Carrier route record

DLLAX→DFW

Delta Air Lines · Los Angeles to Dallas-Fort Worth

Flights: 718
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 12%
Carriers: 4

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

Delta on LAX to DFW lands a B, 6 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in six arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by a little over an hour on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 718 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Frontier Airlines, flew 447 at 74.1% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, Delta's LAX to DFW record is 6 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 60 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

83.6%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 703 completed flights

Avg delay

80 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

1.81%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

74.2%

Every carrier on LAX to DFW, 6,231 flights

These figures cover 718 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 8 minutes early, which is the part an average hides: most flights here are fine, and the on-time rate is decided by a tail of badly late ones. On-time means under 15 minutes late, the DOT's own threshold.

Carrier by carrier

Delta against every carrier on LAX to DFW

Delta flew 718 of the 6,231 flights on LAX to DFW, about 12% of it. Its 83.6% on time is 9 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 74.2%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 83.6% to American at 72.7%.

The three carriers here are closely matched: about 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 LAX to DFW
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Delta Air Lines (this page)	718	83.6%	80 min	1.81%	B
Frontier Airlines	447	74.1%	94 min	1.57%	C
Spirit Airlines	503	74.0%	63 min	3.38%	C−
American Airlines	4,563	72.7%	93 min	2.52%	C

Spirit 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.

Flight by flight

Delta flight numbers on LAX to DFW

Departure window

When Delta 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 718 flights.

5am–8am18 flights—
8am–11am342 flights87.1%
11am–2pm—
2pm–5pm—
5pm–8pm358 flights80.7%
8pm–5am—

Scale runs 70% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The early departures do better, though not dramatically: 87.1% on time for the 8am–11am window against 80.7% for 5pm–8pm. Worth taking if the schedule allows, not worth an extra connection. The 5pm–8pm window is the busiest, with 358 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Delta on LAX to DFW through the year

Darker means more delays. Figures are on-time percentages.April best, July worst

July is the worst month at 77.0% on time, 15 points below April, the best at 91.7%. Summer afternoon convection and peak-season schedules land on the same weeks every year, so this is a pattern you can book around rather than a run of bad luck. May was the busiest month here, with 62 flights.

Across the week, Friday is the strongest day at 88.9% on time and Saturday the weakest at 78.3%. 11 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why Delta runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 49% of the 9,138 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
49%
Late-arriving aircraft
32%
National Airspace System
19%
Extreme weather
1%

The largest share of delay minutes, 49%, 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 4,452 of the 9,138 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 9,138 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 87.1% on time here.

Cancellations sit at 1.81% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.28%.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

5.7% 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 a little over an hour, which a normal layover absorbs.

The 1,235 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 87.9% on time across 718 flights, 4 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 4 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 718 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 Delta on LAX to DFW

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 718 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 83.6% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 703 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