Carrier route record

NKEWR→PBI

Spirit Airlines · Newark to West Palm Beach

Flights: 120
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 3%
Carriers: 3

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

Spirit on EWR to PBI earns an F−, which is as low as this site's scale goes for a reason. Only 51.5% of flights arrive inside the 15-minute window, 26 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. Late arrivals average a little over an hour. Treat any tight connection here as a coin flip. That rests on 120 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 2,770 at 79.1% on time.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Spirit on EWR to PBI runs 26 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 261 extra late arrivals.

On time

51.5%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 103 completed flights

Avg delay

72 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

14.17%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

77.1%

Every carrier on EWR to PBI, 3,611 flights

These figures cover 120 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 22.3% 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

Spirit against every carrier on EWR to PBI

Spirit flew 120 of the 3,611 flights on EWR to PBI, about 3% of it. Its 51.5% on time is 26 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 77.1%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from United at 79.1% to Spirit at 51.5%.

The two carriers here are closely matched: 6 points 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.

On-time performance by carrier on EWR to PBI
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
United Airlines	2,770	79.1%	69 min	1.95%	B
JetBlue Airways	721	73.3%	69 min	2.77%	C
Spirit Airlines (this page)thin sample	120	51.5%	72 min	14.17%	F−

No carrier stands out. United tops the table at 79.1%, 6 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.

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 120 flights.

There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Spirit's EWR to PBI record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 51.5% is the reliable figure here.

Across the year

Spirit on EWR to PBI through the year

Oct–Dec 202528 flights—
Jan–Mar 202679 flights58.2%
Apr–Jun 202613 flights—

Scale runs 50% to 65%. 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 51.5% on time across 120 flights.

Split by quarter, Spirit on EWR to PBI logged 28 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 79 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 13 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 51.5% annual figure is the one to use.

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 3,608 reported delay minutes.

National Airspace System
41%
Carrier
35%
Late-arriving aircraft
22%
Security
1%

The largest share of delay minutes, 35%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. Unlike weather, that is a management outcome, and it is the category where the gap between two carriers on the same schedule is genuinely earned. It accounts for 1,279 of the 3,608 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 3,608 reported delay minutes.

41% 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 1,484 minutes out of 3,608, against a national NAS share of 21%.

Cancellations run at 14.17%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about one flight in seven 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. 22.3% 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 1,024 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 runs 51.4% on time across 120 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. 120 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 PBI

Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 14.17% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you a little over an hour; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 8am–11am departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 103 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