The Median Empty Leg Appears Just 3.2 Days Before Takeoff

A SkyAccess analysis of 518,350 marketplace listings finds that most empty leg inventory surfaces in the final week before departure, which is why searching a month ahead so often turns up nothing.

• Median lead time between listing and departure: 3.2 days
• 25.6 percent of listings appear within 24 hours of departure
• 48.2 percent appear within 3 days
• 68.4 percent appear within 7 days
• Based on 518,350 SkyAccess marketplace listings with departures in the trailing 12 months

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 listing data quantifies just how late. Across 518,350 empty leg listings on the SkyAccess marketplace with departures in the trailing 12 months, the median gap between the moment a leg was listed and its departure was 3.2 days. The 25th percentile was 1.0 day, meaning a quarter of all legs were listed a day or less before wheels up. The 75th percentile was 10.2 days.

The distribution is heavily front-loaded toward departure. Of the full dataset, 132,797 listings, or 25.6 percent, appeared within 24 hours of takeoff. Within 3 days the cumulative share reaches 249,776 listings, or 48.2 percent. Within 7 days it reaches 354,554 listings, or 68.4 percent. Put simply: a quarter of the market materializes in the final day, roughly half within about three days, and two-thirds 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.

Super-midsize jets move fastest; airliner-class legs post earliest

Lead times are not uniform across the fleet. Sorting the eight aircraft categories by median lead time shows a spread from 2.8 days to 5.1 days. Category medians cover the 349,777 listings, 67.5 percent of the dataset, that carry a mapped aircraft category; the remainder lack category data.

Aircraft category	Median lead time (days)	Listings
Super-midsize jet	2.8	70,295
Midsize jet	2.9	68,004
Heavy jet	3.2	36,937
Light jet	3.3	127,567
Very light jet	3.7	11,434
Turboprop	3.9	21,405
Ultra long range	4.0	11,938
Airliner-class	5.1	2,197

Super-midsize jets are the fastest-moving inventory on the marketplace, with a median of 2.8 days, and midsize jets are close behind at 2.9. Light jets, the largest single category at 127,567 listings, sit near the overall median at 3.3 days. At the other end, airliner-class legs post earliest, at a median of 5.1 days, a gap of 2.3 days over super-mids. The pattern is consistent with how these aircraft are scheduled: the categories that do the highest volume of short repositioning work generate legs on the shortest notice, while the largest aircraft fly itineraries that are planned further out.

The winter window tightens from 4.8 days to 1.8

The lead time is not fixed across the calendar. Within the December 2025 to April 2026 span, the only window where marketplace coverage was consistent enough for month-to-month comparison, the monthly median compressed sharply as the winter travel peak intensified.

Month	Median lead time (days)
December 2025	4.8
January 2026	2.9
February 2026	1.8
March 2026	2.0
April 2026	2.4

December legs appeared a median of 4.8 days out. By February the median had fallen to 1.8 days, a tightening of 3.0 days, before easing to 2.0 in March and 2.4 in April. This is consistent with 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 practical takeaway is that the busiest months for empty legs are also the months when they appear on the shortest notice.

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 25.6 percent of listings 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 48.2 percent of all legs appear within 3 days of departure and 68.4 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 quarter of legs listed within a day of takeoff, the Tonight’s Board tracks departures as they surface. The data does not say last-minute booking is better or cheaper. It says last-minute is when most of the listed supply appears.

Methodology

This analysis draws on 518,350 empty leg listings from the SkyAccess marketplace production database, pulled on 2026-08-27. The dataset includes only listings that were not deleted, whose creation timestamp precedes their departure time, and whose departures fall within the trailing 12 months, restricted to past departures only.

Lead time is defined as the elapsed time between a listing’s creation on the SkyAccess marketplace and its scheduled departure. A leg may have been available elsewhere before it was listed on SkyAccess, and a relisted leg resets the clock. These figures therefore measure marketplace listing behavior, not the first-ever availability of a flight.

Cumulative shares were derived as follows: 132,797 of 518,350 listings within 24 hours equals 25.6 percent; 249,776 of 518,350 within 3 days equals 48.2 percent; 354,554 of 518,350 within 7 days equals 68.4 percent. The category gap cited above is 5.1 minus 2.8, or 2.3 days. The winter tightening is 4.8 minus 1.8, or 3.0 days.

Seasonal claims are limited to the December 2025 to April 2026 window. Months outside that span are excluded because the marketplace’s coverage composition shifted over the year as longer-horizon feed imports were added, which moves monthly medians for reasons unrelated to market behavior. Comparing medians across coverage eras would conflate data-source changes with seasonal effects, so this report does not do it. No price or discount analysis is included in this report.

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