Carrier route record
F9MSP→DEN
Frontier Airlines · Minneapolis to Denver
- Flights
- 619
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 11%
- Carriers
- 5
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Frontier Airlines.
Frontier on MSP to DEN lands a B+, 3 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in five arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by an hour and a half on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 619 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 1,459 at 78.4% on time.
The US average over the same twelve months is 77.6%, so there is little to separate Frontier on MSP to DEN from the country as a whole. The variation that matters here is internal: which carrier, and what time of day.
Key figures
On time
80.4%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 613 completed flights
Avg delay
93 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.81%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
77.6%
Every carrier on MSP to DEN, 5,838 flights
These figures cover 619 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 9.1% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule. That is the number that wrecks a connection, and it is not visible in an on-time percentage alone.
Carrier by carrier
Frontier against every carrier on MSP to DEN
Frontier flew 619 of the 5,838 flights on MSP to DEN, about 11% of it. Its 80.4% on time is 3 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 77.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 91.2% to Southwest at 75.7%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkyWest Airlinesthin sample | 244 | 91.2% | 143 min | 2.05% | A |
| Frontier Airlines (this page) | 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. United tops the table at 78.4%, 3 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
Flight by flight
Frontier flight numbers on MSP to DEN
Departure window
When Frontier runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 24 points, against 3 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am221 flights85.8%
- 8am–11am168 flights86.2%
- 11am–2pm70 flights84.1%
- 2pm–5pm7 flights—
- 5pm–8pm42 flights73.2%
- 8pm–5am111 flights62.2%
Scale runs 55% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 8pm–5am window is where this operation falls apart: 62.2% on time, against 86.2% for the 8am–11am 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 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 221 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Frontier on MSP to DEN through the year
December is the weak month at 69.2% on time, against 94.7% 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. March was the busiest month here, with 60 flights.
Across the week, Thursday is the strongest day at 84.3% on time and Friday the weakest at 75.0%. 9 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why Frontier runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 45% of the 11,000 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.
- 45%Late-arriving aircraft
- 31%Carrier
- 22%National Airspace System
- 2%Extreme weather
45% 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 11,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 24 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 11,213 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 86.2% 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 costs
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 9.1% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% nationally. A 45-minute layover does not survive that, and no amount of walking quickly changes it. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.
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 is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 71.7% on time across 618 flights, 9 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 9 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 619 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 Frontier on MSP to DEN
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 619 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 80.4% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 613 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- MSP to DEN, every carrier
- Frontier on DEN to MSP, the return leg
- SkyWest Airlines on MSP to DEN91.2%
- United Airlines on MSP to DEN78.4%
- Delta Air Lines on MSP to DEN76.0%
- Southwest Airlines on MSP to DEN75.7%
- Frontier Airlines network-wide record
- Minneapolis-St Paul International (MSP) delay statistics
- Denver International (DEN) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
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.