Carrier route record

WNMSP→PHX

Southwest Airlines · Minneapolis to Phoenix

Flights: 284
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 9%
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 PHX earns an A+. Close to nine flights in ten arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 11 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs roughly 50 minutes. That rests on 284 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, American Airlines, flew 647 at 79.1% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, Southwest's MSP to PHX record is 11 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 107 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

88.3%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 281 completed flights

Avg delay

52 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.35%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

79.9%

Every carrier on MSP to PHX, 3,081 flights

These figures cover 284 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 7 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 PHX

Southwest flew 284 of the 3,081 flights on MSP to PHX, about 9% of it. Its 88.3% on time is 8 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 79.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from Envoy at 100.0% to Delta at 78.8%. Two of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The two carriers here are closely matched: half a point 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 PHX
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Envoy Airthin sample	2	100.0%	—	50.00%	A−
Southwest Airlines (this page)thin sample	284	88.3%	52 min	0.35%	A+
Frontier Airlinesthin sample	74	84.9%	147 min	1.35%	B
American Airlines	647	79.1%	96 min	1.39%	B
Delta Air Lines	2,074	78.8%	64 min	0.68%	B+

No carrier stands out. American tops the table at 79.1%, half a point 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 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 284 flights.

5am–8am150 flights93.9%
8am–11am14 flights—
11am–2pm80 flights86.1%
2pm–5pm14 flights—
5pm–8pm21 flights—
8pm–5am5 flights—

Scale runs 80% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The weak window here is the middle of the day, not the evening: 11am–2pm runs 86.1% on time against 93.9% for 5am–8am. That shape usually means a departure bank rather than an accumulating delay, so the recovery later in the afternoon is real rather than noise. The 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 150 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Southwest on MSP to PHX through the year

Jul–Sep 202592 flights92.3%
Oct–Dec 202591 flights87.8%
Jan–Mar 202685 flights86.9%
Apr–Jun 202616 flights—

Scale runs 80% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Monthly volumes are too low here to break the year into twelve reliable readings. What the twelve-month total says is 88.3% on time across 284 flights.

Quarter by quarter Southwest on MSP to PHX held fairly steady: 92.3% in Jul–Sep 2025, 87.8% in Oct–Dec 2025 and 86.9% in Jan–Mar 2026. A spread of 5 points is about what a sample of this size moves on its own, so the annual figure is a fair summary.

Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 91.7% on time and Saturday the weakest at 83.8%. 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 1,701 reported delay minutes.

Late-arriving aircraft
41%
Carrier
37%
National Airspace System
20%
Extreme weather
2%

41% 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 1,701 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 20 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 1,701 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 37%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. Unlike weather, that is a management outcome, and it is the category where the gap between two carriers on the same schedule is genuinely earned. It accounts for 624 of the 1,701 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations are rare at 0.35%, 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 2.8% 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 1,276 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 284 flights, 16 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 16 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 284 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 Southwest on MSP to PHX

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 284 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 88.3% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 281 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