The Best Day for Empty Leg Flights: Sunday Beats Tuesday by 29%, According to 453,778 Flights

Empty legs are not spread evenly across the week. SkyAccess analyzed 453,778 flights posted over the trailing 12 months, and Sunday departures outnumber Tuesday departures by roughly 29 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?

Updated September 30, 2026: each unique flight is counted once; duplicates have been removed.

The key numbers

• 453,778 flights analyzed (each unique leg counted once), departures from August 27, 2025 through August 27, 2026, data pulled September 2, 2026
• Sunday is the busiest day: 72,034 departures, the top of the week
• Tuesday is the floor: 56,027 departures, the quietest day
• The spread is about 29 percent: 28.6 percent more Sunday legs than Tuesday legs across all listings, and 29.2 percent in the US-departures cut
• Friday is the number two day at 69,778 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	65,940	46,341
Tuesday	56,027	38,775
Wednesday	59,971	41,444
Thursday	66,156	45,995
Friday	69,778	48,265
Saturday	63,872	44,095
Sunday	72,034	50,092

Sunday leads in both cuts. Across all listings, Sunday’s 72,034 departures run 28.6 percent above Tuesday’s 56,027. Restrict the view to US departures and the pattern holds almost exactly: 50,092 Sunday legs against 38,775 Tuesday legs, a gap of 29.2 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 ranks fourth, 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 29 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, 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 and counting each unique leg once. 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 covers a single trailing year; seasonal effects are contained within it, so multi-year trend comparisons are out of scope.

SkyAccess is a live 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. The day-of-week pattern also differs by aircraft class; see which planes fly empty legs. Flying out of Southern California? See the best empty leg routes from Los Angeles.