Guide
The breakeven hours figure, and why we will not quote one
Updated
Every buyer asks for this number first. This site refuses to state it as a fact, and the reason is worth two minutes.
Question 1
How many hours a year will you fly privately?
Count only the flying you would actually do. The most common planning error is budgeting for the flying you aspire to rather than last year's diary.
Email me this result
We will send you these figures and a link back to them. One email, nothing else unless you tick the box.
What is actually published
Nothing. No regulator, national statistical agency or trade body publishes a breakeven point between owning and chartering a private jet, or the inputs it would need. Regulators publish safety, certification and operating rules. The US Energy Information Administration publishes jet fuel spot prices.
Crew pay, hangarage, insurance premiums, management fees, maintenance reserve rates and charter hourly rates are private commercial terms. They are negotiated case by case and reported nowhere official.
A figure of roughly 200 to 400 hours a year is commonly repeated in the market as where ownership starts to make sense. We cannot source it. Treat it as an industry rule of thumb with no published basis: a sanity check on your own arithmetic, never a fact to plan around.
Why a single number cannot be right
- It depends on the aircraft. A light jet's fixed base and a heavy jet's fixed base differ by an order of magnitude, and so does the charter rate you are comparing against.
- It depends on the mission. Short legs put landings, handling and crew overnights into the comparison in a way that hours alone do not capture.
- It depends on the charter market you face. The alternative to owning is not an abstract rate, it is what you can actually buy on your routes, on your dates.
- It depends on the capital. Comparing a purchase against charter without pricing the cost of the capital, the depreciation and the residual value risk is not a comparison at all.
- It depends on what you value. Guaranteed availability on peak days, a known crew and a configured cabin are real benefits that do not appear in an hourly rate.
How to work out your own
- Take last year's actual flying: hours, legs, routes, passenger counts, and how much notice you had on each trip. Not the aspiration.
- Get written quotes for the ownership case: crew, hangar, insurance, management, maintenance and engine programme rates for the specific type. These are the numbers no website can give you.
- Get real charter quotes for the same trip list, on the same dates, including repositioning. Not an average hourly rate.
- Price the capital: purchase price, financing cost, and a realistic view of value at your expected exit.
- Compare the total annual cost of each route to the same flying, then ask what the difference buys you in availability and control, and whether that is worth paying for.
Our sister site's operating cost model does the ownership side of that arithmetic on your own unit costs, and shows the fixed and variable split that drives the whole comparison.
Absence is the honest answer here. An invented breakeven figure gives false confidence in a decision worth millions. That is worse than a page that hands you the method and tells you to do the work.