Is Spirit Airlines reliable?
Ranked 54 of 105 US airlines on on-time record.
370,858 flights · July 2024 – July 2026 · US Bureau of Transportation Statistics
76.39%
Arrived on time
Within 15 minutes of schedule
2.57%
Cancelled
Share of scheduled flights
73 min
When late, late by
Average across delayed arrivals
55.36%
Delays it caused itself
Rest was weather, ATC or security
Reading Spirit Airlines’ record
The extremes are far apart. On LAX to PDX it arrived on time 95.37% of the time; on FLL to EYW the figure was 44.33%. Same airline, same fleet, same procedures — which is the clearest argument on this site for checking the route rather than the carrier.
Cancellation is where Spirit Airlines stands out, and not well: it cancelled 2.57% of its flights against a median of 1.4% across the airlines here — 1.8 times the typical rate. Cancellation is also the outcome that costs a traveller a day rather than an hour, and the one that triggers a refund entitlement where delay does not.
Spirit Airlines has been getting worse. Its later months run 5.5 points less punctual than its earlier ones. A drift of that size across a whole network is rarely weather; it more often means frequencies added faster than the operation can absorb them.
Spirit Airlines sits mid-table, which for an airline's punctuality is a better outcome than it sounds.
Each axis is a percentile against the other US airlines in the same period, not an absolute score. Further out is better than most; nearer the centre is worse than most.
Spirit Airlines in five measures
An airline's headline on-time rate hides more than it shows. Two carriers can both arrive on time 75% of the time while one is late by twelve minutes and the other by an hour, or while one is evenly mediocre everywhere and the other is excellent on most routes and dreadful on a few.
These five axes pull those apart. Each is scored against the other US airlines in the same period rather than on an absolute scale, because on-time rates cluster tightly enough that raw numbers would draw every carrier as the same shape.
Same everywhere is the one worth reading twice: it measures how far Spirit Airlines’ on-time rate moves from route to route. A carrier scoring low there has an average propped up by routes you may not be flying.
Spirit Airlines month by month
Its most reliable routes
- LAX → PDX Los Angeles to Portland 95.37%
- LGA → BNA New York to Nashville 95.28%
- BNA → LGA Nashville to New York 91.34%
- OAK → SNA Oakland to Santa Ana 89.81%
- SNA → OAK Santa Ana to Oakland 89.38%
- LAX → PHL Los Angeles to Philadelphia 89.29%
- SJC → LAX San Jose to Los Angeles 88.68%
- LAX → RNO Los Angeles to Reno 87.79%
- LAS → SNA Las Vegas to Santa Ana 87.72%
- SNA → LAS Santa Ana to Las Vegas 87.16%
Its worst routes
- FLL → EYW Fort Lauderdale to Key West 44.33%
- ORD → ATL Chicago to Atlanta 50.52%
- EYW → FLL Key West to Fort Lauderdale 50.52%
- PBI → EWR West Palm Beach/Palm Beach to Newark 51.43%
- EWR → PBI Newark to West Palm Beach/Palm Beach 51.46%
- RDU → EWR Raleigh/Durham to Newark 53.36%
- BOS → SJU Boston to San Juan 53.51%
- ORD → BOS Chicago to Boston 54.47%
- ORD → EWR Chicago to Newark 56.22%
- AUS → EWR Austin to Newark 56.93%
How Spirit Airlines compares
Common questions
Is Spirit Airlines reliable?
Spirit Airlines arrived on time 76.39% of the time across 370,858 flights, ranking 54 of 105 airlines measured. That is around the middle of the field.
How often does Spirit Airlines cancel flights?
2.57% of its scheduled flights were cancelled. Cancellation matters more than delay for a traveller: it is the outcome that costs a day, and the one that triggers a refund entitlement.
When Spirit Airlines is late, how late is it?
About 73 minutes on average across its delayed arrivals.
Are Spirit Airlines delays the airline's own fault?
55.36% of the delay minutes it reported came from causes inside the airline — crew, maintenance, and aircraft arriving late from earlier legs — rather than weather or air traffic control.
Figures cover July 2024 – July 2026 and are counted from the regulators' own published files. A grade describes the past and is not a prediction about a particular flight, nor a safety rating. How the grade is calculated →