Route reliability record
PSP→SLC
Palm Springs to Salt Lake City
- Flights
- 1,078
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 541 mi
- Carriers
- 2
This route earns an A+. Nearly every flight arrives inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 16 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs an hour and a half. That rests on 1,078 PSP to SLC flights, with a median arrival 14 minutes early.
Best time to fly PSP to SLC: a 5am–8am departure, ideally on a Tuesday. Flights in that window arrived on time 98.1% of the time and Tuesday flights 97.5%, against 93.7% for the route overall.
Set against the rest of the country, this route's record is 16 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 161 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
93.7%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,074 completed flights
Avg delay
96 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.37%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
SkyWest
94.7% on time across 1,007 flights
These figures cover 1,078 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 14 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
Which airline is most reliable on PSP to SLC
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 | 1,007 | 94.7% | 83 min | 0.40% | A+ |
| Delta Air Linesthin sample | 71 | 78.9% | 142 min | 0.00% | B+ |
Flight by flight
Flights on PSP to SLC
The flight numbers below flew this route at least 250 times in the period, busiest first. Each has its own record, with its schedule and delay causes.
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 1,078 flights.
- 5am–8am365 flights98.1%
- 8am–11am—
- 11am–2pm355 flights91.8%
- 2pm–5pm9 flights—
- 5pm–8pm349 flights91.1%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 85% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The early departures do better, though not dramatically: 98.1% on time for the 5am–8am window against 91.1% for 5pm–8pm. Worth taking if the schedule allows, not worth an extra connection. The 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 365 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 21 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.
February is the weak month at 78.6% on time, against 100.0% in June. Winter delays cluster: a single storm system can account for most of a month's shortfall, so an average December hides both very good weeks and genuinely unflyable days. March was the busiest month here, with 93 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 97.5% on time and Saturday the weakest at 88.2%. 9 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. Carrier accounts for 76% of the 6,542 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.
- 76%Carrier
- 10%Extreme weather
- 8%Late-arriving aircraft
- 6%National Airspace System
The largest share of delay minutes, 76%, 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 4,988 of the 6,542 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 6,542 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations are rare at 0.37%, 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
Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 2.4% 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 541 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 92.0% on time across 1,078 flights, within 2 points 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. 1,078 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.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in SLC after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 1,078 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 93.7% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 1,074 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
PSP to SLC questions
How often is PSP to SLC delayed?
About one flight in fifteen arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 6.3% of the 1,078 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by an hour and a half on average.
How reliable is PSP to SLC compared with the rest of the country?
93.7% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.6%, a difference of 16 points in its favour. That is worth a A+ on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on PSP to SLC?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 98.1% on time. The 5pm–8pm window is the weakest at 91.1%, 7 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 February delays on PSP to SLC?
February is the weakest month at 78.6% on time, compared with 100.0% in June. Across the year that is 21 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
- SLC to PSP — the return legseparate record
- Salt Lake City International (SLC) delay statistics
- PSP to SFO, a related route64.5%
- DEN to SLC, a related route77.5%
- PSP to DEN, a related route81.6%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record94.7%
- Delta Air Lines on-time record78.9%
- Worst months to fly in the US, ranked by the data
- How to read this site: grades, sample sizes, and honest caveats
Direction matters. PSP to SLC and SLC to PSP are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
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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.