Aircraft Lease vs Buy Calculator

Comparing aircraft lease and ownership costs in this calculator reduces to two independently computed totals over your chosen term: total lease cost (monthly lease rate times the number of months) and net ownership cost (total loan payments minus the aircraft's residual value at the end of the term). Purchase price is the dominant driver of ownership cost, since it is the base the loan amortization and residual value are both built from -- residual value percentage is the next largest factor, and because it SUBTRACTS from ownership cost, a higher residual value percentage reduces the net cost of buying since you recover more of your money at the end. Total lease cost, notably, does not depend on purchase price at all in this model -- it is calculated purely from the monthly lease rate and term length, treating the leased aircraft's underlying value as separate from what you pay to lease it.

Annual usage hours, despite being a core input for an aviation cost comparison, has no effect on either total cost figure in this calculator -- both lease and ownership costs here are flat, calendar-time-based figures (dollars per month over a term), not usage-based figures (dollars per flight hour). The "Annual Usage Hours" output field simply echoes back the annual usage hours you entered rather than computing an independent hours-based break-even crossover point; the underlying cost model has no per-hour cost dimension to invert into a genuine utilization threshold. If your actual leasing or ownership costs scale meaningfully with flight hours (wet leases, hourly maintenance reserves, engine-hour-based overhaul costs), this flat-rate model will understate that relationship, and the buy/lease recommendation compares only the two flat totals, without regard to how intensively you plan to fly the aircraft.