Hourly ratesCost
Private JetCost Per Hour
Why the hourly rate is the least useful number in a charter quote, and what it leaves out.
What an hourly rate actually covers
It covers the aircraft in the air, with fuel and crew. That is it. Every charter site publishes one because it is the only component that can be expressed as a single tidy figure, and a single tidy figure is what people expect to see.
What it does not cover is positioning, the daily minimum, crew duty overruns, landing and ramp fees, the private terminal handling charge, overnight parking, peak day surcharges, de-icing, federal excise tax and segment fees, and on international trips customs, permits and a handling agent.
Why two aircraft at the same hourly rate cost different amounts
Take an identical midsize jet quoted by two operators at an identical hourly figure. One has the aircraft on your departure ramp with an empty afternoon. The other has to fly it in from three hundred miles away and send it home afterwards. That is two additional hours of flying on the second quote before your passengers have boarded, and the hourly rate told you nothing about it.
This is not an edge case. It is the normal condition of the market, and it is why a rate card cannot predict what you will pay.
The daily minimum interacts with it badly
Most operators bill a minimum number of hours for each day the aircraft is away from base, commonly one and a half to two. Multiply an hourly rate by your actual flight time and you will frequently get a number well below the invoice, because the aircraft sat at your destination for two days and each of those days carried a minimum.
A ninety minute flight out on Friday returning Sunday can therefore price higher than a four hour flight that returns the same evening. Nothing about the hourly rate hints at that.
What to ask instead
Ask for a single all in total for your specific itinerary, with every fee as its own line. Ask where the aircraft is starting from. Ask what the cancellation terms are in writing.
Those three questions tell you more than any rate card, because they expose the positioning, the fee structure and the risk in one pass. An operator who answers all three quickly is showing you how they run.
Questions
Hourly rates
Why do charter sites publish hourly rates if they are misleading?
Because it is the number people search for and the only one that fits in a table. It is not usually dishonest, it is incomplete, and the incompleteness happens to favour the seller. Any figure quoted without knowing where the aircraft starts from is a guess dressed as a price.
Is the hourly rate at least useful for comparing aircraft?
For comparing operating cost between classes, roughly yes. For predicting your invoice, no. Use it to understand why a heavy jet costs more to run than a light jet, then ignore it when you are comparing actual quotes.
Do brokers mark up the hourly rate?
Every broker earns something. The difference is whether you can see it. We show our fee as a separate line against the operator price rather than folding it into a single number you cannot decompose.
Photography on this site is representative. It does not depict a specific aircraft, operator or tail number offered for charter.