Houston · TX
HOU — William P. Hobby Airport
What each airline's contract owes you when a flight through HOU goes wrong, that airport's filed delay record, and the arithmetic on a tight connection.
Will you make your connection at HOU?
Most of what a tight connection costs was never about HOU. Border formalities, a bag that is not through-checked and a door that closes before departure are the same at every airport, and they are usually what strands people — so the sum below is real arithmetic even though we hold no transfer times for HOU.
45 minutes to spare
You have 60 minutes after the delay. This connection needs about 15. Enough room for a gate change.
This is the floor, before you walk anywhere. Every minute below holds at any airport, because none of it is a property of HOU — it is border formalities, baggage and a closing gate. Add your terminal change above to finish the sum.
| 15m | Gate closes before departure | typical published gate cutoff |
| 15m | needed in total | |
Arithmetic, not a prediction — we hold no data that would let us put a probability on your flight, so we do not pretend to. The gate cutoff is a typical published figure; confirm your airline's. Your airline's app knows your actual gates, which we do not.
For four hubs we have read the operator's own transfer figures and datestamped them, which lets the arithmetic run without asking you anything: DFW, IAH, MIA and LAX.
If your flight through HOU is cancelled or badly delayed
HOU in the DOT's own numbers
Departures from Houston as the carriers filed them with the US Department of Transportation for May 2026. This is the figure that decides whether a delay here is anybody's fault but the weather's.
HOU ranks 35th of 41 for departures among the airports we cover, its 28.1% late rate is 5.7 points worse than the 22.4% median, the 5th-worst here, and 80% of the filed delay minutes were coded as carrier delay or late-arriving aircraft rather than extreme weather or air traffic control — above the 74.6% median, which matters because a delay coded to the carrier is the kind a contract can be held to.
- Departures filed
- 4,364
- Over 15 min late
- 28.1%
- Cancelled
- 0.6%
- Carrier delay + late-arriving aircraft
- 80%
The last figure is the share of filed delay minutes coded as carrier delay or late-arriving aircraft rather than extreme weather or air traffic control. It sums two BTS fields and is not a BTS field itself, and it establishes no fault: the late-arriving code records that the inbound aircraft was late, not what delayed it. The reasoning, and the objection to it, are set out in the airline accountability index. Summed across reporting carriers only, so a hub carrying a lot of non-reporting regional traffic reads better here than a traveller experiences it.
These are monthly aggregate filing codes. They cannot establish what caused your individual flight, whether it was within the carrier's control, or whether compensation is owed.
The departures from HOU most likely to run late
Every carrier and destination out of Houston with enough filed departures to measure, worst first. A route missing from this list flies too thinly for a percentage to mean anything, which is a reason to withhold it rather than to soften it.
| Route | Airline | Flights | Late |
|---|---|---|---|
| HOU → DAL | Southwest Airlines | 350 | 20% |
What the airlines flying here have committed to in writing
Under 14 CFR § 253.4 a carrier's Conditions of Carriage are incorporated into your ticket, which makes them enforceable terms rather than a customer-service policy. Below is what each carrier with filed departures from HOU commits to when the disruption is theirs. Only one carrier here has contract text we have read ourselves.
Southwest Airlines
Ask for the refundSouthwest Airlines' contract only says it may rebook you, so there is no seat to demand — but it names a refund as your remedy.
Section 9.b(1)(i). Read from the contract on 2026-07-29. Source
The federal floor, underneath any contract
Statutory minimums, so no airline's contract and no agency's terms can go below them. They follow your itinerary rather than HOU, so each one is set out in full on its own tool:
How HOU compares with airports of its size
A late-departure rate means little on its own, so these are the airports sitting immediately either side of HOU on the same table. Each figure is the share of departures leaving more than fifteen minutes behind schedule, from the same Department of Transportation filing.
Which airlines run late out of HOU
Departures from HOU as filed with the US Department of Transportation, worst first. Only carriers with at least 300 departures in the month appear, so a carrier missing from this table flies here too thinly to measure fairly rather than perfectly.
| Airline | Departures | Over 15 min late | Carrier delay + late-arriving aircraft |
|---|---|---|---|
| Southwest Airlines | 4,246 | 28.4% | 80.1% |
The last column is the share of filed delay minutes coded as carrier delay or late-arriving aircraft, as opposed to extreme weather or air traffic control. It records how the minutes were filed, not who was at fault. Each airline guide carries that carrier's national record; the accountability index sets out why late inbound aircraft is grouped with carrier delay, and publishes the whole table as a downloadable file.
Figures cover May 2026, a single reporting month, from the US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics On-Time Performance database. Retrieved 2026-07-28. Reporting under 14 CFR part 234 covers domestic US scheduled service only, so no international route appears — including anything to or from Mexico.
Airlines based at HOU
Carriers based here, which usually means more non-stops and more daily frequencies to fall back on if something goes wrong.
Stuck on hold?
Talk to an independent agent instead
Airline phone queues and chatbots are where a rebooking stalls. Our agents work these routes daily and will look at what is actually available, walk through the letter you are about to send, and tell you what a desk agent will and will not do. We are not the airline and we do not file claims for you — the templates above are yours to send.