The Empty Leg Price Index

What the index measures

An empty leg is a flight an aircraft has to make anyway — repositioning to its next booked departure or returning to base — sold without the usual round-trip cost. The market is famously opaque: prices are quoted privately, listings appear and vanish within hours, and no public benchmark exists. The Empty Leg Price Index is our attempt to fix that with our own observation archive rather than survey estimates.

Between 2026-07-01 and 2026-08-11 we logged 5,623 distinct empty-leg listings across 119 aircraft types and 84 operators, spanning 3,178 airport pairs. Each listing is recorded the first time we see it and again each time it reappears, so lead time is measured from genuine first sighting to scheduled departure — not from a press release.

The single most quotable finding: only 17.8% of empty-leg listings carry a public price. More than four in five are advertised as "on request". For a segment marketed on discounts of up to 75%, that is a remarkable absence of published evidence — and the reason a buyer cannot judge an empty-leg quote without a benchmark.

Methodology

Collection. Listings are ingested continuously from operator and marketplace feeds into an observation archive. Each record stores first-seen and last-seen timestamps, departure and arrival ICAO/IATA, aircraft type, operator, scheduled departure window, and the advertised price and currency where one is published.

Deduplication. A listing is counted once per unique source identifier; re-appearances increment a seen-count rather than creating a new observation.

Price statistics. Price percentiles are computed on the USD-denominated subset only (793 listings) to avoid mixing currencies or applying retrospective FX. Listings without a public price are excluded from price statistics but included in supply, lead-time and corridor counts.

Lead time. Measured as scheduled departure minus first-seen timestamp, truncated to the 0–60 day window (5,007 listings) to exclude feed backfills and far-forward placeholders.

Limitations. This is an index of advertised empty legs, not of transacted prices; brokered and privately placed legs are invisible to any feed. Coverage skews to Europe (56%) and North America. Same-airport listings — 3.5% of the sample — are maintenance or crew-currency movements and are reported separately rather than removed silently.

Revisions. Editions are frozen at publication. Corrections are issued as a new edition with a changelog; published figures are never silently restated.