Carrier route record
DLLAX→DFW
Delta Air Lines · Los Angeles to Dallas-Fort Worth
- Flights
- 757
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Share of route
- 12%
- Carriers
- 4
Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Delta Air Lines.
Delta on LAX to DFW earns an A. More than four flights in five arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 8 points better than the national rate of 77.3%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs a little over an hour. That rests on 757 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, American Airlines, flew 4,528 at 73.7% on time.
Set against the rest of the country, Delta's LAX to DFW record is 8 points better than the US average of 77.3%. That gap is worth roughly 81 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
85.4%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 745 completed flights
Avg delay
75 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.45%
National rate is 1.89%
Whole route
74.9%
Every carrier on LAX to DFW, 6,178 flights
These figures cover 757 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. The median arrival is 7 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.
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Carrier by carrier
Delta against every carrier on LAX to DFW
Delta flew 757 of the 6,178 flights on LAX to DFW, about 12% of it. Its 85.4% on time is 11 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 74.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 85.4% to Spirit at 70.8%.
The three carriers here are closely matched: 3 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.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Delta Air Lines (this page) | 757 | 85.4% | 75 min | 1.45% | A |
| American Airlines | 4,528 | 73.7% | 80 min | 2.23% | C |
| Frontier Airlines | 510 | 72.6% | 88 min | 1.76% | C |
| Spirit Airlines | 383 | 70.8% | 59 min | 4.18% | C− |
Spirit Airlines cancels 4.2% 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
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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 757 flights.
- 5am–8am58 flights89.7%
- 8am–11am302 flights89.2%
- 11am–2pm—
- 2pm–5pm39 flights87.2%
- 5pm–8pm358 flights81.3%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 75% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 89.7% of the time, against 81.3% for the evening window. That is 8 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 5pm–8pm window is the busiest, with 358 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Delta on LAX to DFW through the year
April is the best month on the calendar at 91.7% on time. Shoulder season thins the schedule and takes the summer weather with it, and the operation gets its margin back. July was the busiest month here, with 84 flights.
Across the week, Friday is the strongest day at 90.8% on time and Sunday the weakest at 82.4%, a spread of 8 points.
Arrival by arrival
How late Delta on LAX to DFW runs when it is late
The 109 late arrivals split 35 under half an hour, 36 between 30 and 60 minutes, and 38 an hour or more.
- 15+ min early173 flights23.2%
- Within 15 min463 flights62.1%
- 15–29 min late35 flights4.7%
- 30–59 min late36 flights4.8%
- 1–2 hours late24 flights3.2%
- 2+ hours late14 flights1.9%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of 745 completed flights by arrival against schedule.
20 of 104 late departures made up the time and arrived on time, 19% of them. 25 flights left on time and still arrived late.
The worst days
Worst days for Delta on LAX to DFW
The latest arrival of the period was on 10 May 2026, 11 hours 17 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as carrier-caused (crew, maintenance, fuelling, baggage). Three of the five worst days fell in June 2026.
| Date | Arrived late by | Largest filed cause |
|---|---|---|
| 10 May 2026 | 11 hours 17 minutes | Carrier |
| 25 June 2026 | 8 hours | Carrier |
| 9 June 2026 | 7 hours 20 minutes | Carrier |
| 11 June 2026 | 5 hours 21 minutes | Carrier |
| 29 December 2025 | 5 hours 18 minutes | Carrier |
Delay causes
Why Delta runs late on this route
Carrier accounts for 53% of the 8,137 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.
- 53%Carrier
- 29%Late-arriving aircraft
- 16%National Airspace System
- 2%Extreme weather
The largest share of delay minutes, 53%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. It accounts for 4,343 of the 8,137 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 8,137 reported delay minutes.
The practical consequence: the 5am–8am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 89.7% on time here.
Cancellations sit at 1.45% against a national 1.89%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.13%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
5.1% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.3%, so 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.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 89.2% on time across 757 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. 757 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. 757 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 85.4% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 745 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- LAX to DFW, every carrier
- Delta on DFW to LAX, the return leg
- American Airlines on LAX to DFW73.7%
- Frontier Airlines on LAX to DFW72.6%
- Spirit Airlines on LAX to DFW70.8%
- Delta Air Lines network-wide record
- Los Angeles International (LAX) delay statistics
- Dallas/Fort Worth International (DFW) delay statistics
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.05 million flight records
- Worst months to fly in the US, ranked by the data
Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated ; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.