Carrier route record
DLRNO→SLC
Delta Air Lines · Reno to Salt Lake City
- Flights
- 730
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 61%
- Carriers
- 2
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Delta Air Lines.
Delta on RNO 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 an hour and a half. That rests on 730 flights, with a median arrival 11 minutes early.
Set against the rest of the country, Delta's RNO to SLC record is 13 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 129 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
90.5%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 727 completed flights
Avg delay
99 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.27%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
90.1%
Every carrier on RNO to SLC, 1,195 flights
These figures cover 730 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 RNO to SLC
Delta flew 730 of the 1,195 flights on RNO to SLC, most of the route. Its 90.5% on time is about level with the route as a whole at 90.1%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of two carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 90.5% to SkyWest at 89.5%.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Delta Air Lines (this page) | 730 | 90.5% | 99 min | 0.27% | A+ |
| SkyWest Airlines | 465 | 89.5% | 71 min | 0.00% | A+ |
Flight by flight
Delta flight numbers on RNO 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 730 flights.
- 5am–8am365 flights90.4%
- 8am–11am—
- 11am–2pm349 flights91.4%
- 2pm–5pm16 flights—
- 5pm–8pm—
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 80% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 11am–2pm window is the strongest at 91.4% on time. The full set of windows spans about a point.
Across the year
Delta on RNO to SLC through the year
December is the weak month at 77.0% on time, against 98.3% in September. 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. January was the busiest month here, with 62 flights.
Across the week, Monday is the strongest day at 95.2% on time and Sunday the weakest at 86.5%. 9 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. Carrier accounts for 55% of the 6,841 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.
- 55%Carrier
- 31%Late-arriving aircraft
- 9%National Airspace System
- 5%Extreme weather
The largest share of delay minutes, 55%, 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 3,796 of the 6,841 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 6,841 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations are rare at 0.27%, 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 costs
Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 4.3% 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.
At 422 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 85.6% on time across 730 flights, 5 points below 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 5 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 730 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 Delta on RNO to SLC
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 730 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 90.5% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 727 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
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.