Carrier route record

NKPBI→EWR

Spirit Airlines · West Palm Beach to Newark

Flights: 120
Period: September 2025 to August 2026
Share of route: 4%
Carriers: 3

Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Spirit Airlines.

Spirit on PBI to EWR earns an F−, which is as low as this site's scale goes for a reason. Only 51.4% of flights arrive inside the 15-minute window, 26 points worse than the national rate of 77.3%. Late arrivals average a little over an hour. Treat any tight connection here as a coin flip. That rests on 120 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 2,619 at 77.9% on time.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.3%, so Spirit on PBI to EWR runs 26 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 259 extra late arrivals.

On time

51.4%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 105 completed flights

Avg delay

68 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

12.50%

National rate is 1.89%

Whole route

75.8%

Every carrier on PBI to EWR, 3,394 flights

These figures cover 120 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 23.8% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.

Fare search by Aviasales, a Travelpayouts partner. Booking through it may earn this site a commission at no cost to you; it changes no figure here.

Carrier by carrier

Spirit against every carrier on PBI to EWR

Spirit flew 120 of the 3,394 flights on PBI to EWR, about 4% of it. Its 51.4% on time is 24 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 75.8%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from United at 77.9% to Spirit at 51.4%.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. United Airlines arrives on time 77.9% of the time; JetBlue Airways manages 71.5%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 655 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on PBI to EWR
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
United Airlines	2,619	77.9%	92 min	2.33%	B
JetBlue Airways	655	71.5%	76 min	4.43%	C−
Spirit Airlines (this page)thin sample	120	51.4%	68 min	12.50%	F−

JetBlue Airways cancels 4.4% of what it schedules here, the highest in the table. A cancelled flight never appears in an on-time rate, so read that column alongside the punctuality one rather than after it.

Timetable by Aviasales, a Travelpayouts partner. Booking through it may earn this site a commission at no cost to you; it changes no figure here.

Departure window

When Spirit runs best on this route

Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 14 points, against 6 points between the best and worst carrier.

5am–8am34 flights71.9%
8am–11am—
11am–2pm53 flights57.8%
2pm–5pm33 flights—
5pm–8pm—
8pm–5am—

Scale runs 50% to 75%. 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 57.8% on time against 71.9% 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 11am–2pm window is the busiest, with 53 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Spirit on PBI to EWR through the year

Oct–Dec 202527 flights—
Jan–Mar 202680 flights45.7%
Apr–Jun 202613 flights—

Scale runs 35% to 50%. 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 51.4% on time across 120 flights.

Split by quarter, Spirit on PBI to EWR logged 27 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 80 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 13 flights in Apr–Jun 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 51.4% annual figure is the one to use.

Arrival by arrival

How late Spirit on PBI to EWR runs when it is late

The 51 late arrivals split 12 under half an hour, 14 between 30 and 60 minutes, and 25 an hour or more.

15+ min early6 flights5.7%
Within 15 min48 flights45.7%
15–29 min late12 flights11.4%
30–59 min late14 flights13.3%
1–2 hours late19 flights18.1%
2+ hours late6 flights5.7%

Scale runs 0% to 100%.

Share of 105 completed flights by arrival against schedule.

Time lost at the gate mostly stays lost. Of 42 departures that left 15 minutes late or more, only 2 made it up before arrival. In the other direction, 11 flights left on time yet arrived 15 minutes late or more, so that delay built up after pushback: in the air, in a holding pattern or on the ground at EWR.

The worst days

Worst days for Spirit on PBI to EWR

The latest arrival of the period was on 14 February 2026, 3 hours 9 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as a late-arriving aircraft. The same cause led on three of the five worst days.

The latest arrivals of Spirit on PBI to EWR in the period
Date	Arrived late by	Largest filed cause
14 February 2026	3 hours 9 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft
20 March 2026	2 hours 50 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft
27 March 2026	2 hours 49 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft
24 February 2026	2 hours 41 minutes	Carrier
6 April 2026	2 hours 12 minutes	National Airspace System

Delay causes

Why Spirit runs late on this route

Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 44% of the 3,476 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.

Late-arriving aircraft
44%
National Airspace System
33%
Carrier
23%

44% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 3,476 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 44 to one. The split is drawn from 3,476 reported delay minutes.

33% 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 1,164 minutes out of 3,476, against a national NAS share of 21%.

Cancellations run at 12.50%, against 1.89% nationally. That is about one flight in eight cancelled outright. A cancelled flight is invisible in every on-time figure on this page, so the punctuality numbers above describe only the flights that actually operated.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

23.8% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum for a connection here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.

The 1,024 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.

The return leg runs 51.5% on time across 120 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.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 120 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 Spirit on PBI to EWR

Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 12.50% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you a little over an hour; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 5am–8am departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 105 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Where to go next

Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated 22 October 2026; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.

Key figures