Carrier route record

NKTPA→ATL

Spirit Airlines · Tampa to Atlanta

Flights: 126
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 2%
Carriers: 4

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Spirit Airlines.

Spirit on TPA to ATL lands a B+, 3 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in five arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by close to two hours on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 126 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Delta Air Lines, flew 4,413 at 81.7% on time.

Delta Air Lines is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 81.7% on time across 4,413 flights.

On time

80.2%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 126 completed flights

Avg delay

101 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.00%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

79.9%

Every carrier on TPA to ATL, 6,138 flights

These figures cover 126 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 8.7% 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

Spirit against every carrier on TPA to ATL

Spirit flew 126 of the 6,138 flights on TPA to ATL, about 2% of it. Its 80.2% on time is about level with the route as a whole at 79.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 81.7% to Frontier at 73.5%.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Delta Air Lines arrives on time 81.7% of the time; Frontier Airlines manages 73.5%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 867 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on TPA to ATL
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Delta Air Lines	4,413	81.7%	75 min	1.22%	B
Spirit Airlines (this page)thin sample	126	80.2%	101 min	0.00%	B+
Southwest Airlines	732	76.9%	59 min	1.37%	B
Frontier Airlines	867	73.5%	61 min	1.50%	C

Delta leads Frontier by 8 points. Real, but small enough that a better departure time on the weaker carrier can outweigh it.

Departure window

When Spirit runs best on this route

Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 28 points, against 8 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am29 flights—
8am–11am45 flights91.1%
11am–2pm10 flights—
2pm–5pm1 flights—
5pm–8pm41 flights63.4%
8pm–5am—

Scale runs 55% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 63.4% on time, against 91.1% for the 8am–11am slot. By evening the aircraft flying these rotations have absorbed a full day of small delays and there is no slack left to recover in. The 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 45 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Spirit on TPA to ATL through the year

Jul–Sep 202563 flights74.6%
Oct–Dec 202551 flights88.2%
Jan–Mar 20261 flights—
Apr–Jun 202611 flights—

Scale runs 65% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Monthly volumes are too low here to break the year into twelve reliable readings. What the twelve-month total says is 80.2% on time across 126 flights.

Split by quarter, Spirit on TPA to ATL logged 63 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 51 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 1 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 11 flights in Apr–Jun 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 80.2% annual figure is the one to use.

Delay causes

Why Spirit runs late on this route

Carriers report a reason for every delay minute they cause, in five DOT categories. The split below is by minutes, not by number of flights, so a handful of very long weather delays weighs as much as many short ones. It covers 2,516 reported delay minutes.

Carrier
40%
Late-arriving aircraft
30%
National Airspace System
27%
Extreme weather
3%

The largest share of delay minutes, 40%, 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 1,008 of the 2,516 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 2,516 reported delay minutes.

The practical consequence: the 8am–11am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 91.1% on time here.

Cancellations are rare at 0.00%, below the national 1.81% and low enough to earn the plus on the grade. Almost no flights are called off; the risk here is arriving late, not not arriving.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

8.7% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.1%. That is the figure that decides a connection, and it says a 60 to 75 minute layover is reasonable here while anything under 45 minutes is a bet. Most delays on this route last close to two hours, which a normal layover absorbs.

At 406 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 8am–11am window matters as much as it does.

The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 69.6% on time across 126 flights, 11 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 11 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 126 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 Spirit on TPA to ATL

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 126 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 80.2% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 126 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

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.

Key figures