The Empty-Leg Price Index — Q3 2026

Empty legs are the only corner of private aviation where real prices sit in public — and nobody aggregates them. This first edition of the Empty-Leg Price Index records 66 publicly listed repositioning flights across four named sources over a single July 2026 weekend, and reduces them to the numbers that matter: what each cabin class actually costs per flight hour, and how far below charter the discounts genuinely land.

What this index measures

On-demand charter is priced by private quotation, which is why most published "cost of a private jet" figures are marketing bands rather than transactions. Repositioning flights are the exception: when an aircraft must fly empty anyway, operators list the leg publicly, with a route, a date, an aircraft type and — critically — a price. Blade's market overview puts the scale of the inefficiency at nearly 40% of private jets flying empty at any given moment, which is why this inventory never dries up.

Over the weekend of 4–5 July 2026 we recorded every priced listing visible on four public sources — the aggregator EmptyLegGuide, European operator GlobeAir, the Bonn-based broker Call a Jet, and the Geneva broker LunaJets, whose published charter-rate framework we use as the comparison baseline. That produced 66 observations: 36 US-dollar listings with flight times (from which implied hourly rates can be computed), 23 euro-priced broker legs, 3 confirmed euro operator legs with declared discounts, and 4 Canadian-dollar listings reported separately. Where a flight time was published, we divide the listed price by it; nothing is modelled.

United States: implied hourly rates by cabin class

The 36 US-dollar listings carried published flight times, allowing a clean implied rate — the listed price divided by time in the air. Two caveats before the table: sample sizes are small in the turboprop and heavy classes, and one super-midsize outlier (a Miami–Teterboro Challenger 300 at an implied $17,448 per hour on a peak holiday corridor) drags that class's range wide. Medians, not averages, are quoted throughout for exactly that reason.

Two readings stand out. First, the midsize class is where the empty-leg market is deepest and most consistent — fourteen listings inside a tight $6,240–8,658 band, with the venerable Learjet 60 supplying most of the inventory. Second, the cheapest way onto a jet in this wave was not the smallest aircraft but the shortest sensible light-jet hop: $2,691 bought an entire Citation Ultra from San Antonio to Houston. For context on what these classes cost when chartered conventionally, see our hourly charter cost guide and the turboprop cost breakdown.

Europe: what confirmed legs were actually listed at

European inventory in this wave splits into two tiers. GlobeAir — which flies Citation Mustangs and lists confirmed legs with the reference price struck through — offered three bookable flights at 80–88% off its own listed rate. Call a Jet's board carried seven priced European legs on light and super-light types between €4,790 and €12,990. A representative selection, recorded as listed:

The €990 Salzburg–Brno Mustang deserves a moment. Fifty minutes in the air works out at €1,188 per flight hour — roughly 70% below the bottom of the €4,000–6,300 very-light-jet band LunaJets publishes for conventional charter. The Olbia–Bolzano leg lands at €674 per hour, 83% below that floor. These are the numbers the phrase "up to 90% off" is built from — real, but attached to routes and windows almost nobody happens to need.

The discount question, answered with numbers

Broker marketing claims a wide spread — 25–75% is the range most commonly cited. This wave's data lets us be more precise about where reality falls, and it depends heavily on which side of the Atlantic you shop.

In Europe, operator-confirmed legs genuinely reach the top of the claimed range and beyond: GlobeAir's three confirmed flights averaged 85% off the operator's own reference pricing. In the United States, the picture is more sober. The US midsize median of $7,020 per implied hour sits at the low end of conventional midsize charter rather than dramatically below it, and US domestic charter pricing shows why: much American empty-leg inventory is priced to recover most of the trip cost, not to clear at any price. The steep US discounts concentrate in the final 72 hours before departure — inventory this index deliberately records but cannot chase in real time.

Three pricing mechanics the listings reveal

1. Probability-priced inventory

GlobeAir lists two tiers: confirmed legs with a price, and unconfirmed legs carrying only a percentage — the operator's own estimate that the flight will actually operate, ranging from 15% to 65% in this wave. Those probability listings were excluded from our statistics, but they matter to buyers: a 15% flight is an option, not a plan.

2. Logarithmic decay

GlobeAir states openly that its empty-leg prices follow a logarithmic curve: two days out, a leg costs nearly full charter; the price falls steadily as departure approaches. This is the single most useful fact in the market — it means the same seat has many prices, and the discount is a function of your nerve. Future waves of this index will plot that decay curve from repeated observations.

3. The short-hop floor

The one place hourly arithmetic misleads: a 30-minute Jacksonville–Savannah Challenger 300 listed at $7,020 — $14,040 per flight hour, twice the midsize median — because crew duty, handling and fees do not shrink with the route. Positioning minimums put a floor under every leg. Judge short flights on the total, never the rate.

Where empty legs are actually published

The market is fragmented by design — each operator publishes its own repositioning schedule, and no single board carries everything. The sources below are the ones this index records, plus the operator lists worth watching directly. Executive Jet Management notes that legs typically surface about two weeks before departure, so a weekly check covers the market. Our platform comparison grades each in detail, and the honest guide to empty legs covers the cancellation risk nobody advertises.

One practical note for using any of them: empty legs depart from wherever the aircraft happens to be, which is frequently a secondary field an hour from the city centre. Pricing a fixed-fare transfer to the departure airport before you commit keeps a €990 bargain from acquiring a €200 asterisk.

Methodology & corrections

Observation window: 4–5 July 2026. Sources: the four named above, publicly accessible, recorded manually. Inclusion rule: every listing carrying a published price; unconfirmed probability-rated flights excluded from statistics. Implied hourly rates are computed only where the source published a flight time, as listed price divided by time in the air. Prices are as listed — several US sources note prices exclude tax; no currency conversion is applied and CAD listings (4) are held out of the USD statistics. Medians are used throughout; small samples are flagged where they occur. This is wave one: quarter-on-quarter movement begins with the October 2026 edition, which will repeat the same sources and method. Errors, corrections or operators who publish priced legs we should track: contact us — the dataset is available to journalists and researchers on request.