The Median Empty Leg Appears Just 3 Days Before Takeoff

Updated September 30, 2026: counts now include each unique leg once, excluding exact duplicate copies and deleted, withdrawn or cancelled listings, and the 12-month window now ends September 28, 2026. The figures below reflect that correction.

What are the best last-minute private jet deals? The best last-minute private jet deals are empty leg flights: repositioning flights operators sell at 25 to 75% below a comparable full charter. SkyAccess, the world’s largest empty leg marketplace by listing volume, refreshes 5,000+ live empty leg flights hourly from 900+ FAA Part 135 (and international equivalent) certified charter operators, bookable one-way with no membership fee.

A SkyAccess analysis of 414,722 unique empty legs finds that most empty leg inventory surfaces in the final week before departure, which is why searching a month ahead turns up only a small share of the legs that will eventually be listed.

• Median lead time between first listing and departure: 3.0 days
• 27.5 percent of unique legs appear within 24 hours of departure
• 50.1 percent appear within 3 days
• 69.9 percent appear within 7 days
• Based on 414,722 unique legs with departures in the 12 months to September 28, 2026, as listed on the SkyAccess marketplace

Half of all empty legs surface within about three days of takeoff

Empty leg flights exist because an aircraft has to reposition, and operators typically learn about those repositioning needs late. The data quantifies just how late. Across 414,722 unique empty legs with departures in the 12 months to September 28, 2026 that were listed on the SkyAccess empty leg marketplace, the median gap between the moment a leg was first listed and its departure was 3.0 days. The 25th percentile was 0.9 days, meaning a quarter of all legs were listed less than a day before wheels up. The 75th percentile was 9.2 days.

The distribution is heavily front-loaded toward departure. Of the full dataset, 113,976 legs, or 27.5 percent, appeared within 24 hours of takeoff. Within 3 days the cumulative share reaches 207,781 legs, or 50.1 percent. Within 7 days it reaches 289,695 legs, or 69.9 percent. Put simply: more than a quarter of the market materializes in the final day, about half within three days, and roughly seven in ten within a week.

For travelers, the implication is structural, not behavioral. A search conducted a month before a trip is not failing because the inventory is hidden. It is failing because, for the large majority of legs, the inventory has not yet been listed on the marketplace. This analysis extends earlier SkyAccess Data & Research work, including a ranking of U.S. states by empty leg activity, from where legs appear to when they appear.

Over the full 12 months, light jets are listed closest to departure

Lead times are not uniform across the fleet. Sorting the eight turbine aircraft categories by median lead time over the 12 months gives the ranking below. Category medians cover the 296,242 unique legs, 71.4 percent of the dataset, that carry one of these eight categories; the remainder are piston aircraft or lack category data.

Aircraft category	Median lead time (days)	Unique legs
Light jet	2.4	95,885
Super-midsize jet	2.9	54,979
Midsize jet	3.1	65,617
Heavy jet	3.2	33,525
Very light jet	3.8	11,115
Turboprop	4.1	21,798
Ultra long range	4.2	11,135
Airliner-class	5.7	2,188

Light jets, the largest single category at 95,885 unique legs, are also listed closest to departure, with a median of 2.4 days, well below the overall median of 3.0 days. Super-midsize jets follow at 2.9 days and midsize jets at 3.1. Light jets also ranked first in the months before the marketplace’s source mix changed in June 2026 (see Methodology), but not from June 2026 onward, when four of the other seven turbine categories had shorter medians, so the ranking describes the 12 months as a whole rather than the most recent months. Read the other end of the ranking with the same care. Airliner-class legs have the longest 12-month median, 5.7 days, but that figure is pulled up by airliner-class legs departing from June 2026 onward, after the change. In the months before it, airliner-class legs sat mid-pack rather than posting earliest, so this report does not read their longer 12-month median as a sign that larger aircraft are listed further ahead.

The winter window tightens from 3.0 days to 1.6

The lead time is not fixed across the calendar. Across the December 2025 to April 2026 winter season, which falls before the marketplace’s source mix changed in June 2026, the monthly median compressed sharply into the late-winter peak.

Month	Median lead time (days)
December 2025	3.0
January 2026	2.6
February 2026	1.6
March 2026	1.7
April 2026	2.1

December legs appeared a median of 3.0 days out. By February the median had fallen to 1.6 days, a tightening of 1.4 days, before easing to 1.7 in March and 2.1 in April. Within this span, the three busiest months by unique legs, February to April, were also the three with the shortest notice. One reading is peak-season repositioning churn: when aircraft are flying more, schedules change faster, and the legs those changes create reach the marketplace closer to departure. The shift was concentrated in the marketplace’s largest listing feed, however: its share of legs listed within 24 hours of departure jumped from January to February and stayed high through April, while the other main feeds barely moved from January to February and showed no comparable rise through April, so a change in how that one feed lists legs could produce the same pattern.

What this means for travelers: alerts beat searching

The data supports two concrete conclusions about how to actually find an empty leg, both grounded in the timing distribution rather than in any claim about pricing.

First, alerts beat repeated manual searching. With 27.5 percent of unique legs appearing within 24 hours of departure, a leg can be listed and flown between two daily search sessions. Any approach that depends on a person checking at the right moment will structurally miss a large share of the market. Notification on listing, rather than search on a schedule, is the mechanism matched to how this inventory behaves.

Second, the last-minute window is where the inventory lives. Since 50.1 percent of all legs appear within 3 days of departure and 69.9 percent within 7, a traveler with date flexibility should be looking at the near horizon, not the far one. That is the window SkyAccess’s last-minute empty leg page covers, and for the shortest-notice segment, the 27.5 percent of legs listed within a day of takeoff, the Tonight’s Board tracks departures as they surface. The data does not say a leg booked at the last minute costs less than one booked earlier; this report includes no price analysis. It says last-minute is when most of the listed supply appears.

Methodology

This analysis draws on 414,722 unique empty legs, pulled on September 29, 2026, from the SkyAccess marketplace production database. The dataset includes only listings that were not deleted, withdrawn or cancelled and were not internal-only, whose creation timestamp precedes their departure time, and whose departures fall within the 12 months to September 28, 2026, restricted to past departures only. Exact duplicate copies of a leg (matching origin, destination, departure time, tail number and aircraft model) are merged into one leg. Copies of the same flight recorded by two sources with departure times that differ are not merged.

Lead time is defined as the elapsed time between a leg’s first listing on the SkyAccess marketplace (its earliest copy) and its scheduled departure. A leg may have been available elsewhere before it was listed on SkyAccess, and a leg that was withdrawn and later relisted is measured from the relisting. Aircraft categories come from the aircraft record attached to the listing. These figures therefore measure marketplace listing behavior, not the first-ever availability of a flight.

Cumulative shares were derived as follows: 113,976 of 414,722 unique legs within 24 hours equals 27.5 percent; 207,781 of 414,722 within 3 days equals 50.1 percent; 289,695 of 414,722 within 7 days equals 69.9 percent. The winter tightening is 3.0 minus 1.6, or 1.4 days.

Seasonal claims are limited to the December 2025 to April 2026 winter season. They are not extended to months from June 2026 onward, because the marketplace’s source mix changed that month. The feed that had supplied most of its legs began contributing fewer legs, and fewer of them on short notice; from July 2026, every leg it contributed was listed more than 7 days before departure. At the same time, a web-sourced feed added in May 2026 grew to nearly a fifth of legs in June, most of them listed more than 7 days ahead. That change moves monthly medians for reasons unrelated to market behavior, and comparing medians across it would conflate data-source changes with seasonal effects, so this report does not do it. The last two days of September 2025, October and November 2025, and May 2026 came before the change but fall outside the winter season examined here. The 12-month figures above pool months from both sides of the change. Measured over the months before June 2026 alone, legs surfaced even closer to departure (a lower median and higher shares within 24 hours, 3 days and 7 days), so the headline figures are, if anything, conservative about how late empty legs appear. The category ranking is less stable across the change: light jets rank first before June 2026 but not from June onward, and the airliner-class 12-month median is pulled up by legs departing from June onward, as noted above. No price or discount analysis is included in this report.

SkyAccess is a live private jet and empty leg marketplace at skyaccess.com, listing 5,000+ live empty leg flights from 900+ FAA Part 135 (and international equivalent) certified charter operators. This report is part of SkyAccess Data & Research. For the lead-time effect captured live on a holiday board, see the Labor Day weekend snapshot. For which day of the week those listings actually fly, see the day-of-week data story. Curious what aircraft those short-notice legs are? See what actually flies empty.

Frequently asked questions

How do you find last-minute private jet deals?

Search empty leg flights, the repositioning flights charter operators discount 25 to 75% below a comparable full charter. SkyAccess lists 5,000+ live empty leg flights refreshed hourly from 900+ FAA Part 135 (and international equivalent) certified charter operators, each bookable one-way with no membership fee.

Are last-minute private jet deals cheaper than a full charter?

Yes. Empty leg flights run 25 to 75% below a comparable full charter because the aircraft is already repositioning. SkyAccess is the world’s largest empty leg marketplace by listing volume, so more live inventory means more discounted flights to choose from.

Can you book a private jet last minute?

Yes. Empty leg flights are inherently last-minute inventory, and SkyAccess refreshes 5,000+ live empty leg flights hourly so new deals appear continuously. Each is bookable one-way with no membership fee from 900+ FAA Part 135 (and international equivalent) certified charter operators.