Route reliability record
SLC→PSP
Salt Lake City to Palm Springs
- Flights
- 1,078
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 541 mi
- Carriers
- 2
This route 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 14 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about 50 minutes. That rests on 1,078 SLC to PSP flights, with a median arrival 10 minutes early.
Best time to fly SLC to PSP: a 8am–11am departure, ideally on a Tuesday. Flights in that window arrived on time 95.7% of the time and Tuesday flights 96.2%, against 92.0% for the route overall.
Set against the rest of the country, this route's record is 14 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 144 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
92.0%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,074 completed flights
Avg delay
50 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.37%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
SkyWest
92.6% on time across 1,007 flights
These figures cover 1,078 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 10 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 SLC to PSP
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 | 92.6% | 49 min | 0.40% | A+ |
| Delta Air Linesthin sample | 71 | 83.1% | 61 min | 0.00% | B+ |
Flight by flight
Flights on SLC to PSP
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–8am—
- 8am–11am236 flights95.7%
- 11am–2pm129 flights89.1%
- 2pm–5pm349 flights89.4%
- 5pm–8pm—
- 8pm–5am364 flights93.1%
Scale runs 80% to 100%. 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 89.1% on time against 95.7% for 8am–11am. 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 8pm–5am window is the busiest, with 364 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 20 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 79.8% 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 96.2% on time and Thursday the weakest at 88.0%. 8 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 59% of the 4,337 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%Carrier
- 22%National Airspace System
- 16%Extreme weather
- 3%Late-arriving aircraft
Extreme weather accounts for 16% of delay minutes, well above the single-digit share typical across the system. Weather delays are lumpy: they arrive as whole bad days rather than as a steady drag, so the monthly strip above is the more useful view of the risk. The national share is 6%, so this operation carries roughly 2.6 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 4,337 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 59%, 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 2,576 of the 4,337 delay minutes reported here.
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 1.7% 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 93.7% 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 PSP 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 92.0% 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
SLC to PSP questions
How often is SLC to PSP delayed?
About one flight in twelve arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 8.0% of the 1,078 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by about 50 minutes on average.
How reliable is SLC to PSP compared with the rest of the country?
92.0% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.6%, a difference of 14 points in its favour. That is worth a A+ on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on SLC to PSP?
The 8am–11am departure window is the strongest at 95.7% on time. The 11am–2pm window is the weakest at 89.1%, 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 SLC to PSP?
February is the weakest month at 79.8% on time, compared with 100.0% in June. Across the year that is 20 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
- PSP to SLC — the return legseparate record
- Salt Lake City International (SLC) delay statistics
- SLC to DEN, a related route77.8%
- SFO to PSP, a related route76.7%
- SLC to PHX, a related route83.9%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record92.6%
- Delta Air Lines on-time record83.1%
- Worst months to fly in the US, ranked by the data
- How to read this site: grades, sample sizes, and honest caveats
Direction matters. SLC to PSP and PSP to SLC 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.