Carrier route record

NKEWR→SJU

Spirit Airlines · Newark to San Juan

Flights: 146
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 7%
Carriers: 4

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

Spirit on EWR to SJU 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 146 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, JetBlue Airways, flew 628 at 76.4% on time.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Spirit on EWR to SJU runs 10 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 97 extra late arrivals.

On time

67.9%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 137 completed flights

Avg delay

72 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

6.16%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

70.7%

Every carrier on EWR to SJU, 2,101 flights

These figures cover 146 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 13.9% 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 SJU

Spirit flew 146 of the 2,101 flights on EWR to SJU, about 7% of it. Its 67.9% on time is 3 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 70.7%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number three of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from JetBlue at 76.4% to Frontier at 54.4%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The two carriers here are closely matched: 5 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 SJU
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
JetBlue Airways	628	76.4%	87 min	3.34%	B−
United Airlines	1,113	71.0%	75 min	2.34%	C
Spirit Airlines (this page)thin sample	146	67.9%	72 min	6.16%	C−
Frontier Airlinesthin sample	214	54.4%	102 min	2.80%	F

JetBlue Airways cancels 3.3% 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.

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 146 flights.

There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Spirit's EWR to SJU record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 67.9% is the reliable figure here.

Across the year

Spirit on EWR to SJU through the year

Jul–Sep 202520 flights—
Oct–Dec 202514 flights—
Jan–Mar 202690 flights69.4%
Apr–Jun 202622 flights—

Scale runs 60% to 75%. 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 67.9% on time across 146 flights.

Split by quarter, Spirit on EWR to SJU logged 20 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 14 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 90 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 22 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 67.9% 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 3,182 reported delay minutes.

National Airspace System
36%
Late-arriving aircraft
35%
Carrier
29%
Extreme weather
1%

35% 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 3,182 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 35 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 3,182 reported delay minutes.

36% 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 1,142 minutes out of 3,182, against a national NAS share of 21%.

Cancellations run at 6.16%, against 1.81% nationally. That is roughly one flight in fifteen 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. 13.9% 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.

At 1,608 miles this is transcontinental flying, and long routes get a quiet structural advantage. Scheduled block time on a flight this length carries more padding in absolute minutes, so a twenty-minute late departure often still becomes an on-time arrival. Read the on-time rate here as slightly flattering next to a short-haul route with the same operational quality.

The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 63.6% on time across 146 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. 146 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 SJU

Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 6.16% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you a little over an hour; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 11am–2pm departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 137 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