Carrier route record
F9DFW→TPA
Frontier Airlines · Dallas-Fort Worth to Tampa
- Flights
- 233
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 8%
- 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 TPA lands a B, 6 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in six arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by about an hour on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 233 flights, with a median arrival 11 minutes early.
Set against the rest of the country, Frontier's DFW to TPA record is 6 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 58 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
83.4%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 229 completed flights
Avg delay
63 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.72%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
67.1%
Every carrier on DFW to TPA, 2,910 flights
These figures cover 233 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 11 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 DFW to TPA
Frontier flew 233 of the 2,910 flights on DFW to TPA, about 8% of it. Its 83.4% on time is 16 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 67.1%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Frontier at 83.4% to American at 65.6%. 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Frontier Airlines (this page)thin sample | 233 | 83.4% | 63 min | 1.72% | B |
| Spirit Airlinesthin sample | 64 | 68.3% | 57 min | 1.56% | C |
| Envoy Airthin sample | 34 | 67.6% | 84 min | 0.00% | C+ |
| American Airlines | 2,579 | 65.6% | 67 min | 3.53% | C− |
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 26 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am45 flights97.8%
- 8am–11am38 flights83.8%
- 11am–2pm30 flights—
- 2pm–5pm40 flights79.5%
- 5pm–8pm23 flights—
- 8pm–5am57 flights71.4%
Scale runs 65% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 97.8% of the time, against 71.4% for the overnight window. That is 26 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 8pm–5am window is the busiest, with 57 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Frontier on DFW to TPA through the year
- Jul–Sep 202527 flights—
- Oct–Dec 202554 flights81.1%
- Jan–Mar 202672 flights85.5%
- Apr–Jun 202680 flights86.2%
Scale runs 75% to 90%. 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 83.4% on time across 233 flights.
Quarter by quarter Frontier on DFW to TPA held fairly steady: 81.1% in Oct–Dec 2025, 85.5% in Jan–Mar 2026 and 86.2% in Apr–Jun 2026. A spread of 5 points is about what a sample of this size moves on its own, so the annual figure is a fair summary.
Across the week, Thursday is the strongest day at 90.0% on time and Friday the weakest at 81.0%. 9 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. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 62% of the 2,402 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.
- 62%Late-arriving aircraft
- 26%National Airspace System
- 11%Carrier
- 2%Extreme weather
62% 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 2,402 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 40 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 2,402 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 97.8% on time here.
Cancellations sit at 1.72% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
6.6% 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 about an hour, which a normal layover absorbs.
The 929 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 79.6% on time across 234 flights, 4 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 4 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 233 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 TPA
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 233 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 83.4% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 229 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- DFW to TPA, every carrier
- Frontier on TPA to DFW, the return leg
- American Airlines on DFW to TPA65.6%
- Frontier Airlines network-wide record
- Dallas/Fort Worth International (DFW) delay statistics
- Tampa International (TPA) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
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.