Carrier route record
WNPHL→TPA
Southwest Airlines · Philadelphia to Tampa
- Flights
- 157
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 6%
- Carriers
- 3
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Southwest Airlines.
Southwest on PHL to TPA lands a B, about a point worse than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in four arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by about an hour on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 157 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, American Airlines, flew 1,675 at 74.5% on time.
The US average over the same twelve months is 77.6%, so there is little to separate Southwest on PHL to TPA from the country as a whole. The variation that matters here is internal: which carrier, and what time of day.
Key figures
On time
76.5%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 153 completed flights
Avg delay
55 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.27%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
73.2%
Every carrier on PHL to TPA, 2,616 flights
These figures cover 157 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 8.5% 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
Southwest against every carrier on PHL to TPA
Southwest flew 157 of the 2,616 flights on PHL to TPA, about 6% of it. Its 76.5% on time is 3 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 73.2%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Southwest at 76.5% to Frontier at 69.8%.
The two 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Southwest Airlines (this page)thin sample | 157 | 76.5% | 55 min | 1.27% | B |
| American Airlines | 1,675 | 74.5% | 79 min | 1.97% | C |
| Frontier Airlines | 784 | 69.8% | 93 min | 2.04% | C |
No carrier stands out. American tops the table at 74.5%, 5 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 11 points, against 5 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am—
- 8am–11am—
- 11am–2pm117 flights73.7%
- 2pm–5pm40 flights84.6%
- 5pm–8pm—
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 65% to 90%. 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 73.7% on time against 84.6% for 2pm–5pm. 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 117 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Southwest on PHL to TPA through the year
- Jul–Sep 202513 flights—
- Oct–Dec 202566 flights75.4%
- Jan–Mar 202656 flights72.2%
- Apr–Jun 202622 flights—
Scale runs 65% to 80%. 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 76.5% on time across 157 flights.
Split by quarter, Southwest on PHL to TPA logged 13 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 66 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 56 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 22 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 76.5% annual figure is the one to use.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 81.4% on time and Sunday the weakest at 76.7%. 5 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 1,988 reported delay minutes.
- 38%National Airspace System
- 36%Late-arriving aircraft
- 26%Carrier
36% 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 1,988 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 36 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 1,988 reported delay minutes.
38% 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 752 minutes out of 1,988, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations sit at 1.27% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 1.27%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
8.5% 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 920 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 76.6% on time across 157 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. 157 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 PHL to TPA
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 157 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 76.5% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 153 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- PHL to TPA, every carrier
- Southwest on TPA to PHL, the return leg
- American Airlines on PHL to TPA74.5%
- Frontier Airlines on PHL to TPA69.8%
- Southwest Airlines network-wide record
- Philadelphia International (PHL) delay statistics
- Tampa International (TPA) 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.