Carrier route record

F9DFW→SFO

Frontier Airlines · Dallas-Fort Worth to San Francisco

Flights: 185
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 4%
Carriers: 4

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Frontier Airlines.

Frontier on DFW to SFO draws a D−. Roughly one flight in two 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 185 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 852 at 71.8% on time.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Frontier on DFW to SFO runs 19 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 186 extra late arrivals.

On time

59.0%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 178 completed flights

Avg delay

63 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

3.78%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

62.0%

Every carrier on DFW to SFO, 4,125 flights

These figures cover 185 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 15.2% 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

Frontier against every carrier on DFW to SFO

Frontier flew 185 of the 4,125 flights on DFW to SFO, about 4% of it. Its 59.0% on time is 3 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 62.0%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 76.5% to Frontier at 59.0%. 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 71.8% of the time; American Airlines manages 59.3%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 3,071 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on DFW to SFO
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
SkyWest Airlinesthin sample	17	76.5%	29 min	0.00%	B+
United Airlines	852	71.8%	91 min	0.82%	C+
American Airlines	3,071	59.3%	68 min	2.74%	D
Frontier Airlines (this page)thin sample	185	59.0%	63 min	3.78%	D−

The spread between United and American is 13 points, wide enough that it should decide the booking. On a hundred trips that is 13 more arrivals inside the on-time window.

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 185 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 59.0% is the reliable figure here.

Across the year

Frontier on DFW to SFO through the year

Jul–Sep 202551 flights59.2%
Oct–Dec 202546 flights73.3%
Jan–Mar 202619 flights—
Apr–Jun 202669 flights40.0%

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 59.0% on time across 185 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 62 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 65.8% on time and Sunday the weakest at 44.4%. 21 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why Frontier runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. National Airspace System accounts for 52% of the 4,575 delay minutes carriers reported, and the remaining four split what is left. The split is by minutes rather than by flights, so a few very long delays count for as much as many short ones.

National Airspace System
52%
Late-arriving aircraft
45%
Carrier
3%
Extreme weather
0%

45% 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 4,575 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 45 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 4,575 reported delay minutes.

52% 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 2,391 minutes out of 4,575, against a national NAS share of 21%.

Cancellations run at 3.78%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about 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

For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 15.2% 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 1,464 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. 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 55.7% on time across 184 flights, 3 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 3 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 185 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 3.78% 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. 178 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Where to go next

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.

Key figures