Route reliability record
HOU→FLL
Houston to Fort Lauderdale
- Flights
- 798
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 957 mi
- Carriers
- 1
This route draws a C+. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is roughly 50 minutes behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 798 HOU to FLL flights, with a median arrival 5 minutes late.
Best time to fly HOU to FLL: a 8am–11am departure, ideally on a Monday. Flights in that window arrived on time 79.7% of the time and Monday flights 71.3%, against 65.2% for the route overall.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so this route runs 12 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 124 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
65.2%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 791 completed flights
Avg delay
48 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.25%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
Southwest
65.2% on time across 798 flights
These figures cover 798 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. On-time means an arrival less than 15 minutes after the scheduled gate time, the same threshold the Department of Transportation uses in its own reports. Cancelled and diverted flights are excluded from the on-time rate and counted separately, which is why the cancellation column matters on its own.
Carrier by carrier
Which airline is most reliable on HOU to FLL
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Southwest Airlines | 798 | 65.2% | 48 min | 0.25% | C+ |
Best ways to make this trip
The most reliable ways to fly Houston to Fort Lauderdale
Every airline on this route and on the routes between nearby airports, ranked by how often a scheduled flight actually operated and arrived on time. 5 of the top 5 use a different airport at one end.
| Option | Airline | Success | On time | Cancelled | Best departure | Most punctual flight |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. IAH → FLLHouston to Fort Lauderdale | United Airlines | 84.4% | 85.0% | 0.73% | 5am–8am, Tue | — |
| 2. IAH → MIAHouston to Miami | United Airlines | 80.0% | 80.3% | 0.41% | 5am–8am, Tue | — |
| 3. IAH → MIAHouston to Miami | American Airlines | 77.3% | 78.3% | 1.31% | 5am–8am, Mon | AA 1347 07:30 |
| 4. IAH → FLLHouston to Fort Lauderdale | Spirit Airlines | 70.3% | 71.6% | 1.85% | 5am–8am, Tue | — |
| 5. IAH → MIAHouston to Miami | Spirit Airlines | 68.5% | 70.7% | 3.17% | 5am–8am, Wed | — |
Success is the share of scheduled flights that operated and arrived less than 15 minutes late, so a cancelled flight counts against it. “(route)” means the best time comes from every carrier on the route rather than this airline alone.
Departure window
The best time of day to leave
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 30 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–8am12 flights—
- 8am–11am205 flights79.7%
- 11am–2pm163 flights68.8%
- 2pm–5pm56 flights57.1%
- 5pm–8pm223 flights60.1%
- 8pm–5am139 flights49.3%
Scale runs 40% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 8pm–5am window is where this operation falls apart: 49.3% on time, against 79.7% for the 8am–11am slot. By evening the aircraft flying these rotations have absorbed a full day of small delays and there is no slack left to recover in. The 5pm–8pm window is the busiest, with 223 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 49 points from best month to worst, which is wide. An annual average tells you very little about the week you are actually flying, so read the strip rather than the headline if your dates are fixed.
Delays peak in May, when the on-time rate falls to 38.7%. January is the strongest month at 87.3%. Moving a flexible trip across that boundary buys 49 points. December was the busiest month here, with 80 flights.
Across the week, Monday is the strongest day at 71.3% on time and Wednesday the weakest at 59.4%. 12 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 53% of the 13,000 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.
- 53%Late-arriving aircraft
- 31%Carrier
- 14%National Airspace System
- 2%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
53% 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 13,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 25 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 13,323 reported delay minutes.
The practical consequence: the 8am–11am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 79.7% on time here.
Cancellations are rare at 0.25%, below the national 1.81% and low enough to earn the plus on the grade. Roughly one flight in 100 is called off; the risk here is arriving late, not not arriving.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here actually costs
7.7% 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 roughly 50 minutes, which a normal layover absorbs.
The 957 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 72.3% on time across 800 flights, 7 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 7 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 798 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.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in FLL after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 798 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 65.2% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 791 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
HOU to FLL questions
How often is HOU to FLL delayed?
About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 34.8% of the 798 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by roughly 50 minutes on average.
How reliable is HOU to FLL compared with the rest of the country?
65.2% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.6%, a difference of 12 points against it. That is worth a C+ on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on HOU to FLL?
The 8am–11am departure window is the strongest at 79.7% on time. The 8pm–5am window is the weakest at 49.3%, 30 points behind. Later departures inherit delays from earlier flights the same aircraft has already flown, which is why the curve slopes the way it does.
How bad are May delays on HOU to FLL?
May is the weakest month at 38.7% on time, compared with 87.3% in January. Across the year that is 49 points between the best and worst months. Moving flexible dates out of that month is one of the few things that reliably helps.
Related
Where to go next
- FLL to HOU — the return legseparate record
- William P. Hobby (HOU) delay statistics
- Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International (FLL) delay statistics
- HOU to DAL, a related route80.9%
- ATL to FLL, a related route70.7%
- HOU to ATL, a related route79.8%
- Southwest Airlines on-time record65.2%
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
Direction matters. HOU to FLL and FLL to HOU are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
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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.