Carrier route record

WNSFO→BUR

Southwest Airlines · San Francisco to Burbank

Flights: 514
Period: September 2025 to August 2026
Share of route: 17%
Carriers: 3

Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Southwest Airlines.

Southwest on SFO to BUR earns an F, which is as low as this site's scale goes for a reason. Only 49.7% of flights arrive inside the 15-minute window, 28 points worse than the national rate of 77.3%. Late arrivals average about an hour. Treat any tight connection here as a coin flip. That rests on 514 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 1,663 at 80.2% on time.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.3%, so Southwest on SFO to BUR runs 28 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 276 extra late arrivals.

On time

49.7%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 501 completed flights

Avg delay

59 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

2.33%

National rate is 1.89%

Whole route

74.9%

Every carrier on SFO to BUR, 3,101 flights

These figures cover 514 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 17.2% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.

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Carrier by carrier

Southwest against every carrier on SFO to BUR

Southwest flew 514 of the 3,101 flights on SFO to BUR, about 17% of it. Its 49.7% on time is 25 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 74.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from United at 80.2% to Southwest at 49.7%.

The two carriers here are closely matched: about a point 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.

On-time performance by carrier on SFO to BUR
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
United Airlines	1,663	80.2%	56 min	0.12%	B+
SkyWest Airlines	924	79.2%	75 min	2.06%	B
Southwest Airlines (this page)	514	49.7%	59 min	2.33%	F

No carrier stands out. United tops the table at 80.2%, about a point clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.

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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 53 points, against about a point between the best and worst carrier.

5am–8am31 flights90.0%
8am–11am141 flights50.4%
11am–2pm71 flights36.6%
2pm–5pm104 flights39.2%
5pm–8pm162 flights53.8%
8pm–5am5 flights—

Scale runs 30% 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 36.6% on time against 90.0% 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 5pm–8pm window is the busiest, with 162 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Southwest on SFO to BUR through the year

Jan–Mar 202677 flights73.7%
Apr–Jun 2026260 flights45.2%
Jul–Sep 2026177 flights45.7%

Scale runs 35% to 80%.

Monthly volumes are too low here to break the year into twelve reliable readings. What the twelve-month total says is 49.7% on time across 514 flights.

Southwest on SFO to BUR did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Jan–Mar 2026 at 73.7% on time and its weakest Apr–Jun 2026 at 45.2%, a swing of 29 points on roughly 171 flights a quarter. The twelve-month rate averages over that, so if you are flying in a weak quarter the quarter's own figure is the better guide.

Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 63.5% on time and Monday the weakest at 37.3%, a spread of 26 points.

Arrival by arrival

How late Southwest on SFO to BUR runs when it is late

The 252 late arrivals split 70 under half an hour, 96 between 30 and 60 minutes, and 86 an hour or more.

15+ min early56 flights11.2%
Within 15 min193 flights38.5%
15–29 min late70 flights14.0%
30–59 min late96 flights19.2%
1–2 hours late60 flights12.0%
2+ hours late26 flights5.2%

Scale runs 0% to 100%.

Share of 501 completed flights by arrival against schedule.

43 of 283 late departures made up the time and arrived on time, 15% of them. 12 flights left on time and still arrived late.

The worst days

Worst days for Southwest on SFO to BUR

The latest arrival of the period was on 20 April 2026, 4 hours 31 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as a late-arriving aircraft. The same cause led on four of the five worst days.

The latest arrivals of Southwest on SFO to BUR in the period
Date	Arrived late by	Largest filed cause
20 April 2026	4 hours 31 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft
17 July 2026	4 hours 30 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft
6 March 2026	4 hours 21 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft
11 April 2026	4 hours 8 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft
31 March 2026	3 hours 57 minutes	Carrier

Delay causes

Why Southwest runs late on this route

Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 83% of the 15,000 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.

Late-arriving aircraft
83%
Carrier
12%
National Airspace System
5%
Extreme weather
0%

83% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 15,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 83 to one. The split is drawn from 14,902 reported delay minutes.

The practical consequence: the 5am–8am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 90.0% on time here.

Cancellations sit at 2.33% against a national 1.89%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.19%.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

17.2% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum for a connection here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.

At 326 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 40.4% on time across 514 flights, 9 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 9 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 514 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 SFO to BUR

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 514 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 49.7% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 501 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Where to go next

Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated 22 October 2026; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.

Key figures