The 2026 Private Jet Card Index: True Cost-Per-Hour Across NetJets, VistaJet, Flexjet, Wheels Up & XO

Component scores: cost transparency 20/25 · operational quality 38/40 · contract flexibility 29/35

NetJets is the programme every other programme is measured against. It invented fractional ownership under Richard Santulli, was sold to Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway in 1998 for $725 million, and remains the institutional standard for US corporate aviation. The entry product is the 25-hour Card275, priced at $215,000 or $8,600 an hour inclusive of federal excise tax when the lineup was re-cut in January 2025; NetJets sold that card under the Marquis Jet banner until 2021, having bought the company from its founders in 2010. Fractional shares on Phenom 300 light jets, Citation Latitude mid-size jets and Challenger 650 large-cabin aircraft scale up from there.

Availability, as of this Index. NetJets told its sales organisation on 31 July 2026 that it was curtailing new jet card sales and restricting lease sales, both the 25-hour and the 50-hour products, to concentrate on what it called its core business of shared ownership. In August it confirmed that existing card owners may buy a renewal card and existing 25-hour lessees may start another lease or convert to a card. Fractional shares are unaffected. Nothing about this appears on netjets.com, so a prospect reading the operator's own site would not know the entry product had closed — which is a cost-transparency problem as much as an availability one, and it is reflected in the 20 of 25 rather than a higher mark. It is also not the first time: card sales were suspended in August 2021 and did not resume until March 2023.

What it does best: peak-day availability is real. NetJets puts its daily movements at around 1,400 flights across a fleet it gave as 868 aircraft in August 2026, and it is the scale of that fleet that absorbs the days everyone wants to fly — Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, the Friday of Memorial Day. Its recovery aircraft policy is the strongest in the industry. If your assigned aircraft is delayed you get a similar or better aircraft at no surcharge. The US and European footprint is unmatched, the fleet is well maintained, crew tenure is high and the cabin experience is consistent. That is what 38 of 40 on operational quality looks like.

Where it falls short: international operations outside Europe and the Americas are weaker than VistaJet's. Demand has outrun supply to the point where the entry card is no longer sold at all to new buyers, which is a harder version of the inventory pressure the programme has carried since 2021. Pricing is opaque to non-customers — quotes are issued only after a sales conversation, which is what holds cost transparency to 20 of 25. And the structure favours buyers willing to commit to fractional or a 50+ hour card; small-ticket buyers get less attention than VistaJet would give the same profile.

Component scores: cost transparency 19/25 · operational quality 37/40 · contract flexibility 28/35

VistaJet is the structurally different proposition in this Index. It does not own light jets and does not sell fractional shares; it sells the Program membership on its own fleet, which VistaJet lists as spanning Bombardier, Gulfstream, Cessna, Embraer and Dassault aircraft from super-midsize to super-long-range, at a fixed hourly rate with guaranteed availability anywhere in the world on 24 hours' notice. The customer profile is global: founders, family offices and corporates whose missions are intercontinental.

What it does best: the no-ferry-fee structure. On a New York to Singapore round trip with a non-intercontinental operator, repositioning the aircraft empty between legs can add $150,000 to $300,000. VistaJet has eliminated that line, and has made the fleet investment to support it globally. Cabin consistency is the strongest in the industry — the silver-and-red livery is identical in Singapore, Lagos and São Paulo, and cabin host training is centralised.

Where it falls short: there is no light-jet option. If your missions are predominantly US domestic or short-hop European, VistaJet is structurally the wrong fit, because the smallest aircraft is a Challenger 350-class super-midsize and you pay those rates whether you need them or not. The three-year commitment on VJ25 locks you in before you have validated your usage pattern, and Program pricing is custom-quoted with no published rate card. It does publish a charter from-price of $11,000 per hour, which is more than three of the other four give you, and it is why the programme takes 19 of 25 on cost transparency rather than less. Note the wording, though: it is a from-price on charter, not a Program rate, and VistaJet's own membership pages give the same $11,000 without the per-hour qualifier. Treat it as a floor, not a quote.

Component scores: cost transparency 20/25 · operational quality 34/40 · contract flexibility 25/35

Flexjet is the second-largest fractional operator in the US behind NetJets, and on most operational measures it is genuinely competitive. The 97% customer retention rate Flexjet publishes is a meaningful tell: buyers who joined are not leaving, which is rare in any subscription business and rarer still in private aviation, and the company puts 35% of its customers at ten years or more of tenure. It gives its combined revenue as $4.6bn at year-end 2025 across 340 aircraft and more than 3,000 customers. The fleet is younger on average than NetJets', and cabin standards on the Praetor 500 and the European Legacy 500 card products are excellent.

What it does best: the entry-level 25-hour card on a Phenom 300 at $198,425 is the lowest published light-jet card in this Index — and, since NetJets stopped selling its own, the only one of the top three a new buyer can actually purchase. The headline gap is smaller than it looks: Flexjet quotes that number before federal excise tax, so the all-in figure is $213,307 against NetJets' $215,000, a difference of about $1,700 across 25 hours rather than the $10,000 a straight comparison of the published numbers suggests. This page previously drew the larger conclusion and it was wrong to. The Red Label upgraded-interior tier is meaningfully better than NetJets' standard cabin on equivalent aircraft, and the cabin host training and onboard food and beverage programme is widely rated slightly ahead of NetJets at the equivalent tier. Publishing that entry number is why Flexjet ties NetJets at 20 of 25 on cost transparency despite scoring lower overall.

Where it falls short: fleet scale is smaller than NetJets — 340 aircraft against 868 — so peak-day availability has more flex in it, and the European card programme covers fewer airports than NetJets Europe. On the balance-sheet question this Index used to raise: the abandoned 2022 SPAC listing is no longer the most recent word on it. In July 2025 an investor group led by L Catterton put $800m of equity into Flexjet, reported at the time as taking roughly a fifth of the company at a valuation near $4bn. That is a materially stronger position than the 2022 picture, though it is still a private capital structure against Berkshire Hathaway's balance sheet, which is the comparison that holds operations to 34 of 40 rather than 38.

Component scores: cost transparency 18/25 · operational quality 26/40 · contract flexibility 24/35

Wheels Up went through a public near-collapse in 2023 and was rescued by an investor consortium led by Delta Air Lines. The rebuild has been slow but real: the legacy jets and the King Air turboprop fleet have been retired ahead of schedule, and what remains is a single-digit-type controlled fleet of Phenom 300 and Challenger 300 aircraft — more than 40 of them as of the second quarter of 2026, with the company targeting more than 50 by year end. That is a far smaller operation than the several-hundred-aircraft figure that circulated during the pre-restructuring years, and an earlier version of this page carried that stale number. The smaller fleet is the point: utilisation and cabin consistency both improve when there is one light jet and one super-midsize rather than eleven types. As of 2026 it is competitive again, but it is not the institutional standard, and the 2023 history will reasonably influence buyer confidence for years.

What it does best: it publishes a number, which two of the four programmes above it do not. Signature, the membership Wheels Up launched in September 2025 and the only tier it currently markets, states a minimum $200,000 pre-paid deposit and a monthly fee, with a choice of dynamic or fixed-rate pricing plans; legacy tiers are supported for existing members rather than sold. Signature passed 1,200 members in the second quarter of 2026 and premium memberships now account for more than half the active base. For a buyer who cannot forecast usage precisely, the deposit-and-draw structure is more forgiving than a committed-hour block. The Delta partnership produces some unusual benefits including elite-status matching and integration with commercial Delta One bookings.

Where it falls short: peak-day availability remains weaker than NetJets, recovery times are slower, and cabin consistency is the lowest of the major programmes because the post-restructuring fleet is more heterogeneous. That is 26 of 40 on operations, the second-lowest here, and the number that will move first if the fleet reaches its stated target. The 2023 recovery is not yet far enough in the rear-view to claim full institutional confidence; we expect Wheels Up to climb this Index over 2027 and 2028 if the rebuild continues.

Component scores: cost transparency 8/25 · operational quality 28/40 · contract flexibility 25/35

XO is the membership-and-deposit product within the Vista Global family, and it works differently from every other programme in this Index: no fixed hourly rate, no committed-hour block, no guaranteed-availability contract. The deposit structure is published, contrary to what earlier versions of this page said: XO lists three tiers — $100,000 for XO Membership and $250,000 for XO Reserve, each with a $995 annual fee, and $500,000 for XO Corporate with no annual fee — all refundable, with a sixty-day refund window. What is not published, and cannot be, is what a year of flying costs, because members then book at dynamic prices through the XO app that vary by aircraft availability, route demand and date. For some travellers — particularly those flying heavily on dense routes between major US metros — XO produces real savings. For others the variable pricing is impossible to budget against.

What it does best: app-based booking is genuinely better than the call-and-quote experience of NetJets, Flexjet and VistaJet. Confirmations come through in minutes rather than hours. Empty-leg shared flights occasionally produce single-digit-thousand fares on routes that would cost $15,000+ on a card. And the network is the largest aggregated one in this Index: XO puts it at more than 2,000 hand-selected aircraft across all cabin classes, of which the Vista Members' fleet — the super-midsize-and-up core it controls directly — is over 200. An earlier version of this page gave 2,450, a figure that dates from 2022 and that XO no longer uses. If empty legs are the appeal, compare it against the dedicated empty-leg platforms before you deposit six figures to reach them.

Where it falls short: dynamic pricing is structural, not a bug — and it is the wrong product for any traveller who needs to commit to a budget in advance, who flies on peak holidays, or who needs guaranteed availability on specific dates. The 8 of 25 on cost transparency is not a penalty for hiding the entry price, which XO publishes more completely than NetJets or Flexjet do; it is a penalty for the thing a buyer actually needs to know. Every other programme here lets a prospect multiply a rate by their hours and get a number. XO does not, and no amount of deposit disclosure changes that.