Frontier Group Holdings, Inc. (ULCC) Stock Analysis
Frontier Group Holdings, Inc.
▾ What's in the 30/100 risk score? (higher = riskier)
Contributions (weight × component score) sum to the total. This near-term score now includes fundamental health (leverage, FCF trend). It excludes the the Altman Z score, whose retained-earnings input this filer does not report separately, which relies on a proxied (estimated) input. See the Financial Health section for the full balance-sheet read.
How to read ULCC (pre-profit growth)
This company is reinvesting instead of generating profit, so a standard DCF cannot price it. The useful question is whether the growth the market is paying for is achievable — and whether the company can fund itself until then.
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Reverse-DCF — the growth the price demands ↓
It shows exactly how fast the business must grow to justify today's price. Compare that to what comparable companies have actually achieved.
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Cash runway ↓
Can it reach profitability before it has to raise money and dilute shareholders?
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Interactive calculator ↓
Set your own growth + margin assumptions and see what the business would be worth if you are right.
The share count we read for ULCC looks wrong — common for multi-class / founder-controlled filers that report shares per share-class. That makes per-share figures (including intrinsic value) misleading, so we suppressed them. The company's total financials below are sound.
What to use instead: Lean on the totals — revenue, net income, cash flow — and the balance sheet. Multi-class share counts are being corrected; once fixed, the per-share valuation returns automatically.
This note is only about the single DCF fair-value number — ULCC's full financial statements, health scores, and written analysis are all below.
⚠ We found only 2 genuine same-industry (Airlines) comparables — fewer than the 4 we require for a reliable median. The 8 names in the table below therefore include 6 broader Industrials names marked fallback, whose business models and margins differ — which is why any median below is computed over that wider set, not over true comparables. So we do not derive a peer-implied share value here. Read the multiples as rough context only.
How does ULCC stack up against its closest peers?
Ideally we compare ULCC only to same-industry peers, but too few exist in our universe right now, so the basket below mixes in broader-sector names. Treat the multiples as rough context, not a valuation. For a leveraged business, EV/EBIT and FCF yield (both in the table) are usually more reliable than EV/Sales, because revenue multiples ignore differences in margins and debt.
▾ What's "EV / Sales" in plain English?
EV (Enterprise Value) = market cap + total debt − cash. It's "what you'd pay to buy the entire company outright" — you pay the market cap to shareholders and take over their debt, but you keep their cash. EV is fairer than market cap alone because it includes the debt the new owner inherits.
EV / Sales = EV ÷ annual revenue. So "2.5×" means investors pay $2.50 of enterprise value per $1 of yearly sales. Higher = market is paying more per dollar of sales (usually because they expect future growth or fat margins).
p25 / median / p75 are the 25th, 50th (middle), and 75th percentile of the peers' multiples. Half the peers fall between p25 and p75. The median (p50) is the typical peer — that's the benchmark we compare to.
| EV / SalesEV / Sales — For every $1 of yearly revenue, this is how many dollars investors pay to own the whole business (including debt). Why it matters: Works for pre-profit growth companies where P/E and FCF don't apply. The most apples-to-apples cross-company multiple because it ignores accounting choices. Reference: 1–3x for mature companies · 4–10x for software/SaaS · 10–20x for hypergrowth · >20x is rare and demanding Full explanation → |
1.2x / 1.8x / 3.0x |
| EV / Gross ProfitEV / Gross Profit — Enterprise value divided by gross profit — the multiple paid for what each dollar of sales contributes after direct costs. Why it matters: More refined than EV/Sales for high-margin businesses (software, marketplaces) where gross margin is the real economic engine. Reference: 8–15x for SaaS · 15–25x for hypergrowth software · >30x demanding Full explanation → |
3.0x / 5.9x / 14.0x |
| EV / EBITEV / EBITDA — Enterprise value divided by earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization. Why it matters: A classic "what would a private buyer pay" multiple — used in M&A. Strips out tax and capital-structure noise. Reference: 8–12x for mature businesses · 15–25x for growth · Below 5x often signals distress Full explanation → |
13.3x / 20.8x / 32.2x |
Bold middle number = median peer. Half the peers trade above it, half below. Computed over 8 peers (broad — see caveat); implausible multiples excluded.
⚠️ Important caveat: peer multiples only work if the peers are genuinely comparable. Always check the peer list below — if the auto-picker grabbed micro-caps or unrelated businesses, the comparison is noise. A medical-device giant priced against tiny biotech startups won't produce a useful signal.
▾ View peer list (8)
| Ticker | Company | Industry | Mcap | EV/Sales | EV/GP | EV/EBIT | FCF Yield |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| JBLU | JETBLUE AIRWAYS CORP | Airlines | $2.0B | 0.2x | — | — | 7.7% |
| RJET | REPUBLIC AIRWAYS HOLDINGS INC. | Airlines | $953M | 1.5x | — | 11.8x | 15.6% |
| TNC | TENNANT CO | Refrigeration & Service In ·fallback | $1.5B | 1.2x | 3.0x | 21.5x | 2.1% |
| TRS | TRIMAS CORP | Metal Forgings & Stampings ·fallback | $1.5B | 3.0x | 14.0x | 47.0x | 3.4% |
| ALGT | Allegiant Travel CO | Air Transportation, Schedu ·fallback | $1.7B | 1.5x | — | 13.3x | 10.7% |
| WLDN | Willdan Group, Inc. | Engineering Services ·fallback | $1.4B | 2.1x | 5.6x | 32.2x | 4.3% |
| HTZ | HERTZ GLOBAL HOLDINGS, INC | Auto Rental & Leasing ·fallback | $1.7B | 7.0x | — | — | 89.8% |
| XPEL | XPEL, Inc. | Coating, Engraving & Allie ·fallback | $1.3B | 2.6x | 6.3x | 20.1x | 4.8% |
Quality & solvency checks
Cheap stocks can be cheap for a reason. These screens warn when a low valuation comes paired with structural fragility.
Why it matters: Cheap-looking stocks (low P/E or P/B) often have low Z-scores because the market knows the company is dying. Z-score warns you before you fall into a value trap.
Reference: > 3.0 = safe zone · 1.81–3.0 = grey zone · < 1.81 = distress zone
Full explanation →
We can't produce a trustworthy Altman Z here: retained earnings weren't separately reported in our data, so a core input would have to be fabricated. Rather than show a categorical "distress" verdict from an invented number, we mark it unavailable. Judge financial health from the leverage, cash position, and the measurable Piotroski checks instead.
Read with caution for this industry. Automakers (and airlines) run a large captive finance arm, which inflates total assets and liabilities and depresses Altman Z — it routinely reads "distress" even for investment-grade names with full access to capital markets. Treat it as one input, not a literal bankruptcy probability. Weigh it against the company's cash position, near-term debt maturities, and where it sits in the economic cycle.
▾ The checks — what passed, what didn't (and what we couldn't measure)
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✗ Positive net incomeNet income -$137.0M in the latest year.Why this matters: Does the company actually earn a profit? Sustained losses eventually force it to raise money — diluting you — or take on debt.
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✗ Positive operating cash flowOperating cash flow -$525.0M (was -$82.0M the prior year).Why this matters: Profit can be an accounting figure; cash from running the business is harder to fake. Negative operating cash flow means the core business consumes cash and must be funded externally.
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✗ Cash flow backs up reported profitOperating cash flow -$525.0M vs net income -$137.0M.Why this matters: When cash generated exceeds reported earnings, profits are high-quality (not propped up by accruals or one-time items).
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✗ Return on assets improvingReturn on assets -1.9% vs 1.4% a year ago.Why this matters: Is the company squeezing more profit out of each dollar of assets than last year? Rising = getting more efficient; falling = the opposite.
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✗ Debt load (vs assets)Long-term debt is 8.6% of assets vs 3.9% a year ago ($620.0M now).Why this matters: Rising debt relative to assets means more risk and more cash going to interest instead of shareholders. Falling debt is a sign of strengthening.
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✗ Short-term liquidity (current ratio)Current ratio 0.46x vs 0.53x a year ago — below 1.0, a caution flag.Why this matters: The current ratio compares assets it can turn to cash within a year against bills due within a year. Below 1.0 means it may struggle to cover near-term obligations.
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✗ Share count (dilution)Share count rose 0.6% (226.5M → 227.8M year-over-year).Why this matters: Issuing lots of new shares splits the pie into more pieces, shrinking your slice. Stable or falling share count protects existing owners.
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· Pricing power (gross margin) (n/a — data not reported; not scored)
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✗ Sales per asset (asset turnover)Asset turnover 0.52x vs 0.61x a year ago.Why this matters: Asset turnover measures how much revenue each dollar of assets generates. Rising = more productive use of the asset base.
Missing data is never counted as a pass or a fail — it's shown as n/a and excluded from the denominator. Each check compares the company against its own prior year.
Plain English: the company holds about $671M in cash and is burning roughly $525M/year in operations. At that pace, the cash lasts 15 mo before it must raise capital (diluting shareholders), take on debt, or cut spending.
Assumes constant burn and ignores financing/asset sales. For pre-profit biotech and growth companies, this matters more than a DCF — a great drug pipeline is worthless if they run out of money before approval.
What if you assume different inputs?
Here's where we land — and what happens if you change the assumptions. Drag the sliders to set your own Discount RateDiscount Rate — The annual return you demand for taking single-stock risk instead of buying a safe Treasury or index fund.
Why it matters: Higher discount rate = stricter valuation (a stock has to produce more cash to be worth holding). Lower = more generous.
Reference: 8–12% is standard · 9–10% matches S&P 500 historical return · Below 7% is illogical for single-stock risk
Full explanation → (the annual return you demand for single-stock risk) and terminal growth; the value updates live so you can see whether the stock looks cheaper or richer. The discount rate starts at 10.0%, the figure our model used for ULCC. Open Advanced to also change beta, growth and the rate path.
Note: no headline intrinsic value is published for this stock (the valuation is held for a data-quality reason — see the notes above). The calculator below is a what-if tool: the values it produces are your assumptions played out, not our estimate.
A full intrinsic value isn't shown for ULCC because the valuation is currently held for a data-quality reason (see the guardrail notes above). The reverse-DCF reading still works — it needs only the price and cash flow — but we won't publish a forward value until the underlying data passes our checks.
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⚙ Advanced — tinker with every input (beta, growth, rate path, margin → full intrinsic value)
A standard discounted cash flowDCF — Discounted Cash Flow — sums up all future cash a business will produce, adjusted for the fact that future dollars are worth less than dollars today.
Why it matters: It is the most fundamentally honest valuation method when applicable — but only works for companies with predictable, positive cash flow.
Reference: Best for: mature, profitable businesses. Fails for: pre-profit growth, banks, REITs.
Full explanation → valuation is not meaningful for Frontier Group Holdings, Inc. because its operating cash flow has been negative in the latest period and only positive in 1 out of the last 5 years, indicating a cash-burning operational profile. Investors are likely focused on the company's revenue growth, which has been 16% annually over the last four years, betting on its ability to achieve sustained profitability and positive cash flow in the future. The #1 quantifiable risk is the current ratio of 0.46, indicating current liabilities significantly exceed liquid assets.
As of 2 months ago
Anatomy of a share
What you're buying per share. Bars are at the same scale so you can see the relative size of revenue, costs, cash flow, and debt — not just read them in a table.
What's free cash flow / what do these mean?
Revenue per share — how much the business earns from customers, divided by the number of shares outstanding. Top of the income statement.
Earnings per share — profit left after operating costs, interest, and taxes, per share. Two versions appear on this page and are not interchangeable: GAAP diluted EPS uses the company's weighted-average diluted share count during the reporting period (this is the "earnings" in "price-to-earnings"); net income per current share divides annual net income by today's share count. They differ whenever the share count has changed.
Owner-earnings free cash flow per share — the cash the business produces for shareholders. Savng's owner-earnings FCF subtracts capital expenditures and stock-based compensation from operating cash flow (SBC is a real dilution cost even though it's non-cash). This is deliberately more conservative than "standard" FCF, which subtracts only capital expenditures — so our figure is lower than the headline FCF you'll see elsewhere. FCF funds dividends, buybacks, debt repayment, and acquisitions; a company can report positive earnings yet negative FCF.
Debt per share — total interest-bearing borrowings divided by shares. High debt-per-share next to thin FCF-per-share is a fragility signal.
What you actually need to decide
Every stock price is a disagreement. Here's the single thing that must go right for the bulls, the single thing that breaks the thesis, and the concrete signposts to watch so you can update your view as real results arrive.
- Consistent positive operating cash flow in future quarters
- Improvement in the current ratio above 1.0
- Continued revenue growth while achieving profitability
The trend, in plain numbers (2024 → 2025)
Straight from the financial statements — no model, no opinion. For a small or unprofitable company, the direction of these numbers usually tells you more than any single valuation.
Nothing clearly improving year-over-year.
- Revenue fell -1% to $3.72B.
- Free cash flow is negative at -$621.0M — the cash burn widened vs last year.
- Swung to a loss of -$137.0M (from a profit the prior year).
Management & Leadership
Barry Biffle serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Frontier Group Holdings, Inc., having held the position since 2016. William Franke is the Chairman of the Board, a prominent figure in the ultra-low-cost carrier sector. The executive team focuses on expanding the airline's network and maintaining its cost-efficient operations.
What They Make
Frontier Group Holdings, Inc. operates Frontier Airlines, an ultra-low-cost carrier providing passenger air transportation services. Its primary customers are leisure travelers and price-sensitive individuals seeking affordable air travel.
End Markets
Revenue Drivers
Why Is It Priced Like This?
Why Customers Pay
What we use instead: earnings (P/E, EV/EBIT), book value (P/B) — computed from the figures this company does report, shown in the sections below. Those numbers are unaffected by the missing cash-flow data.
The market is pricing ULCC based on expectations of future growth and its ability to eventually achieve consistent profitability and positive cash flow, given its 16% annual revenue growth over four years. However, the negative net income and operating cash flow in the latest period suggest the company is still in a growth phase that requires significant investment, making current cash flow less relevant for valuation.
Business Model & Valuation
How They Make Money
Normalized FCF
Cyclical/commodity sector (Airlines) with negative current FCF: normalized FCF uses multi-year median to smooth through the cycle.
Show advanced inputs
| RevenueGrowth | 16.0% |
| SectorDefault | 6.0% |
| BestEstimate | 13.0% |
| Method | blend(70% revenue_cagr, 30% sector) |
| GrowthBasis | total |
What this model does NOT do: this is a consolidated owner-earnings FCF model. Standalone segment assumptions: none. It does not project its revenue segments independently; their combined effect is embedded in the historical revenue and cash-flow trend the model extrapolates. The calculator above can only approximate a segment's impact through the single consolidated growth rate — it cannot model any one line separately. For a true segment-level view, build a separate model from the company's segment disclosures.
Maturity & Competitive Position
Moat Signals
Revenue is growing at 16%/yr over 4 years, from $2060M to $3724M.
Geography & Markets
Frontier Group Holdings, Inc. primarily operates within the United States, serving a broad network of domestic cities. It also offers flights to select international destinations in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America, though specific geographic revenue splits are not available.
Geographic Risks
Market Signals
These are timing signals, not value signals — they describe the stock's recent price behavior, not what the business is worth. Use them for the "the thesis looks good, but is now the moment?" question. Each tile below explains what it's saying.
Why it matters: Short-term contrarian indicator. Extreme readings often precede mean reversion, though not always.
Reference: 30–70 normal · >70 overbought · <30 oversold
Full explanation → (14)71.1OverboughtBought up hard recently — stretched; pullbacks are common from here.
Why it matters: When the fast line crosses above the slow line, short-term momentum is turning up; below, turning down. A timing cue, not a value signal.
Reference: Line above signal = bullish momentum · below = bearish
Full explanation →BullishLine above signalThe fast trend is above the slow trend — short-term momentum is currently upward.
Technicals describe price, not the business. A great company can have a "bearish" tape (a buying chance) and a weak one a "bullish" tape (a trap). Pair these with the valuation and health sections above.
QUALITY
Data Quality & Risk Flags (8 notes — click to expand/collapse)
Guardrail Notes (8)
- Cyclical sector: using normalized cash flow (median OCF minus estimated maintenance capex).
- Median OCF is negative — OCF-based normalization not applicable.
- Normalized OCF-capex was negative. Falling back to median raw FCF.
- No positive normalized FCF. Using EPS as proxy.
- Model implies no positive equity value under these assumptions. Valuation is speculative/low-confidence.
- Illiquidity discount 7% applied (small/micro-cap — harder to exit, demand a margin).
- Extreme valuation (P/IV 65.0538x, IV $0.09 vs price $6.05); output dominated by data/units issue (often a multi-class share-count mismatch). Suppressed.
- DATA UNAVAILABLE: per-share values suppressed due to missing/unreliable shares data.
FINANCIALS
Financial Statements (5-year tables — click to expand)
From Frontier Group Holdings, Inc.'s SEC filings (EDGAR).
Income (5yr)
| Year | Revenue | Net Income | EPS |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 3.7B | -137.0M | $-0.60 |
| 2024 | 3.8B | 85.0M | $0.37 |
| 2023 | 3.6B | -11.0M | $-0.05 |
| 2022 | 3.3B | -37.0M | $-0.17 |
| 2021 | 2.1B | -102.0M | $-0.48 |
Cash Flow (5yr)
| Year | Operating CF | CapEx | − SBC & adj. | Free Cash Flow |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | -525.0M | 75.0M | 21.0M | -621.0M |
| 2024 | -82.0M | 76.0M | 16.0M | -174.0M |
| 2023 | -261.0M | 51.0M | 14.0M | -326.0M |
| 2022 | -78.0M | 41.0M | 15.0M | -134.0M |
| 2021 | 216.0M | 27.0M | 11.0M | 178.0M |
How we define FCF: operating cash flow − capital expenditure − stock-based compensation (owner-earnings basis — SBC is a real cost to shareholders even though it's non-cash). Latest year: -525.0M − 75.0M − 21.0M (SBC & adj.) = -621.0M. This is the same owner-earnings FCF definition the valuation model uses, though the DCF's starting value is a normalized multi-year median, not this single year.
Balance Sheet
| Total Assets | 7.2B |
| Total Liabilities | 6.7B |
| Equity | 491.0M |
| Total Debt | 620.0M |
Similar companies worth a look
Same sector and industry, similar fundamentals shape. Verify everything yourself — this list is computed mechanically and does not reflect our judgment about whether any of these are a good investment.