Carrier route record
F9IAH→FLL
Frontier Airlines · Houston to Fort Lauderdale
- Flights
- 104
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 4%
- Carriers
- 3
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Frontier Airlines.
Frontier on IAH to FLL draws a D−. Roughly one flight in two 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 104 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 1,792 at 85.0% on time.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Frontier on IAH to FLL runs 19 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 186 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
59.0%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 100 completed flights
Avg delay
48 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
3.85%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
79.8%
Every carrier on IAH to FLL, 2,760 flights
These figures cover 104 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 9.0% 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 IAH to FLL
Frontier flew 104 of the 2,760 flights on IAH to FLL, about 4% of it. Its 59.0% on time is 21 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 79.8%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from United at 85.0% to Frontier at 59.0%.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. United Airlines arrives on time 85.0% of the time; Spirit Airlines manages 71.6%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 864 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United Airlines | 1,792 | 85.0% | 64 min | 0.73% | A+ |
| Spirit Airlines | 864 | 71.6% | 73 min | 1.85% | C |
| Frontier Airlines (this page)thin sample | 104 | 59.0% | 48 min | 3.85% | D− |
The spread between United and Spirit is 13 points, wide enough that it should decide the booking. On a hundred trips that is 13 more arrivals inside the on-time window.
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 104 flights.
There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Frontier's IAH to FLL record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 59.0% is the reliable figure here.
Across the year
Frontier on IAH to FLL through the year
- Oct–Dec 20256 flights—
- Jan–Mar 202637 flights64.7%
- Apr–Jun 202661 flights56.7%
Scale runs 50% 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 59.0% on time across 104 flights.
Split by quarter, Frontier on IAH to FLL logged 6 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 37 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 61 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 59.0% annual figure is the one to use.
Delay causes
Why Frontier runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 43% of the 1,955 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.
- 43%Late-arriving aircraft
- 37%National Airspace System
- 17%Carrier
- 3%Extreme weather
43% 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 1,955 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 14 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 1,955 reported delay minutes.
37% 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 721 minutes out of 1,955, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations run at 3.85%, 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. 9.0% 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 966 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 52.0% on time across 104 flights, 7 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 7 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 104 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 IAH to FLL
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 3.85% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you roughly 50 minutes; 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. 100 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- IAH to FLL, every carrier
- Frontier on FLL to IAH, the return leg
- United Airlines on IAH to FLL85.0%
- Spirit Airlines on IAH to FLL71.6%
- Frontier Airlines network-wide record
- George Bush Intercontinental (IAH) delay statistics
- Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International (FLL) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- Same route, different airline: where the carrier you pick matters most
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.