Route reliability record

MSP→DEN

Minneapolis to Denver

Flights: 5,838
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Distance: 680 mi
Carriers: 5

This route lands a B+, level with the national rate of 77.6%. Roughly one flight in four arrive 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 5,838 flights, of which Frontier Airlines flew 619 at 80.4% on time.

Frontier Airlines is the most reliable of the four carriers covered here at 80.4% on time across 619 flights.

On time

77.6%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 5,778 completed flights

Avg delay

69 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.81%

National rate is 1.81%

Best carrier

Frontier

80.4% on time across 619 flights

These figures cover 5,838 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 5 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

Which airline is most reliable on MSP to DEN

The four carriers here are closely matched: 5 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 MSP to DEN
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
SkyWest Airlinesthin sample	244	91.2%	143 min	2.05%	A
Frontier Airlines	619	80.4%	93 min	0.81%	B+
United Airlines	1,459	78.4%	80 min	0.75%	B+
Delta Air Lines	1,804	76.0%	59 min	0.94%	B+
Southwest Airlines	1,712	75.7%	61 min	0.53%	B+

No carrier stands out. Frontier tops the table at 80.4%, 5 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.

Departure window

The best time of day to leave

Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 29 points, against 5 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am922 flights91.8%
8am–11am1,129 flights79.7%
11am–2pm1,475 flights85.6%
2pm–5pm684 flights71.4%
5pm–8pm1,174 flights62.4%
8pm–5am454 flights66.6%

Scale runs 55% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 62.4% on time, against 91.8% for the 5am–8am slot. By evening the aircraft flying these rotations have absorbed a full day of small delays and there is no slack left to recover in. The 11am–2pm window is the busiest, with 1,475 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

When delays peak on this route

This route's year swings by 27 points from best month to worst, which is wide. An annual average tells you very little about the week you are actually flying, so read the strip rather than the headline if your dates are fixed.

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

December is the weak month at 62.0% on time, against 89.0% in April. Winter delays cluster: a single storm system can account for most of a month's shortfall, so an average December hides both very good weeks and genuinely unflyable days. July was the busiest month here, with 570 flights.

Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 81.4% on time and Sunday the weakest at 75.9%. 6 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why this route gets delayed

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 90,000 reported delay minutes.

National Airspace System
35%
Late-arriving aircraft
32%
Carrier
31%
Extreme weather
3%

35% 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 31,000 minutes out of 90,000, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 89,580 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 91.8% on time here.

Cancellations are rare at 0.81%, 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 actually costs

7.9% 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 are the a little over an hour kind, which a normal layover absorbs.

The 680 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 runs 77.6% on time across 5,848 flights, within half a point of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.

The sample behind these figures is 5,838 flights, enough that the headline rate is stable to within roughly a point. The hour-block and month splits divide that further, so read the thinner bars with more caution than the headline.

What to do with this

Booking this route

Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. April runs 89.0% on time and December 62.0%, a swing of 27 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of December before you think about anything else. 5,778 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Common questions

MSP to DEN questions

How often is MSP to DEN delayed?

Roughly one flight in four arrive at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 22.4% of the 5,838 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by a little over an hour on average.

Which airline is most reliable on MSP to DEN?

Frontier Airlines leads at 80.4% on time across 619 flights. Southwest Airlines is at the other end on 75.7%, a gap of 5 points. Sample size matters as much as the percentage: a rate built from a few hundred flights moves around far more than one built from ten thousand.

What time of day has the fewest delays on MSP to DEN?

The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 91.8% on time. The 5pm–8pm window is the weakest at 62.4%, 29 points behind. Later departures inherit delays from earlier flights the same aircraft has already flown, which is why the curve slopes the way it does.

How bad are December delays on MSP to DEN?

December is the weakest month at 62.0% on time, compared with 89.0% in April. Across the year that is 27 points between the best and worst months. Moving flexible dates out of that month is one of the few things that reliably helps.

Where to go next

Direction matters. MSP to DEN and DEN to MSP are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.

Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, July 2025 to June 2026. Updated monthly. How this data is collected.

Key figures