We study the influence of an external magnetic field in the ground-state and thermal spin correlations on a hybrid spin electron ladder. The model captures some characteristics of spin ladders present in a class of superconducting ceramics. It includes localized Ising spins and decorating mobile electrons. Ferromagnetic exchange couplings are assumed between neighboring spins. We show that the quantum kinetics, promoted by the hopping of decorating electrons between the ladder legs, induces antiferromagnetic correlations and magnetic frustration. The model is exactly solved using decoration–iteration transformation and transfer matrix techniques. In particular, we demonstrate that an external magnetic field promotes a reentrant character of the frustrated regime. The distinct ground-state orderings are also shown to be signaled by the magnetization curves as well as by the thermodynamic response functions.