Carrier route record
UATPA→DEN
United Airlines · Tampa to Denver
- Flights
- 1,186
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 38%
- Carriers
- 3
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with United Airlines.
United on TPA to DEN earns a B+. More than four flights in five arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 7 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about an hour. That rests on 1,186 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Frontier Airlines, flew 604 at 79.3% on time.
Set against the rest of the country, United's TPA to DEN record is 7 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 69 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
84.5%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,176 completed flights
Avg delay
67 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.34%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
81.2%
Every carrier on TPA to DEN, 3,099 flights
These figures cover 1,186 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
United against every carrier on TPA to DEN
United flew 1,186 of the 3,099 flights on TPA to DEN, about 38% of it. Its 84.5% on time is 3 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 81.2%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from United at 84.5% to Southwest at 79.0%.
The two carriers here are closely matched: half 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.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United Airlines (this page) | 1,186 | 84.5% | 67 min | 0.34% | B+ |
| Frontier Airlines | 604 | 79.3% | 85 min | 0.83% | B+ |
| Southwest Airlines | 1,309 | 79.0% | 49 min | 0.23% | B+ |
No carrier stands out. Frontier tops the table at 79.3%, half a point clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
Departure window
When United runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 21 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am—
- 8am–11am422 flights92.4%
- 11am–2pm364 flights88.4%
- 2pm–5pm364 flights71.5%
- 5pm–8pm—
- 8pm–5am36 flights82.9%
Scale runs 65% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the morning departure. Flights leaving between 8am–11am arrive on time 92.4% of the time, against 71.5% for the afternoon window. That is 21 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 422 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
United on TPA to DEN through the year
August is the worst month at 67.4% on time, 23 points below April, the best at 90.0%. Summer afternoon convection and peak-season schedules land on the same weeks every year, so this is a pattern you can book around rather than a run of bad luck. March was the busiest month here, with 138 flights.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 90.1% on time and Sunday the weakest at 80.0%. 10 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why United 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 12,000 reported delay minutes.
- 36%National Airspace System
- 35%Late-arriving aircraft
- 23%Carrier
- 6%Extreme weather
35% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. That is a cascade, and cascades start small and grow through the day. Across 12,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 6 to one. It is the strongest argument for booking the first departure of the morning, when the aircraft has been sitting at the gate overnight with nothing to inherit. The split is drawn from 12,111 reported delay minutes.
36% 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 4,342 minutes out of 12,000, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations are rare at 0.34%, 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
5.9% 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 about an hour, which a normal layover absorbs.
At 1,506 miles this is transcontinental flying, and long routes get a quiet structural advantage. Scheduled block time on a flight this length carries more padding in absolute minutes, so a twenty-minute late departure often still becomes an on-time arrival. Read the on-time rate here as slightly flattering next to a short-haul route with the same operational quality.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 81.4% on time across 1,186 flights, 3 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 3 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,186 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.
What to do with this
Booking United on TPA to DEN
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. April runs 90.0% on time and August 67.4%, a swing of 23 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of August before you think about anything else. 1,176 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- TPA to DEN, every carrier
- United on DEN to TPA, the return leg
- Frontier Airlines on TPA to DEN79.3%
- Southwest Airlines on TPA to DEN79.0%
- United Airlines network-wide record
- Tampa International (TPA) delay statistics
- Denver International (DEN) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
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.