How we calculate every number on this site

The short version

We multiply your route's flight time by a published hourly rate band for each aircraft category, apply a 2-hour billing minimum, add ground time for any fuel stop, and round to the nearest $100. The recommended aircraft is the cheapest category that flies the route nonstop, seats your party and suits the flight's length. Everything is in USD.

Where the hourly rates come from

Editorial reference bands compiled by the CharterJetCalc editorial team from publicly published operator and broker hourly rate cards and from quotes collected for these routes.

They describe the United States and Canada, on-demand single-entity charter. They were last reviewed on August 15, 2026 and are next scheduled for review on November 15, 2026.

The formula

1. Distance. Great-circle distance between the two airports, in statute miles, from their published coordinates. Real routings are slightly longer; we do not model airways or ATC routing.
2. Flight time. Distance ÷ the category's cruise speed, plus a flat 30 minutes for taxi, climb, descent and approach.
3. Fuel stops. We plan to 85% of an aircraft's published maximum range, which is what reserves, alternates and realistic winds leave you. Each stop adds 45 minutes of ground time. A category needing more than 1 stop is not offered at all.
4. Billing minimum. Charter is billed at a minimum of 2 hours per flight, covering the crew day and the aircraft's repositioning around your leg. Short hops bill this rather than their airborne time — which is why a 40-minute flight is not half the price of an 80-minute one.
5. Total. Billable hours × the low and high ends of the hourly band, rounded to the nearest $100.
6. Round trips are exactly twice the one-way figure. Operators sometimes price a return slightly better per leg because the aircraft avoids an empty repositioning flight; we do not assume that saving.

A fully worked example

New York (TEB) to Miami (OPF), 4 passengers, one way, on the recommended midsize jet. Every figure below is generated by the same code that runs the calculator.

Check it yourself: 2.68 × $5,500 = $14,764, rounded to $14,800.

How the recommended aircraft is chosen

This is the part most calculators get wrong, and the reason a headline "from $X" is so often misleading. The cheapest aircraft that can physically reach a destination is frequently not one anybody should book. Our recommendation is the least expensive category that satisfies all three of the following:

• it flies the route nonstop, if any category can;
• it seats your party;
• it meets a cabin-comfort floor set by the distance.

The comfort floor is fixed and published:

The cheapest option is never hidden — it appears as the lowest viable option, with its fuel stop, its block time and its cabin size stated next to the price. We just refuse to let it be the headline.

Routes outside the United States and Canada

Our rate bands describe the United States and Canada, on-demand single-entity charter. When either end of a trip falls outside it, we do not apply a regional price multiplier — we have no verified data for one, and inventing a number would be worse than admitting the gap. Instead we widen the range: the floor drops 10% and the ceiling rises 25%.

Fuel, crew, handling, permit and overflight costs outside the US and Canada differ in ways we have not measured. Rather than invent a regional multiplier we do not have data for, we widen the range: the floor drops 10% and the ceiling rises 25%. The widening is deliberately weighted upward, because outside our reference market the surprises are far more often additions than savings.

Every affected page and result says so on its face. Regions we treat as outside the reference market: Europe, Middle East, Australia & Oceania, Latin America & the Caribbean, Other regions. For those routes the estimate is an order of magnitude and a negotiating anchor, not a price.

What the estimate includes

• Aircraft and crew for the flight time shown
• Fuel at prevailing prices
• Standard landing and handling fees at business-aviation airports
• Routine catering and in-flight service at the operator’s standard level
• Federal excise tax and segment fees where the operator quotes them inclusively

What it excludes

These are billed separately by the operator and are not in any figure we publish:

• De-icing, which is charged per application in winter
• Overnight crew expenses on multi-day trips
• Aircraft-on-ground and extended-wait charges
• International handling, customs, overflight and permit fees
• Peak-date and event surcharges
• Ground transport, hangarage and special catering requests

What we deliberately do not model

A model is only honest if its blind spots are published alongside it. These are ours:

• The bands describe categories, not individual tail numbers. A 20-year-old airframe and a two-year-old airframe in the same category can quote 40% apart.
• Positioning is not modelled. If no aircraft of the chosen category is near your departure airport, the operator adds the ferry legs and the quote rises.
• Demand is not modelled. Dates and events move real quotes more than any other single factor and this model deliberately does not guess at them.
• Outside the United States and Canada the bands are used as a reference point only, with a wider uncertainty range — see the regional note below.

Taken together, these are also the reason a firm quote can land meaningfully outside our range in either direction. If yours does, we would like to know: it is how the bands get better.

How the model is checked

The engine ships with an automated test suite that runs on every build. It verifies the distance maths against known airport pairs, the billing minimum, fuel-stop logic, rounding, passenger capacity constraints, the recommendation rule, round-trip arithmetic, regional widening, and that every airport in our dataset produces a usable estimate. A separate suite checks the published pages: that every price shown on a route page matches the engine, that titles, descriptions and canonicals are unique, and that no internal link is broken.

Rate bands are reviewed on the schedule at the top of this page. When they change, every page that quotes them changes in the same build, because no page stores a price of its own.

Found something wrong?

Tell us and we will fix it and say that we did — our corrections policy explains how.