Carrier route record

F9JFK→TPA

Frontier Airlines · New York to Tampa

Flights: 158
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 7%
Carriers: 3

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

Frontier on JFK to TPA 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 158 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Delta Air Lines, flew 1,094 at 79.6% on time.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Frontier on JFK to TPA runs 10 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 101 extra late arrivals.

On time

67.5%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 157 completed flights

Avg delay

77 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.63%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

77.1%

Every carrier on JFK to TPA, 2,301 flights

These figures cover 158 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 12.7% 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 JFK to TPA

Frontier flew 158 of the 2,301 flights on JFK to TPA, about 7% of it. Its 67.5% on time is 10 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 Delta at 79.6% to Frontier at 67.5%.

The two carriers here are closely matched: 4 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 JFK to TPA
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Delta Air Lines	1,094	79.6%	76 min	2.65%	B
JetBlue Airways	1,049	75.9%	74 min	3.91%	B−
Frontier Airlines (this page)thin sample	158	67.5%	77 min	0.63%	C+

JetBlue Airways cancels 3.9% 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 158 flights.

There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Frontier's JFK to TPA record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 67.5% is the reliable figure here.

Across the year

Frontier on JFK to TPA through the year

Jul–Sep 202591 flights73.6%
Oct–Dec 202551 flights64.0%
Jan–Mar 202616 flights—

Scale runs 55% to 80%. 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 67.5% on time across 158 flights.

Split by quarter, Frontier on JFK to TPA logged 91 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 51 flights in Oct–Dec 2025 and 16 flights in Jan–Mar 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 67.5% annual figure is the one to use.

Delay causes

Why Frontier runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 47% of the 3,943 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
47%
National Airspace System
29%
Late-arriving aircraft
25%

The largest share of delay minutes, 47%, 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 1,845 of the 3,943 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 3,943 reported delay minutes.

Cancellations are rare at 0.63%, 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 costs

For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 12.7% 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 1,005 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 82.1% on time across 158 flights, 15 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 15 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 158 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 JFK to TPA

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 158 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 67.5% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 157 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