Carrier route record
WNMSP→DEN
Southwest Airlines · Minneapolis to Denver
- Flights
- 1,712
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 29%
- Carriers
- 5
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Southwest Airlines.
Southwest on MSP to DEN sits in the middle of the pack with a B+. Close to three flights in four arrive on time by the DOT's definition, 2 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. The late ones land about an hour behind schedule. That rests on 1,712 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Frontier Airlines, flew 619 at 80.4% on time.
Frontier Airlines is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 80.4% on time across 619 flights.
Key figures
On time
75.7%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,700 completed flights
Avg delay
61 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.53%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
77.6%
Every carrier on MSP to DEN, 5,838 flights
These figures cover 1,712 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 3 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
Southwest against every carrier on MSP to DEN
Southwest flew 1,712 of the 5,838 flights on MSP to DEN, about 29% of it. Its 75.7% on time is 2 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 77.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last 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: 4 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 | 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 (this page) | 1,712 | 75.7% | 61 min | 0.53% | B+ |
No carrier stands out. Frontier tops the table at 80.4%, 4 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
Departure window
When Southwest runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 37 points, against 4 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am389 flights94.6%
- 8am–11am231 flights80.7%
- 11am–2pm401 flights82.0%
- 2pm–5pm312 flights61.7%
- 5pm–8pm292 flights57.9%
- 8pm–5am87 flights59.8%
Scale runs 50% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 57.9% on time, against 94.6% 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 401 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Southwest on MSP to DEN through the year
June is the worst month at 61.1% on time, 25 points below April, the best at 86.1%. 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. July was the busiest month here, with 173 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 79.7% on time and Sunday the weakest at 71.7%. 8 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why Southwest 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 25,000 reported delay minutes.
- 35%Late-arriving aircraft
- 35%National Airspace System
- 23%Carrier
- 7%Extreme weather
35% 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 25,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 5 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 25,136 reported delay minutes.
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 8,858 minutes out of 25,000, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations are rare at 0.53%, 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
7.8% 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 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 72.7% on time across 1,724 flights, 3 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 3 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,712 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 Southwest on MSP to DEN
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. April runs 86.1% on time and June 61.1%, a swing of 25 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of June before you think about anything else. 1,700 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- MSP to DEN, every carrier
- Southwest on DEN to MSP, the return leg
- SkyWest Airlines on MSP to DEN91.2%
- Frontier Airlines on MSP to DEN80.4%
- United Airlines on MSP to DEN78.4%
- Delta Air Lines on MSP to DEN76.0%
- Southwest 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.