Carrier route record

F9FLL→DFW

Frontier Airlines · Fort Lauderdale to Dallas-Fort Worth

Flights: 142
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 5%
Carriers: 4

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

Frontier on FLL to DFW draws a D−. Roughly 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 142 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Spirit Airlines, flew 722 at 73.5% on time.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Frontier on FLL to DFW runs 16 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 164 extra late arrivals.

On time

61.2%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 134 completed flights

Avg delay

70 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

4.23%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

72.7%

Every carrier on FLL to DFW, 2,984 flights

These figures cover 142 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 11.2% 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 FLL to DFW

Frontier flew 142 of the 2,984 flights on FLL to DFW, about 5% of it. Its 61.2% on time is 12 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 72.7%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Spirit at 73.5% to Frontier at 61.2%. One 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.

On-time performance by carrier on FLL to DFW
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Spirit Airlines	722	73.5%	65 min	2.91%	C
American Airlines	1,986	73.2%	100 min	3.37%	C−
JetBlue Airwaysthin sample	134	72.0%	73 min	0.75%	C+
Frontier Airlines (this page)thin sample	142	61.2%	70 min	4.23%	D−

American Airlines cancels 3.4% 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 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 142 flights.

There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Frontier's FLL to DFW record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 61.2% is the reliable figure here.

Across the year

Frontier on FLL to DFW through the year

Oct–Dec 202515 flights—
Jan–Mar 202651 flights69.4%
Apr–Jun 202676 flights59.2%

Scale runs 50% 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 61.2% on time across 142 flights.

Split by quarter, Frontier on FLL to DFW logged 15 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 51 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 76 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 61.2% annual figure is the one to use.

Across the week, Thursday is the strongest day at 77.4% on time and Sunday the weakest at 50.0%. 27 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. Carrier accounts for 44% of the 3,663 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.

Carrier
44%
National Airspace System
33%
Late-arriving aircraft
22%
Extreme weather
1%

The largest share of delay minutes, 44%, 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 1,595 of the 3,663 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 3,663 reported delay minutes.

33% 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 1,219 minutes out of 3,663, against a national NAS share of 21%.

Cancellations run at 4.23%, 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. 11.2% 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 1,119 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 69.8% on time across 143 flights, 9 points above 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 9 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 142 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 FLL to DFW

Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 4.23% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you a little over an hour; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 5pm–8pm departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 134 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