Fort Worth to San Francisco
- Flights
- 219
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Share of route
- 5%
- Carriers
- 4
Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Frontier Airlines.
Frontier on DFW to SFO earns an F−, which is as low as this site's scale goes for a reason. Only 53.6% of flights arrive inside the 15-minute window, 24 points worse than the national rate of 77.3%. Late arrivals average about an hour. Treat any tight connection here as a coin flip. That rests on 219 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 914 at 70.2% on time.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.3%, so Frontier on DFW to SFO runs 24 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 237 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
53.6%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 211 completed flights
Avg delay
58 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
3.65%
National rate is 1.89%
Whole route
60.8%
Every carrier on DFW to SFO, 4,264 flights
These figures cover 219 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 17.1% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.
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Carrier by carrier
Frontier against every carrier on DFW to SFO
Frontier flew 219 of the 4,264 flights on DFW to SFO, about 5% of it. Its 53.6% on time is 7 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 60.8%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 85.7% to Frontier at 53.6%. 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 70.2% of the time; American Airlines manages 58.2%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 3,096 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkyWest Airlinesthin sample | 35 | 85.7% | 29 min | 0.00% | A+ |
| United Airlines | 914 | 70.2% | 76 min | 0.66% | C+ |
| American Airlines | 3,096 | 58.2% | 67 min | 2.55% | D |
| Frontier Airlines (this page)thin sample | 219 | 53.6% | 58 min | 3.65% | F− |
The spread between United and American is 12 points, wide enough that it should decide the booking. On a hundred trips that is 12 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 219 flights.
There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Frontier's DFW to SFO record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 53.6% is the reliable figure here.
Across the year
Frontier on DFW to SFO through the year
- Jul–Sep 202517 flights—
- Oct–Dec 202546 flights73.3%
- Jan–Mar 202619 flights—
- Apr–Jun 202669 flights40.0%
- Jul–Sep 202668 flights45.5%
Scale runs 30% 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 53.6% on time across 219 flights.
Frontier on DFW to SFO did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Oct–Dec 2025 at 73.3% on time and its weakest Apr–Jun 2026 at 40.0%, a swing of 33 points on roughly 73 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, Friday is the strongest day at 60.5% on time and Sunday the weakest at 35.9%, a spread of 25 points.
Arrival by arrival
How late Frontier on DFW to SFO runs when it is late
Frontier on DFW to SFO often beats the schedule: 59 of 211 completed flights, 28%, arrived 15 minutes or more early. The 98 late arrivals split 23 under half an hour, 39 between 30 and 60 minutes, and 36 an hour or more.
- 15+ min early59 flights28.0%
- Within 15 min54 flights25.6%
- 15–29 min late23 flights10.9%
- 30–59 min late39 flights18.5%
- 1–2 hours late32 flights15.2%
- 2+ hours late4 flights1.9%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of 211 completed flights by arrival against schedule.
Time lost at the gate mostly stays lost. Of 97 departures that left 15 minutes late or more, only 11 made it up before arrival. In the other direction, 12 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 SFO.
The worst days
Worst days for Frontier on DFW to SFO
The latest arrival of the period was on 18 May 2026, 8 hours 50 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as a late-arriving aircraft. Three of the five worst days fell in May 2026.
| Date | Arrived late by | Largest filed cause |
|---|---|---|
| 18 May 2026 | 8 hours 50 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 20 November 2025 | 4 hours 20 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 25 May 2026 | 2 hours 33 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 29 June 2026 | 2 hours 16 minutes | National Airspace System |
| 5 May 2026 | 1 hour 53 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
Delay causes
Why Frontier runs late on this route
National Airspace System accounts for 58% of the 5,719 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.
- 58%National Airspace System
- 40%Late-arriving aircraft
- 2%Carrier
- 0%Extreme weather
40% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 5,719 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 40 to one. The split is drawn from 5,719 reported delay minutes.
58% 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 3,318 minutes out of 5,719, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations run at 3.65%, against 1.89% nationally. That is roughly one flight in 25 cancelled outright. A cancelled flight is invisible in every on-time figure on this page, so the punctuality numbers above describe only the flights that actually operated.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
17.1% 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 1,464 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 64.3% on time across 217 flights, 11 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 11 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 219 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 DFW to SFO
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 3.65% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you about an hour; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 8pm–5am departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 211 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- DFW to SFO, every carrier
- Frontier on SFO to DFW, the return leg
- United Airlines on DFW to SFO70.2%
- American Airlines on DFW to SFO58.2%
- Frontier Airlines network-wide record
- Dallas/Fort Worth International (DFW) delay statistics
- San Francisco International (SFO) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- 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.