Carrier route record
NKEWR→DFW
Spirit Airlines · Newark to Dallas-Fort Worth
- Flights
- 243
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Share of route
- 7%
- Carriers
- 5
Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Spirit Airlines.
Spirit on EWR to DFW draws a C−. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is a little over an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 243 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, American Airlines, flew 1,440 at 80.1% on time.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.3%, so Spirit on EWR to DFW runs 11 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 111 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
66.2%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 231 completed flights
Avg delay
79 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
4.94%
National rate is 1.89%
Whole route
78.6%
Every carrier on EWR to DFW, 3,631 flights
These figures cover 243 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 15.6% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.
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Carrier by carrier
Spirit against every carrier on EWR to DFW
Spirit flew 243 of the 3,631 flights on EWR to DFW, about 7% of it. Its 66.2% on time is 12 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 78.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from Republic at 87.0% to Spirit at 66.2%. Two of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The two carriers here are closely matched: half a point separate the best from the worst. At that spread, schedule and price are better tie-breakers than reliability. Sample sizes are shown so you can see which rows are worth weighing.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Republic Airwaysthin sample | 25 | 87.0% | 67 min | 4.00% | A− |
| American Airlines | 1,440 | 80.1% | 104 min | 4.10% | B− |
| United Airlines | 1,805 | 79.5% | 74 min | 2.66% | B |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 118 | 70.4% | 243 min | 1.69% | C |
| Spirit Airlines (this page)thin sample | 243 | 66.2% | 79 min | 4.94% | C− |
American Airlines cancels 4.1% of what it schedules here, the highest in the table. A cancelled flight never appears in an on-time rate, so read that column alongside the punctuality one rather than after it.
Timetable by Aviasales, a Travelpayouts partner. Booking through it may earn this site a commission at no cost to you; it changes no figure here.
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 243 flights.
There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Spirit's EWR to DFW record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 66.2% is the reliable figure here.
Across the year
Spirit on EWR to DFW through the year
- Jul–Sep 202528 flights—
- Oct–Dec 2025101 flights63.0%
- Jan–Mar 202690 flights65.0%
- Apr–Jun 202624 flights—
Scale runs 55% to 70%. 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 66.2% on time across 243 flights.
Split by quarter, Spirit on EWR to DFW logged 28 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 101 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 90 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 24 flights in Apr–Jun 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 66.2% annual figure is the one to use.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 77.4% on time and Monday the weakest at 55.6%, a spread of 22 points.
Arrival by arrival
How late Spirit on EWR to DFW runs when it is late
Spirit on EWR to DFW often beats the schedule: 88 of 231 completed flights, 38%, arrived 15 minutes or more early. The 78 late arrivals split 17 under half an hour, 25 between 30 and 60 minutes, and 36 an hour or more.
- 15+ min early88 flights38.1%
- Within 15 min65 flights28.1%
- 15–29 min late17 flights7.4%
- 30–59 min late25 flights10.8%
- 1–2 hours late22 flights9.5%
- 2+ hours late14 flights6.1%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of 231 completed flights by arrival against schedule.
24 of 90 late departures made up the time and arrived on time, 27% of them. 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 DFW.
The worst days
Worst days for Spirit on EWR to DFW
The latest arrival of the period was on 1 November 2025, 5 hours 15 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as national airspace system delay. On three of the five worst days the largest share was filed as carrier-caused (crew, maintenance, fuelling, baggage).
| Date | Arrived late by | Largest filed cause |
|---|---|---|
| 1 November 2025 | 5 hours 15 minutes | National Airspace System |
| 22 October 2025 | 4 hours 48 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 13 March 2026 | 4 hours 15 minutes | Carrier |
| 28 December 2025 | 4 hours 14 minutes | Carrier |
| 24 November 2025 | 4 hours 5 minutes | Carrier |
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 6,153 reported delay minutes.
- 40%National Airspace System
- 34%Carrier
- 26%Late-arriving aircraft
- 0%Security
40% 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 2,465 minutes out of 6,153, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 6,153 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations run at 4.94%, against 1.89% nationally. That is about one flight in twenty 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
15.6% 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 1,372 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 runs 66.1% on time across 245 flights, within half a point of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 243 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 EWR to DFW
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 4.94% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you a little over an hour; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 2pm–5pm departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 231 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- EWR to DFW, every carrier
- Spirit on DFW to EWR, the return leg
- American Airlines on EWR to DFW80.1%
- United Airlines on EWR to DFW79.5%
- Frontier Airlines on EWR to DFW70.4%
- Spirit Airlines network-wide record
- Newark Liberty International (EWR) delay statistics
- Dallas/Fort Worth International (DFW) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- How often a connection fails at the major US hubs
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.