One in Four Empty Legs Is a Light Jet: What Actually Flies Empty
Ask someone to picture a private jet and they will describe a heavy or ultra-long-range cabin: the vast cabin from the brochures. Ask the empty leg board what actually flies empty and it gives a very different answer. We mapped 556,121 empty leg listings on the SkyAccess marketplace, covering departures from August 27, 2025 to August 27, 2026, to their aircraft categories. One in four is a light jet, and the big cabins people imagine are under a fifth of the board.
The key numbers
- 556,121 empty leg listings on the SkyAccess marketplace with departures between August 27, 2025 and August 27, 2026; 556,118 of them mapped to an aircraft category (data pulled September 3, 2026).
- One in four empty legs is a light jet: 139,002 listings, 25.0 percent of the board.
- The workhorse middle dominates. Light, midsize, and super-midsize jets together account for 372,483 listings, 67.0 percent of everything listed.
- Turboprops outnumber ultra-long-range jets: 48,137 turboprop legs against 37,351 ultra-long-range legs.
- Helicopters logged 21 legs. In an entire year. Across the whole marketplace.
The full board, by category
Here is every category on the SkyAccess marketplace for the trailing twelve months, ranked by listing count.
| Aircraft category | Empty leg listings | Share of board |
|---|---|---|
| Light jet | 139,002 | 25.0% |
| Midsize jet | 128,328 | 23.1% |
| Super-midsize jet | 105,153 | 18.9% |
| Heavy jet | 63,505 | 11.4% |
| Turboprop | 48,137 | 8.7% |
| Ultra-long-range jet | 37,351 | 6.7% |
| Very light jet | 24,226 | 4.4% |
| Airliner/bizliner | 7,719 | 1.4% |
| Piston | 2,676 | 0.5% |
| Helicopter | 21 | 0.004% |
A few things jump out. Turboprops, which rarely feature in anyone’s mental image of private aviation, put more legs on the board than ultra-long-range jets: 48,137 against 37,351. Heavy and ultra-long-range jets combined, the cabins that define the category in popular imagination, add up to 18.1 percent of listings, under a fifth of the board. And helicopters are a rounding error: 21 legs across a full year of 556,121 listings.
The workhorse middle
The story of the empty leg board is the middle of the size range. Light jets (25.0 percent), midsize jets (23.1 percent), and super-midsize jets (18.9 percent) together account for 372,483 listings, 67.0 percent of everything on the marketplace over the trailing twelve months.
The mechanism is straightforward: empty legs are the charter fleet in motion, seen from the repositioning side. An empty leg exists because an aircraft flew a paying trip one way and needs to get somewhere else, so the mix of aircraft flying empty mirrors the mix of aircraft flying charter. Light and midsize jets do the short regional round trips that dominate charter flying, which means they generate the repositioning flights that dominate the empty leg board too. Two out of three empty legs come from this workhorse middle because that is where the flying happens.
The speed of the board, by cabin size
Category also shapes how much warning you get. Our published analysis of when empty leg flights appear on the board found that super-midsize jets have the shortest median lead time at 2.8 days between listing and departure, with midsize jets at 2.9 days and light jets at 3.3 days. Ultra-long-range jets give the most notice, at a median of 4.0 days.
Put the two datasets together and the picture sharpens: the categories that dominate the board are also the ones that move through it fastest. The super-midsize segment, nearly a fifth of all listings, turns over in under three days at the median. If you are watching for a specific leg in the workhorse middle, the window between appearance and departure is short.
What this means if you are booking
Set your expectations to the data, not the stock photo. If you go looking for an empty leg, what you will realistically find is a light, midsize, or super-midsize jet: two out of three listings sit in that band. Heavy and ultra-long-range cabins do appear, over 100,000 legs a year between them, but holding out exclusively for a big cabin means ignoring most of the board. Flexibility on cabin class is the single biggest lever you control: the workhorse middle alone offers well over three times the inventory of heavy and ultra-long-range jets combined (67.0 percent versus 18.1 percent).
Three practical moves follow. First, set alerts on the live empty leg board rather than checking manually, because the median leg in the dominant categories is gone within about three days of appearing. Second, time your search: our data on the best day for empty leg flights shows the board has a weekly rhythm worth planning around. Third, watch the broader market pulse in our monthly Empty Leg Index, which tracks how the board is shifting month to month.
Methodology
This analysis covers 556,121 empty leg listings on the SkyAccess marketplace with departure dates from August 27, 2025 to August 27, 2026, excluding deleted listings. Data was pulled on September 3, 2026. All counts refer to SkyAccess marketplace listings, not industry-wide activity.
Categories come from each listing’s aircraft model record, which is populated on effectively every listing: 556,118 of 556,121 mapped to a category. Readers of our lead-time analysis may recall that it reported category medians for 67.5 percent of its dataset; that analysis attributed category through the tail-assigned aircraft record, which roughly two-thirds of listings carry, while the model-level mapping used here covers effectively all listings. The category shares in this piece are therefore the more complete view of the board’s composition.
This is a single-window snapshot of the trailing twelve months. We make no year-over-year comparisons, and this piece makes no claims about pricing, aircraft specifications, or fleet sizes; it describes listing composition only. This story is part of SkyAccess Data & Research, our ongoing series built on marketplace data.
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.
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