Carrier route record

UAMSN→DEN

United Airlines · Madison to Denver

Flights: 730
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 68%
Carriers: 3

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

United on MSN to DEN earns a B+. More than four flights in five arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 7 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs a little over an hour. That rests on 730 flights, with a median arrival 9 minutes early.

Set against the rest of the country, United's MSN to DEN record is 7 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 66 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

84.2%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 723 completed flights

Avg delay

69 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.68%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

80.1%

Every carrier on MSN to DEN, 1,074 flights

These figures cover 730 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 9 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

United against every carrier on MSN to DEN

United flew 730 of the 1,074 flights on MSN to DEN, most of the route. Its 84.2% on time is 4 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 80.1%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from United at 84.2% to Frontier at 67.4%. Two of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

Only one carrier clears this site's 365-flight floor here, so there is no comparison to draw. The table below is the full picture.

On-time performance by carrier on MSN to DEN
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
United Airlines (this page)	730	84.2%	69 min	0.68%	B+
SkyWest Airlinesthin sample	203	74.1%	87 min	0.49%	C+
Frontier Airlinesthin sample	141	67.4%	117 min	1.42%	C

Departure window

When United 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 730 flights.

5am–8am1 flights—
8am–11am365 flights88.2%
11am–2pm—
2pm–5pm359 flights80.2%
5pm–8pm5 flights—
8pm–5am—

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

Book the morning departure. Flights leaving between 8am–11am arrive on time 88.2% of the time, against 80.2% for the afternoon 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 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 365 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

United on MSN to DEN through the year

Darker means more delays. Figures are on-time percentages.January best, June worst

June is the worst month at 71.2% on time, 18 points below January, the best at 88.7%. 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. August was the busiest month here, with 65 flights.

Across the week, Monday is the strongest day at 88.1% on time and Wednesday the weakest at 79.0%. 9 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why United 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 7,837 reported delay minutes.

Late-arriving aircraft
37%
National Airspace System
36%
Carrier
27%
Extreme weather
1%

37% 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 7,837 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 33 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 7,837 reported delay minutes.

36% 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 2,796 minutes out of 7,837, against a national NAS share of 21%.

Cancellations are rare at 0.68%, 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

Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 4.7% land an hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% nationally. Connections built on this flight are about as safe as US domestic connections get, though a cancelled flight still ignores every layover you give it.

The 826 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 80.0% on time across 729 flights, 4 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 4 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 730 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 United on MSN to DEN

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 730 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 84.2% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 723 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