Empty Leg vs On-Demand Charter: What You Trade for the Price

On an on-demand charter you specify the trip. You name the date, the departure time, the two airports and the aircraft category, and the operator builds a flight around your requirements. Nothing about the trip exists until you commission it, which is precisely what you are paying for.

On an empty leg you specify nothing. The aircraft is flying from one airport to another on roughly a given day because somebody else's paid booking put it there. Your choice is binary: take that flight as published, or don't. The operator is not being flexible for you and is not going to be — the routing and the timing were fixed the moment the originating customer signed.

So the honest framing of the discount is not that empty legs are private jets on sale. It is that you are buying a segment whose cost the operator has already committed and would otherwise fly with nobody on board. Anything they recover from you beats flying it empty. That is the entire economic engine, and it has a consequence people rarely spell out: when there is no committed cost to recover, there is no discount to give. We can show that in our own data, and we do, further down.

SkyAccess indexes 900+ certified charter operators. On September 4, 2026 the marketplace carried 4,565 live, published, priced empty legs. The median price was $7,691 all-in. A quarter of the book was under $3,819 and a quarter was over $14,438; the tenth percentile was $2,010 and the ninetieth was $25,460. Those are the buyer-facing totals — base fare plus service fee — not a starting rate that expands at checkout, though estimated taxes are shown to you separately.

Median price by aircraft category, from the same snapshot: turboprop $2,945 (607 legs), very light jet $2,903 (244), light jet $6,164 (1,167), midsize $7,102 (624), super-midsize $13,400 (603), heavy $11,926 (590), ultra-long-range $30,430 (262). Note that the ladder is not strictly monotonic — super-midsize legs came in above heavy legs in this snapshot — because each category flies a different mix of routes and stage lengths. Category is a good predictor of cabin, and only a rough predictor of price.

Geography matters more than most buyers expect. US-origin legs, which are three quarters of the book, had a median of $6,253 across 3,414 legs. UK-origin legs had a median of $13,301 across 172 legs — a much smaller book at roughly double the price. Canada sat at $9,412 (114 legs), Germany at $8,314 (103) and France at $9,736 (88). If you are searching empty legs from the UK or Europe, budget against those numbers rather than against the global median.

These are prices for the whole aircraft, not per seat. A $6,164 light jet leg carrying five people is a different proposition from the same leg carrying one, and it is the main reason empty legs compete well against business-class fares for groups and badly for solo travelers.

The standard claim in this category is up to 75% off. We cannot reproduce that from our own data, so we are not going to print it.

What we can measure honestly is an aircraft against itself. For 1,246 active aircraft, the operator has given us both a retail charter hourly rate and an empty-leg rate band. Comparing each aircraft's empty-leg band to its own retail rate, the top of the empty-leg band sits a median of 7% below the retail rate, and the bottom of the band sits a median of 25% below. That is the rate-card gap, measured on the same airframe with the same operator.

More instructive is what sits inside that median. On 521 of those 1,246 aircraft — 41.8%, two in five — the top of the empty-leg band is at or above the aircraft's own retail charter rate. A discount is not a property of empty legs. It is a property of a particular leg on a particular day, and on a meaningful share of the fleet the rate card alone gives you nothing.

The real-world saving is larger than 7–25%, and we will not put a number on how much larger, because we cannot measure it defensibly. Two things sit outside the rate card. First, an operator's retail hourly rate is usually not an all-in number: for 9,056 of the 9,225 aircraft in our fleet data, the retail rate excludes fuel surcharge, landing and handling fees and taxes, so the true retail cost of a charter hour is higher than its rate card implies. Second, and much bigger, a retail charter bills you for positioning legs that an empty leg does not — and that structural difference appears in neither rate card. We built an instrument to size the total-trip gap and it produced a result we could not defend, so it is not on this page.

The practical takeaway is not a percentage. It is that you should quote both products on your actual trip, on the same day, all-in, and compare those two numbers. A headline discount is not a substitute for the two quotes in front of you.

The most common surprise in charter pricing is that a one-way costs far more than half the round trip. The reason is that the aircraft does not live at your departure airport and has no reason to stay at your destination.

A standalone one-way charter is really three segments. The aircraft flies empty from wherever it currently sits to your origin. It flies your leg with you on board. Then it flies empty from your destination to its base or its next booking. You are one revenue segment carrying the cost of three, and the operator has to recover all of it somewhere. A round trip spreads those same two empty positioning segments across two revenue legs, which is why the per-leg number looks lower even though nothing structural has changed.

Now read that in reverse and you have the empty leg. The third segment — the empty flight home from somebody else's one-way — is exactly the inventory we list. When you book an empty leg you are buying the leg the previous customer already paid to have flown. Same aircraft, same crew, same Part 135 certificate, same maintenance program. What is different is only that its cost is already sunk.

That gives a clean rule for one-way trips. If your route happens to coincide with a positioning need somebody else has already created, the price is genuinely very good. If it does not, you are paying standalone one-way pricing and there is no discount hiding anywhere, because there is no absorbed cost to share. Searching harder will not find one.

Empty legs are perishable, and not in the countdown-timer sense that marketing usually means. We measured it on two independent supply feeds over different three-month windows in 2026, and they agree.

Lead time first — the gap between a leg appearing and departing. On one feed, across 135,664 legs, the median was 4.9 days; on the other, across 31,372 legs, 5.8 days. Around 60% and 57% respectively departed within a week of first appearing, and roughly a quarter departed within two days. Empty-leg inventory is a one-week planning horizon, not a one-quarter one.

Shelf life second — how long a listing stays in the feed. The median listing was gone in 1.6 days on one feed (122,090 listings) and 1.1 days on the other (30,707). Between 42% and 46% disappeared within a single day, and between 62% and 74% within three days.

One piece of care about that word. Gone means the listing left the feed. It may have been booked, or the operator may have withdrawn it, or the originating trip may have changed and taken the positioning need with it. We cannot tell which from the feed and we are not going to tell you they all sold.

The operational consequence is the important part. If your trip is eight weeks out and your date is fixed, the empty leg you would want does not exist yet, and no amount of searching will produce it. An on-demand charter has the opposite property: it can be quoted at any horizon, because it does not have to already exist.

Who sets the date. On-demand charter: you do. Empty leg: the originating booking does. You are choosing from what is published on the days it is published.

Who sets the airports. On-demand charter: you do, down to the specific field and FBO. Empty leg: the origin and destination are fixed by the trip that created the positioning need. Some operators will consider a nearby field if the cost is genuinely neutral; most will not. Do not book an empty leg unless both published airports work for you as they are.

Who picks the aircraft. On-demand charter: you choose the category and often the specific model, and you can match cabin, range, baggage and pet policy to the trip. Empty leg: the aircraft is whatever is flying that segment. You see the type and category before you book and you accept it or you don't.

Departure time. On-demand charter: a time you choose. Empty leg: a window, commonly several hours wide, with the actual departure set by when the originating trip finishes and the crew is legal to fly. Plan your ground transport against the window, not against a time.

Price. On-demand charter: the full economic cost of a trip built for you, including the empty positioning legs at both ends. Empty leg: a median of $7,691 all-in across our live book, with the whole middle half of that book between $3,819 and $14,438.

Planning horizon. On-demand charter: quotable any time, from months out to same day. Empty leg: a median of five to six days between the leg appearing and departing, with most of the book turning over inside a week.

Round trips. On-demand charter: quoted as one trip, and usually the cheaper structure per leg. Empty leg: inherently one-way. A round trip means finding two separate legs in opposite directions on dates that line up, which happens on dense corridors and rarely elsewhere. Mixing — empty leg out, charter back — is the common outcome.

If the operator's plans change. On-demand charter: your booking is the reason the flight exists, so it does not evaporate. Empty leg: if the originating booking moves or cancels, the positioning need can disappear and take your flight with it. Reputable marketplaces, SkyAccess included, refund the empty-leg buyer in full when that happens. Confirm the clause in writing before you pay.

Your date is fixed and the trip is high-stakes. A wedding, a closing, a hearing, a board meeting. You are not buying an aircraft in that situation, you are buying certainty about being somewhere, and an empty leg does not sell certainty at any price.

Your airports are not negotiable. If you need one specific field because of where you live, or one specific field because of where the venue is, the odds of a published empty leg matching both ends are poor and get worse the more specific you are.

You need the aircraft to do something in particular. Baggage volume for ski or golf equipment, a lavatory, a flight attendant, a specific range without a fuel stop, a pet on board. Charter lets you specify the airframe. On an empty leg you take what is flying.

You are more than a week or two out. Given a median of five to six days between listing and departure, planning a fixed trip around inventory that has not appeared yet is planning around nothing. Set alerts if the trip can flex; get a charter quote if it cannot.

And the case people forget: the gap on your specific trip turns out to be small. If the all-in empty-leg price lands close to the all-in charter quote, buy the charter. You are getting full control of date, time, airports and aircraft for very little, and that is a good trade in the other direction.

Quote both products on the same route on the same day. Everything on this page is background; the only number that decides your trip is the pair of quotes in front of you.

Compare all-in against all-in. On a domestic US flight that means the charter price plus the 7.5% federal excise tax plus the per-passenger segment fee, and it means asking explicitly about fuel surcharge, landing and handling fees, catering beyond the standard package, de-icing in winter, and international fees where they apply. A base rate compared against an all-in price is not a comparison. Remember too that charter is billed on block time — pushback to parking, taxi included — not on time in the air.

Check the certificate on both sides. Empty legs and on-demand charters are operated under the same FAA Part 135 rules by the same air carriers, so the safety question is about the operator, not about which product you bought. Our guide to verifying a Part 135 operator walks the checks, and our Part 91 vs Part 135 guide explains why the distinction is the one that matters.

Ask the cancellation questions in writing before you pay, and ask them separately. What happens if the originating booking moves? What happens if you cancel? Those two answers are different on an empty leg, and the second is usually stricter than it would be on a retail charter.

Then decide against your own requirements rather than against a discount. The right question is not how far below retail this leg is. It is whether this specific aircraft, on this specific day, between these two specific airports, at this specific price, is worth more to you than a trip built to your own schedule at the charter quote.