Carrier route record

DLPDX→SLC

Delta Air Lines · Portland to Salt Lake City

Flights: 1,698
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 71%
Carriers: 4

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Delta Air Lines.

Delta on PDX to SLC 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 13 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about an hour. That rests on 1,698 flights, with a median arrival 11 minutes early.

Set against the rest of the country, Delta's PDX to SLC record is 13 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 127 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

90.3%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,677 completed flights

Avg delay

63 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

1.12%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

88.5%

Every carrier on PDX to SLC, 2,381 flights

These figures cover 1,698 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 11 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

Delta against every carrier on PDX to SLC

Delta flew 1,698 of the 2,381 flights on PDX to SLC, most of the route. Its 90.3% on time is 2 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 88.5%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Alaska at 93.6% to Frontier at 58.1%. Two of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

Only one carrier clears this site's 365-flight floor here, so there is no comparison to draw. The table below is the full picture.

On-time performance by carrier on PDX to SLC
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Alaska Airlinesthin sample	47	93.6%	34 min	0.00%	A+
Delta Air Lines (this page)	1,698	90.3%	63 min	1.12%	A
SkyWest Airlines	593	85.3%	54 min	0.17%	A+
Frontier Airlinesthin sample	43	58.1%	74 min	0.00%	D+

Flight by flight

Delta flight numbers on PDX to SLC

Departure window

When Delta 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 1,698 flights.

5am–8am365 flights97.3%
8am–11am361 flights88.6%
11am–2pm361 flights87.4%
2pm–5pm3 flights—
5pm–8pm608 flights88.9%
8pm–5am—

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 87.4% on time against 97.3% 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 5pm–8pm window is the busiest, with 608 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Delta on PDX to SLC through the year

Darker means more delays. Figures are on-time percentages.March best, July worst

July is the worst month at 80.3% on time, 15 points below March, the best at 95.3%. 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. March was the busiest month here, with 151 flights.

Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 94.8% on time and Sunday the weakest at 87.2%. 8 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why Delta runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 63% of the 10,000 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.

Late-arriving aircraft
63%
Carrier
31%
National Airspace System
6%

63% 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 10,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 63 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 10,204 reported delay minutes.

The practical consequence: the 5am–8am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 97.3% on time here.

Cancellations sit at 1.12% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.12%.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 3.5% 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 630 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 87.5% on time across 1,697 flights, within 3 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 1,698 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 Delta on PDX to SLC

Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. March runs 95.3% on time and July 80.3%, a swing of 15 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of July before you think about anything else. 1,677 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