Route reliability record
RNO→SFO
Reno to San Francisco
- Flights
- 1,897
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 192 mi
- Carriers
- 2
This route draws a D. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is about an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 1,897 RNO to SFO flights, of which United Airlines flew 905 at 65.6% on time.
Best time to fly RNO to SFO: a 5am–8am departure, ideally on a Saturday. Flights in that window arrived on time 91.6% of the time and Saturday flights 77.1%, against 64.7% for the route overall.
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 129 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
64.7%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,868 completed flights
Avg delay
64 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.42%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
United
65.6% on time across 905 flights
These figures cover 1,897 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 11.7% 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 RNO to SFO
The two carriers here are closely matched: 2 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United Airlines | 905 | 65.6% | 62 min | 0.55% | C+ |
| SkyWest Airlines | 992 | 63.9% | 66 min | 2.22% | D |
No carrier stands out. United tops the table at 65.6%, 2 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
Flight by flight
Flights on RNO to SFO
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.
Best ways to make this trip
The most reliable ways to fly Reno to San Francisco
Every airline on this route, ranked by how often a scheduled flight actually operated and arrived on time, with its best departure time and most punctual flight number. No nearby airport pair beat these.
| Option | Airline | Success | On time | Cancelled | Best departure | Most punctual flight |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. RNO → SFOReno to San Francisco | United Airlines | 65.2% | 65.6% | 0.55% | 5am–8am, Sat | — |
| 2. RNO → SFOReno to San Francisco | SkyWest Airlines | 62.5% | 63.9% | 2.22% | 5am–8am, Sat | OO 5899 10:45 |
Success is the share of scheduled flights that operated and arrived less than 15 minutes late, so a cancelled flight counts against it. “(route)” means the best time comes from every carrier on the route rather than this airline alone.
Departure window
The best time of day to leave
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 42 points, against 2 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am370 flights91.6%
- 8am–11am473 flights54.4%
- 11am–2pm153 flights49.3%
- 2pm–5pm503 flights66.5%
- 5pm–8pm232 flights57.1%
- 8pm–5am166 flights52.5%
Scale runs 40% to 95%. 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 49.3% on time against 91.6% 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 2pm–5pm window is the busiest, with 503 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 45 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 40.2%. January is the strongest month at 84.7%. Moving a flexible trip across that boundary buys 45 points. January was the busiest month here, with 191 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 77.1% on time and Monday the weakest at 58.2%. 19 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 59% of the 42,000 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.
- 59%National Airspace System
- 19%Carrier
- 19%Late-arriving aircraft
- 3%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
59% 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 25,000 minutes out of 42,000, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 42,141 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations sit at 1.42% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.11%.
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. 11.7% 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 192 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 5am–8am window matters as much as it does.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 75.5% on time across 1,897 flights, 11 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 11 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,897 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.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in SFO after this flight
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 84.7% on time and May 40.2%, a swing of 45 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of May before you think about anything else. 1,868 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
RNO to SFO questions
How often is RNO to SFO delayed?
About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 35.3% of the 1,897 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by about an hour on average.
Which airline is most reliable on RNO to SFO?
United Airlines leads at 65.6% on time across 905 flights. SkyWest Airlines is at the other end on 63.9%, a gap of 2 points. Sample size matters as much as the percentage: a rate built from a few hundred flights moves around far more than one built from ten thousand.
What time of day has the fewest delays on RNO to SFO?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 91.6% on time. The 11am–2pm window is the weakest at 49.3%, 42 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 RNO to SFO?
May is the weakest month at 40.2% on time, compared with 84.7% in January. Across the year that is 45 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 RNO — the return legseparate record
- San Francisco International (SFO) delay statistics
- United Airlines on RNO to SFO65.6%
- SkyWest Airlines on RNO to SFO63.9%
- RNO to LAS, a related route82.1%
- LAX to SFO, a related route64.8%
- RNO to DEN, a related route85.8%
- United Airlines on-time record65.6%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record63.9%
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
- How often a connection fails at the major US hubs
Direction matters. RNO to SFO and SFO to RNO 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.