Your Seven Year Old Jet Has Not Depreciated at All

Business jets have not been depreciating the way the textbooks say. The working rule, that an aircraft sheds roughly 8 percent of its value every year once the first two years are behind it, no longer matches what aircraft are actually selling for. On several 2016-build airframes, seven years and a couple of thousand flight hours have cost the owner almost nothing.

That is a large claim, and the person making it sells aircraft for a living, so it is worth testing against the market prints rather than taking on trust. The transaction data mostly supports him. The nuance is that the effect is not evenly spread, and the aircraft it does not apply to are the ones most buyers are looking at.

The Eight Percent Rule Stopped Matching the Transactions

Writing in the August 2026 issue of Business Jet Traveler, aircraft broker Joseph Carfagna Jr compared spring 2019 guide values from Vref and the Aircraft Bluebook against what the same aircraft were worth seven years later. His conclusion is blunt: "The old assumption that real market depreciation is approximately 8 percent per year after years one and two just does not hold up anymore."

Carfagna is the president of an aircraft sales business, which makes him an interested party in an argument that jets hold their value. Take the worked examples as his, and then check them against the independent market data further down.

What Four Aircraft Actually Did Over Seven Years

The second row is the one worth pausing on. That aircraft flew 2,000 additional hours across the period, roughly doubling its time, and came out at the same number it started at. Under the 8 percent rule it should have lost more than 40 percent of its value.

The G650ER is the weakest of the set and still retained about 90 percent. On a $56 million aircraft, a 10 percent loss across seven years is a very different proposition from the same percentage across one.

The Market Data Backs the Direction, If Not Every Number

Carfagna's examples are four aircraft. The independent prints cover the whole market, and they point the same way.

Global Jet Capital's Q2 2026 market brief reports average bluebook values up 2.9 percent year over year. Values rising at all, in a category everyone assumes only falls, is the headline.

Supply explains most of it. Preowned inventory has fallen to about 5.8 percent of the active fleet, its lowest since February 2024 and well under the ten-year average. When there is very little to buy, the aircraft that do come to market clear at firm numbers. AVNET covered that squeeze in detail in the preowned market surge, and the International Aircraft Dealers Association counted 746 transactions in the first half of 2026, up 21 percent, so this is a thin market that is also a busy one.

Why Asking Prices Fell While Values Rose

One figure in the same brief looks like a flat contradiction: average asking prices down 29 percent year over year to $4.8 million. Values up, prices down.

Both are true because they measure different things. The average asking price is a mix, not a valuation. Younger, higher-value aircraft have been trading quickly and leaving the market, while older, cheaper airframes sit on it. As the young metal sells, what remains listed is worth less on average, and the average asking price falls even as individual aircraft hold or gain value. Anyone reading that number as a market decline has it backwards.

The Split Is Generational, Not Universal

The value retention is not a blanket effect, and this is the part a buyer needs.

The aircraft holding their money are the 2014 to 2016 builds. The previous generation has behaved exactly as the textbook predicts: 2012-vintage Challenger 300s, Gulfstream G550s and Citation XLS+ airframes each sit near 50 percent of their original price.

So the honest version of the claim is narrower than the headline. A late-model aircraft of a current, in-production type, in a market with almost no inventory, has held its value remarkably well. An aircraft one generation back has halved. The dividing line is not age in years so much as whether the type is still the one buyers want.

What It Means If You Are Buying or Selling

If you are selling a well-kept 2014 to 2016 airframe of a current type, the 8 percent-a-year assumption is probably costing you money in your own head before it ever reaches a negotiation.

If you are buying, the corollary is less comfortable. The scarcity holding those values up is also what you are paying. And the generational split means the model you choose matters more than the hours on it. Our guide to buying a preowned business jet covers what the pre-purchase inspection decides once you have picked the type.

If you are budgeting ownership, treat this as a correction to one line rather than a rewrite of the whole spreadsheet. AVNET's real annual cost of owning a private jet puts depreciation at roughly 14 percent in the first year, settling to 5 to 8 percent a year afterwards, and describes it as the largest single cost of ownership. That remains the right planning assumption for a new delivery. What the 2026 evidence challenges is the idea that the decline simply continues, year after year, on an aircraft that is already several years old and of a type still in production.

The Caveats Worth Stating

Three of them, plainly. The worked examples come from a broker with a professional interest in the conclusion. Guide values are estimates of what an aircraft should fetch, not a record of what one did. And the whole effect rests on an inventory shortage, which is a market condition rather than a law of physics: if supply returns to its ten-year average, the arithmetic that produced these retentions goes with it.

None of which makes the observation wrong. It makes it current, which is a different and more useful thing.