Carrier route record
UAMSP→DEN
United Airlines · Minneapolis to Denver
- Flights
- 1,459
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 25%
- Carriers
- 5
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with United Airlines.
United on MSP to DEN lands a B+, about a point 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 a little over an hour on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 1,459 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
78.4%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,445 completed flights
Avg delay
80 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.75%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
77.6%
Every carrier on MSP to DEN, 5,838 flights
These figures cover 1,459 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 9.3% 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
United against every carrier on MSP to DEN
United flew 1,459 of the 5,838 flights on MSP to DEN, about 25% of it. Its 78.4% on time is about level with the route as a whole at 77.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number three 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: 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.
| 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 (this page) | 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.
Flight by flight
United flight numbers on MSP to DEN
Departure window
When United runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 32 points, against 5 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am108 flights93.5%
- 8am–11am365 flights80.5%
- 11am–2pm506 flights89.1%
- 2pm–5pm—
- 5pm–8pm479 flights61.9%
- 8pm–5am1 flights—
Scale runs 55% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 61.9% on time, against 93.5% 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 506 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
United on MSP to DEN through the year
December is the weak month at 63.3% on time, against 88.0% 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. June was the busiest month here, with 172 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 82.2% on time and Thursday the weakest at 75.2%. 7 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 25,000 reported delay minutes.
- 42%National Airspace System
- 38%Late-arriving aircraft
- 19%Carrier
- 1%Extreme weather
38% 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 29 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 24,966 reported delay minutes.
42% 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 10,000 minutes out of 25,000, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations are rare at 0.75%, 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. 9.3% 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 runs 79.9% on time across 1,457 flights, within 2 points 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 1,459 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 United on MSP to DEN
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. April runs 88.0% on time and December 63.3%, a swing of 25 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of December before you think about anything else. 1,445 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- MSP to DEN, every carrier
- United on DEN to MSP, the return leg
- SkyWest Airlines on MSP to DEN91.2%
- Frontier Airlines on MSP to DEN80.4%
- Delta Air Lines on MSP to DEN76.0%
- Southwest Airlines on MSP to DEN75.7%
- United 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.