The Best Day for Empty Leg Flights: Sunday Beats Tuesday by 30%, According to 556,121 Listings

Empty legs are not spread evenly across the week. Across 556,121 empty leg listings on the SkyAccess marketplace over the trailing 12 months, Sunday departures outnumber Tuesday departures by roughly 30 percent, and the same gap shows up almost identically when we cut the data to US departures only. If you are hunting for a seat, the calendar shapes the board.

This is part of SkyAccess Data & Research, our ongoing series built on what the marketplace actually lists rather than what the industry assumes. The question this time is simple: which day of the week do empty legs fly?

The key numbers

• 556,121 empty leg listings analyzed, departures from August 27, 2025 through August 27, 2026, pulled September 2, 2026
• Sunday is the busiest day: 87,536 departures, the top of the week
• Tuesday is the floor: 67,533 departures, the quietest day
• The spread is about 30 percent: 29.6 percent more Sunday legs than Tuesday legs across all listings, and 30.5 percent in the US-departures cut
• Friday is the number two day at 86,237 departures, just behind Sunday

The shape of the week

Lay the seven days side by side and the week has a clear silhouette: a Friday crest, a Sunday peak, a Monday tail that stays elevated, then a slide into a midweek trough that bottoms out on Tuesday before the cycle rebuilds.

Day	All empty legs	US departures
Monday	81,089	53,216
Tuesday	67,533	44,085
Wednesday	69,883	46,942
Thursday	81,339	52,321
Friday	86,237	54,677
Saturday	82,504	50,844
Sunday	87,536	57,524

Sunday leads in both cuts. Across all listings, Sunday’s 87,536 departures run 29.6 percent above Tuesday’s 67,533. Restrict the view to US departures and the pattern holds almost exactly: 57,524 Sunday legs against 44,085 Tuesday legs, a gap of 30.5 percent. When a pattern survives a geographic cut this cleanly, it is structural, not noise.

One wrinkle in the US cut is worth noting: Saturday softens. In the all-legs view Saturday is the third-busiest day, but among US departures Monday and Thursday both edge past it. The Sunday peak and Tuesday floor, however, are identical in both views.

Why the week looks like this

Empty legs are byproducts. Every one of them exists because an aircraft flew a booked charter in one direction and needs to get somewhere else, usually back to base or onward to its next job. The weekly rhythm of empty legs is therefore the mirror image of the weekly rhythm of booked round trips.

Weekend round trips, out on Friday and home on Sunday, throw off repositioning flights at both ends, which is why the supply of empty legs crests on Friday and again on Sunday, with a Monday tail. By Tuesday the listing count bottoms out. From Thursday the count climbs again as the next weekend’s pattern builds.

What this means if you want a seat

The practical read is straightforward: flexibility toward the weekend is worth real supply. A traveler who can fly Sunday is choosing from roughly 30 percent more listed flights than one locked into Tuesday. Friday is nearly as rich. Midweek is not empty, but it is the thinnest part of the board.

Timing matters as much as the day itself. In our published lead-time analysis of 518,350 listings, the median empty leg appeared 3.2 days before takeoff, and about a quarter surfaced inside 24 hours. Put that together with the weekly shape and you get a useful rule of thumb: a Sunday board fills in from roughly Thursday, and it keeps filling right up to departure day.

That is also why alerts beat manual searching. A flight that appears Saturday for a Sunday departure will never be found by someone who searched on Wednesday. Setting a route alert on the SkyAccess empty leg board means the listing finds you the moment an operator posts it, which is exactly how the quarter of flights that appear inside 24 hours get caught.

For a broader view of how the board moved this season, the Empty Leg Index for September 2026 tracks the marketplace month by month.

A consistency check: Labor Day

Patterns are more trustworthy when independent snapshots agree. In our Labor Day 2026 snapshot, Friday was the biggest listed day of that holiday window, which lines up with the Friday crest in this 12-month view. The two views were computed independently.

Methodology

All figures are counts of empty leg listings on the SkyAccess marketplace with departures from August 27, 2025 through August 27, 2026, a trailing 12-month window, excluding deleted listings. Data was pulled on September 2, 2026. Each flight is assigned to a day of the week by its departure timestamp. The US-departures cut includes only legs departing from US locations. These are listing counts, not flown-flight counts from any external source, and this analysis makes no year-over-year comparison: the window is a single trailing year, so seasonal effects are contained within it but trends across years are out of scope.

SkyAccess is a real-time private jet and empty leg marketplace at skyaccess.com, listing 5,000+ live empty leg flights from a network of 900+ certified charter operators. This story is part of SkyAccess Data & Research.