How Much Does an Empty Leg Flight Cost? Real Prices From Live Inventory

On September 4, 2026 there were 4,565 empty leg flights published and bookable on SkyAccess with a price attached. The median price was $7,691. Prices are effectively all in US dollars — only two listings in the entire snapshot were priced in another currency.

The median on its own is close to useless for planning, because empty leg pricing is heavily skewed. The full distribution of that same 4,565: the cheapest listing was $478, the 10th percentile was $2,010, the 25th percentile $3,819, the median $7,691, the 75th percentile $14,438, the 90th percentile $25,460, and the most expensive single listing was $247,262. One listing in ten was under $2,010, and one in ten was over $25,460. Anyone quoting you a single average empty leg price is describing a distribution that is more than a hundred times wide at the edges.

Two things this figure is not. It is not a national or global market average — it is what one marketplace had listed on one day, and inventory turns over continuously, so the same query next month will return a different number. And it is a snapshot of what was offered, not of what was booked; the price a listing carries is the price it was published at, which is not the same thing as a clearing price. We report the offered price because that is the number we can actually stand behind.

The price shown on a SkyAccess empty leg is the base fare plus the service fee, and those two components add up to the total you see. Estimated taxes are displayed as a separate line rather than folded into the headline number. That is worth knowing before you compare our number to anyone else's, because a base-fare-only figure and an all-in figure are not the same quantity and the gap between them is not small.

The costs that sit outside almost any charter price, empty leg or not, are the ones that vary by trip rather than by aircraft: catering beyond the operator's standard package, de-icing in winter, international customs, handling and overflight charges, and ground transport at either end. Ask the operator for the complete add-on list in writing before you book. On a discounted leg the add-ons are a larger proportion of the total than they would be on a retail charter, simply because the base is smaller.

When you are comparing two listings on two different sites, the only comparison that means anything is total-to-total. Get both quotes to the same definition — everything the operator will invoice, taxes included — before you decide one is cheaper.

Turboprops and very light jets are the entry point. Across 607 live turboprop legs the median was $2,945, with the middle half between $2,010 and $4,192. Across 244 very light jet legs the median was $2,903, middle half $2,010 to $4,690. These two categories are where the sub-$3,000 private flight actually exists, and they made up nearly a fifth of live inventory.

Light jets are the deepest category in the market. 1,167 live legs, median $6,164, middle half $3,753 to $10,050. Midsize jets came in at 624 legs, median $7,102, middle half $4,947 to $13,107. Those two categories alone were 39% of everything available, which is why they are usually the realistic answer for a small-group trip on a popular corridor.

At the larger end, super-midsize showed 603 legs with a median of $13,400 and a middle half of $8,490 to $22,211. Heavy jets showed 590 legs, median $11,926, middle half $8,844 to $21,424. Ultra-long-range aircraft were the smallest and most expensive group: 262 legs, median $30,430, with the top quarter of listings above $69,401.

One caveat on the table above, because it matters for how you read it. Those seven categories cover 4,097 of the 4,565 priced listings. The remaining 468 were 351 listings whose aircraft carries no category on its record, 106 airliner-class aircraft, and 11 piston aircraft. We have left them out of the per-category figures rather than quietly folding them into a neighboring row.

Read the category table in order and one row is out of place: the median heavy jet leg, at $11,926, was cheaper than the median super-midsize leg at $13,400. Every published pricing guide in this industry, including the ones that present pricing as a clean ladder from turboprop to ultra-long-range, would tell you that cannot happen.

It happens because you are not buying an aircraft category, you are buying a specific leg, and the legs in those two categories were not the same length. In the same snapshot, the median heavy jet leg was 65 minutes of flight time over 386 nautical miles. The median super-midsize leg was 86 minutes over 585 nautical miles — about a third longer in time and half again in distance. A shorter trip on a bigger aircraft can cost less than a longer trip on a smaller one, and in our live inventory it routinely did.

The practical consequence is that aircraft category is a weak predictor of what an individual empty leg costs. It sets a floor on the hourly economics and a ceiling on how many people fit, but the leg length, the route and the operator's own position drive the number you actually pay. Filter by the trip you want, then look at what turns up, rather than deciding on a category first and assuming the price follows.

The United States is the bulk of the market and sets the baseline: 3,414 of the 4,565 priced listings departed from a US airport, with a median of $6,253 and a middle half of $3,350 to $12,121. That is meaningfully below the global median, which means the worldwide figure of $7,691 is being pulled up by non-US inventory.

United Kingdom departures were the clearest example. 172 live legs departed from a UK airport, with a median of $13,301 and a middle half of $7,629 to $27,952 — roughly double the US median at every point in the distribution. We have not measured why, and we are not going to guess at it in print: the difference could be aircraft mix, leg length, operating cost base, or simply which operators list with us in that market. What we can say is that if you are searching for empty legs from the UK, the US price expectations you have picked up online are not the right anchor.

Other markets with enough live inventory to report: Canada, 114 legs, median $9,412; Germany, 103 legs, median $8,314; France, 88 legs, median $9,736. Treat all four non-US figures with the caution a sample in the low hundreds deserves. They describe our inventory in those countries on one day, not those national markets.

The standard claim in this industry is up to 75% off retail charter. We went looking for that number in our own data and could not honestly produce it, so here is what we found instead and exactly what it does and does not cover.

The comparison we can make cleanly is the rate card on a single aircraft: for the same tail, the hourly rate band the operator authorizes for empty legs against that same aircraft's retail charter rate. Across 1,246 active aircraft that publish both, the gap at the top of the empty leg band was a median of 7%, with a middle half of 0% to 20%. At the bottom of the empty leg band the median gap was 25%.

The uncomfortable part of that result is worth stating plainly: 521 of those 1,246 aircraft — 41.8% — have an empty leg ceiling rate at or above their own retail charter rate. On a rate-card basis, four aircraft in ten show no discount at all. A discount on an empty leg is not automatic, and if you assume one you will overpay on a meaningful share of listings.

Now the reason 7–25% is a floor rather than the answer. It compares hourly rates, and an hourly rate comparison structurally omits the single biggest reason empty legs are cheaper: on a retail charter you pay for the positioning flights that bring the aircraft to you and take it home again, and on an empty leg you do not. It also flatters retail, because for 9,056 of 9,225 aircraft in our records the retail hourly rate is not an all-in figure — fuel surcharge, landing and handling fees and taxes sit on top of it, so real retail is higher than the number in that comparison. Both effects push the same way: the true saving on a real trip is larger than 7–25%.

How much larger, we do not know, and we are not going to publish a number we cannot defend. Doing it properly needs matched on-demand charter quotes on the same routes and dates as live empty legs, and we do not currently hold that dataset. Until we do, treat 7–25% as a measured floor, treat the 41.8% with no rate-card discount as the real warning, and price-check every individual listing against a retail quote for your own trip rather than trusting a headline percentage from anybody, us included.

This is the most repeated piece of empty leg advice there is, and our data gives a more complicated answer than the advice does. Looking at August 2026, we found 605 flights we could observe at both roughly 20 days out and roughly 1 day out. 84.6% of them fell in price, with a median drop of 16.5% and a 90th percentile drop of 37.1%.

We are not publishing that as the headline, because the selection check kills it. 512 of those 605 flights — 84.6%, almost exactly matching the share that fell — were flights under a dynamic pricing policy that reduces the price as departure approaches. For the 93 flights in the sample that were not dynamically priced, the median change over the same window was −0.6%. In other words, prices fell because a pricing rule lowered them, not because empty legs organically cheapen as they age.

There is a second reason to hold this loosely: only 605 of the 53,816 distinct flights in that window could be paired at both observation points at all, about 1.1%. That is a small and non-random slice. The honest reading is that on the flights where we apply dynamic pricing, waiting does tend to lower the price, and on the flights where we do not, it mostly does not. Which of those you are looking at is not something you can tell from the listing.

The real constraint on empty leg pricing is not how much you pay, it is how long the option exists. Across 135,664 legs from one supply feed between April and July 2026, the median gap between a leg appearing and its departure was 4.9 days, with 60.4% of legs departing within a week of first being listed. A second, independent feed covering June to September 2026 and 31,372 legs agreed closely: median 5.8 days, 57.0% inside a week. Whatever else empty leg inventory is, it is not something you plan a quarter around.

Shelf life is shorter still. Of 30,707 legs tracked on one feed, the median time a listing remained in the feed was 1.1 days, with 45.9% gone within a day and 74.2% gone within three. The other feed, over 122,090 legs, showed a median of 1.6 days, with 62.2% gone within three days. We checked whether that was an artifact of how we archive records rather than a real market behavior, and it is not: listings leave the feed continuously, across 16 to 24 distinct hours of every day, at a steady rate through the period.

One precision that matters. A listing leaving the feed does not mean it sold. It means it is no longer available — it may have been booked, or cancelled, or withdrawn by the operator, or the originating trip that created it may have changed. We can measure that it disappeared. We cannot measure why, and no honest page should tell you otherwise. What it means for your budget is straightforward: the cheap listing you are thinking about is more likely than not to be gone in a couple of days, and waiting for that specific price to fall further is usually a way of losing the listing rather than a way of paying less.

Start by placing the listing in the distribution. If a leg is quoted under $3,819 it sits in the cheapest quarter of what we had live; above $14,438 it is in the most expensive quarter. Then narrow to the category: a light jet at $6,000 is roughly at that category's median, while a light jet at $11,000 is above its 75th percentile and needs a reason — a long leg, a scarce route, a premium airframe.

Then get a retail quote for the identical trip on the same aircraft category and date. Given that 41.8% of aircraft show no rate-card discount at all, this is the only step that tells you whether the specific listing in front of you is a deal. If the empty leg is not clearly below the retail quote once both numbers are stated all-in, the discount you assumed is not there.

Finally, check the length of the leg, not just the aircraft on it. Because leg length drives price more reliably than category does — clearly enough that heavy jets showed a lower median than super-midsize in our inventory — the useful comparison between two listings is price against flight time and distance, not price against the aircraft's name.