Route reliability record
PSP→SFO
Palm Springs to San Francisco
- Flights
- 2,520
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 421 mi
- Carriers
- 4
This route draws a D+. About one flight in three arrive at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is a little over an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 2,520 flights, with a median arrival 1 minutes late.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so this route runs 13 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 131 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
64.5%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 2,471 completed flights
Avg delay
71 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.87%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
SkyWest
65.7% on time across 2,178 flights
These figures cover 2,520 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 14.1% 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
Which airline is most reliable on PSP to SFO
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.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkyWest Airlines | 2,178 | 65.7% | 67 min | 0.96% | C+ |
| United Airlinesthin sample | 307 | 58.8% | 96 min | 0.33% | D+ |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 22 | 54.5% | 73 min | 0.00% | F+ |
| Alaska Airlinesthin sample | 13 | 23.1% | 72 min | 0.00% | F+ |
Departure window
The best time of day to leave
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 2,520 flights.
- 5am–8am423 flights65.0%
- 8am–11am446 flights63.5%
- 11am–2pm534 flights68.7%
- 2pm–5pm490 flights67.5%
- 5pm–8pm627 flights58.9%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 50% to 75%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 58.9% on time, against 68.7% for the 11am–2pm 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 5pm–8pm window is the busiest, with 627 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 51 points from best month to worst, which is wide. An annual average tells you very little about the week you are actually flying, so read the strip rather than the headline if your dates are fixed.
Delays peak in May, when the on-time rate falls to 33.0%. January is the strongest month at 84.4%. Moving a flexible trip across that boundary buys 51 points. April was the busiest month here, with 250 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 71.5% on time and Sunday the weakest at 59.6%. 12 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
One category carries most of the weight here. National Airspace System accounts for 51% of the 63,000 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.
- 51%National Airspace System
- 30%Carrier
- 18%Late-arriving aircraft
- 2%Extreme weather
51% 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 32,000 minutes out of 63,000, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 62,615 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations are rare at 0.87%, 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 actually costs
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 14.1% 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.
At 421 miles this is a short hop, and stage length matters more than it looks. A flight this short spends under two hours in the air, which leaves almost nothing to claw back a late pushback with. Delay here is decided on the ground, in the turn, which is why the 11am–2pm window matters as much as it does.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 76.7% on time across 2,504 flights, 12 points above 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 12 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 2,520 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 this route
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. January runs 84.4% on time and May 33.0%, a swing of 51 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of May before you think about anything else. 2,471 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
PSP to SFO questions
How often is PSP to SFO delayed?
About one flight in three arrive at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 35.5% of the 2,520 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by a little over an hour on average.
How reliable is PSP to SFO compared with the rest of the country?
64.5% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.6%, a difference of 13 points against it. That is worth a D+ on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on PSP to SFO?
The 11am–2pm departure window is the strongest at 68.7% on time. The 5pm–8pm window is the weakest at 58.9%, 10 points behind. Later departures inherit delays from earlier flights the same aircraft has already flown, which is why the curve slopes the way it does.
How bad are May delays on PSP to SFO?
May is the weakest month at 33.0% on time, compared with 84.4% in January. Across the year that is 51 points between the best and worst months. Moving flexible dates out of that month is one of the few things that reliably helps.
Related
Where to go next
- SFO to PSP — the return legseparate record
- San Francisco International (SFO) delay statistics
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record65.7%
- United Airlines on-time record58.8%
- Frontier Airlines on-time record54.5%
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
- Connecting flights: how much buffer the data says you need
Direction matters. PSP to SFO and SFO to PSP are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, July 2025 to June 2026. Updated monthly. How this data is collected.