Carrier route record

NKLAX→DFW

Spirit Airlines · Los Angeles to Dallas-Fort Worth

Flights: 503
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 8%
Carriers: 4

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

Spirit on LAX to DFW sits in the middle of the pack with a C−. Close to three flights in four arrive on time by the DOT's definition, 4 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. The late ones land about an hour behind schedule. That rests on 503 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Delta Air Lines, flew 718 at 83.6% on time.

Delta Air Lines is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 83.6% on time across 718 flights.

On time

74.0%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 485 completed flights

Avg delay

63 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

3.38%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

74.2%

Every carrier on LAX to DFW, 6,231 flights

These figures cover 503 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

Spirit against every carrier on LAX to DFW

Spirit flew 503 of the 6,231 flights on LAX to DFW, about 8% of it. Its 74.0% on time is about level with the route as a whole at 74.2%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number three of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 83.6% to American at 72.7%.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Delta Air Lines arrives on time 83.6% of the time; American Airlines manages 72.7%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 4,563 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on LAX to DFW
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Delta Air Lines	718	83.6%	80 min	1.81%	B
Frontier Airlines	447	74.1%	94 min	1.57%	C
Spirit Airlines (this page)	503	74.0%	63 min	3.38%	C−
American Airlines	4,563	72.7%	93 min	2.52%	C

Delta leads American by 11 points. Real, but small enough that a better departure time on the weaker carrier can outweigh it.

Departure window

When Spirit runs best on this route

Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 11 points, against 11 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am57 flights78.9%
8am–11am18 flights—
11am–2pm6 flights—
2pm–5pm96 flights67.7%
5pm–8pm95 flights74.5%
8pm–5am231 flights73.7%

Scale runs 60% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 78.9% of the time, against 67.7% for the afternoon window. That is 11 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 8pm–5am window is the busiest, with 231 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Spirit on LAX to DFW through the year

Darker means more delays. Figures are on-time percentages.August best, March worst

Delays peak in March, when the on-time rate falls to 51.4%. August is the strongest month at 89.3%. Moving a flexible trip across that boundary buys 38 points. July was the busiest month here, with 64 flights.

Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 81.4% on time and Friday the weakest at 64.8%. 17 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why Spirit runs late on this route

Carriers report a reason for every delay minute they cause, in five DOT categories. The split below is by minutes, not by number of flights, so a handful of very long weather delays weighs as much as many short ones. It covers 7,989 reported delay minutes.

Late-arriving aircraft
39%
National Airspace System
37%
Carrier
23%
Security
0%

39% 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 7,989 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 39 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 7,989 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 2,946 minutes out of 7,989, against a national NAS share of 21%.

Cancellations run at 3.38%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about one flight in 30 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

7.0% 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 about 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 80.2% on time across 505 flights, 6 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 6 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 503 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 Spirit on LAX to DFW

Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 3.38% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you about an hour; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 5am–8am departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 485 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