How Much Does a Jet Card Cost in 2026? Real Card Prices and the Fine Print

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By Pat Sinnott (about Pat), Founder of Peak Aviation Solutions. Commercial multi-engine rated pilot with a BS in Flight Operations and Aviation Management, 21 years in aviation, who has overseen thousands of flights and helped grow Summit Aviation’s flight department from one airplane to 21 before starting Peak in Bozeman.

Last updated: September 3, 2026

One of my first jobs in this industry was in operations at a jet card program, back when I was finishing my flight operations degree. I watched cards get sold and the flights behind them get filled. Years later I’m a charter broker in Bozeman, and clients still hand me their card contracts to read before they sign.

So when someone asks me about jet card cost, I don’t start with a number. I start with the fee stack, because the hourly rate on the brochure is the only number most buyers look at, and it is not the number they end up paying.

A 25-hour light-jet card at the major programs costs roughly $183,000 to $215,000 in 2026: Sentient Jet lists $183,100, Flexjet’s Phenom 300 card is reported at $198,425 plus tax, and NetJets’ Card275 starts at $215,000 including tax. Those totals work out to about $7,300 to $8,600 an hour, but the two ends of that band are not measured the same way.

The low end is my own arithmetic, Sentient’s published 25-hour price divided by 25 hours, and it sits before that program’s fuel surcharge and before the 7.5 percent federal excise tax. The high end already carries both: NetJets quotes the Card275 with fuel and tax inside the rate, waives the daily minimum on the Phenom 300, and adds no peak-day surcharge on that card (Private Jet Card Comparisons, Jan 29, 2025). Where a program does bill taxi time, apply a daily minimum, or charge a peak-day surcharge, those land on top of its rate, and the section below prices each one.

What is a jet card, and how is it different from a membership deposit?

A jet card is a prepaid block of flight hours or dollars, usually 25 hours, bought at a fixed hourly rate for one cabin class, usually with guaranteed availability inside a callout window, and a contract of rules covering peak days, blackout dates, daily minimums, and expiration.

Callout is the contract’s word for lead time: the notice a program requires before departure in order to owe you an airplane. The jet card contract page takes that rule apart, along with the others.

That definition separates a jet card program from the other thing people call a jet card membership. A card fixes your rate. A deposit membership, like XO, Jet Linx, or the Wheels Up Signature plan, takes your money up front and prices most trips dynamically. The private jet membership hub walks through every program type; this page stays on cards.

The price of a card is built from three layers: the hourly rate, set by cabin class; the rules that add billable time, meaning taxi minutes, daily minimums, and peak-day surcharges; and the pass-through charges, mainly the 7.5 percent federal excise tax and whatever fuel adjustment the program applies. Most jet card cost pages show you the first layer and stop.

How much does a jet card cost in 2026?

Private jet card prices move several times a year, so read the dates in the last column first. Some rows were refreshed this month and some rest on January 2025 pricing.

The jet card price comparison below mixes two kinds of source. Sentient, Magellan and Jets.com publish their prices on their own sites. Flexjet publishes no hourly rates or card totals anywhere, so its row is trade-reported. NetJets publishes the $215,000 entry price for the Card275 but not an hourly rate, so both NetJets per-hour figures are trade-reported too, and both carry January 2025 pricing.

Program and card	Cabin class	Hourly rate	25-hour total	Notes	Source and date
Sentient Jet SJ25	Light	$7,324, my division of the published total	$183,100, published	Plus fuel surcharge and FET; hours never expire; 10-hour guaranteed availability	sentient.com, fetched Aug 2026
Sentient Jet SJ25+	Not specified	$9,431, derived and rounded	From $235,850, published	Plus fuel surcharge and FET	sentient.com, Aug 2026
Flexjet 25, Phenom 300	Light	$7,937, trade-reported	$198,425 plus FET, trade-reported	Monthly fuel adjustment; 5-day callout; availability not guaranteed	Private Jet Card Comparisons, updated Aug 13, 2026
NetJets Card275, Phenom 300	Light	$8,600 including FET, trade-reported	$215,000, published by NetJets	90 blackout days; no peak-day surcharge; daily minimum waived on this type	Private Jet Card Comparisons, Jan 29, 2025; SherpaReport, Aug 6, 2026
NetJets Card320, Phenom 300	Light	$11,200, trade-reported	Not published as a total	45 blackout plus 45 peak days; no peak-day surcharge	Private Jet Card Comparisons, Jan 29, 2025
Magellan Jets, 25 hours	Not specified in the from-rate	From $7,500, published	About $187,500, my arithmetic on the from-rate	Refundable, no expiration, no peak surcharges	magellanjets.com, modified Jun 23, 2026
Jets.com Access Pass	By class	Deposit based	$200,000 for 25 hours, published	2.0-hour daily minimum; unused hours forfeited after 24 months	jets.com, 2026

Private Jet Card Comparisons tracks more than 500 programs and published these average jet card hourly rates for Q1 2026: light jets $8,563, midsize $9,639, super-midsize $12,444, and large cabin $15,612. The same report put the average daily minimum at 96.1 minutes, up 19 percent year over year, and the average number of peak days at 36.3 (Private Jet Card Comparisons, Apr 6, 2026).

Put the 25 hour jet card prices on the same basis as that market average and you get a like-for-like read. Three rows above are light jets: Sentient at $7,324, Flexjet at $7,937, and the NetJets Card275 at $8,600. Two sit below the $8,563 light-jet average for the quarter, and the one above it is the only one whose rate already includes fuel and tax. On a common basis the headline jet card programs price close to the middle of their own market, not above it.

People search for the best jet card program as though a single one exists. It doesn’t, because the rate is the part of these contracts that varies least. To compare jet card programs in a way that changes your mind, compare the callout, the blackout calendar, the daily minimum, and what happens to money you do not fly. All four sit in the jet card contract.

What size card can you buy: 10 hour, 25 hour, and 100 hour blocks

People ask how much is a jet card, and the honest answer starts with which block you are buying.

Twenty-five hours is the standard entry, and every program in the table above sells it at the bottom of its range. Smaller blocks exist mostly outside the jet fleet. Tradewind’s Goodspeed card starts at 10 hours on the PC-12, a single-engine turboprop, at $5,450 per hour, against $5,300 at 25 hours and $5,110 at 40 (flytradewind.com, fetched Aug 2026). If you want a 10 hour jet card in a jet cabin, ask the program directly, because none of the cards above publishes a block that small.

Buying more hours buys a lower rate, not a different product. Magellan’s from-rate is $7,500 an hour at 25 hours, $7,250 at 50, and $7,000 at 100 (magellanjets.com, modified Jun 23, 2026). That is the shape of a 100 hour jet card: about 7 percent off the 25-hour rate, by my arithmetic, for four times the money up front. Before you weigh a 100 hour jet card cost against anything else, price a share too, because at 100 hours the ladder starts pointing at fractional ownership.

Can you still buy a Marquis Jet card?

No. The Marquis Jet Card was absorbed into NetJets and is no longer sold, though people still search for it by name. The current NetJets equivalents are the Card275 and the Card320, both priced in the table above.

The fee stack: the hidden costs and fees in a jet card contract

Why does a 90-minute flight cost more than 1.5 hours of the rate?

In September 2023, Private Jet Card Comparisons ran the math on 178 light and very light jet card prices. The median published rate then was $5,210 per hour, and the median cost of a 90-minute flight on those same cards was $9,316, which is 1.78 times the hourly rate rather than the 1.5 you’d expect (Private Jet Card Comparisons, updated Sept 29, 2023). That $5,210 median sits well below every light-jet rate in the 2026 table above, so rates have risen a long way and you should not price your own flying off it.

The multiple is what travels. Whatever your rate turns out to be, something close to 1.78 times it is what 90 minutes in the air costs, and the gap is the fee stack.

The fee stack is the set of contract rules that add billable time and pass-through charges on top of a card’s hourly rate: taxi minutes, daily minimums, peak-day surcharges, fuel adjustments, interchange fees, and federal excise tax.

Here is what’s in it, from the same publisher’s list of extra charges in a card contract (Private Jet Card Comparisons, Jul 6, 2025):

• Taxi time: most programs bill 12 minutes per segment on top of flight time, which is 20 percent of an hour before the wheels leave the ground.
• Daily minimums: the market average is now 96.1 minutes, so a 50-minute hop bills as an hour and thirty-six minutes.
• Peak-day surcharges: up to 50 percent at some programs, on an average of 36.3 designated days a year.
• Fuel surcharges: indexed weekly or monthly at most programs, and NetJets is the notable one that said in April 2026 it would not add one for card customers (Private Jet Card Comparisons, Apr 2, 2026).
• Federal excise tax: 7.5 percent on domestic flights, sometimes inside the quoted rate, often not.
• Deicing: $1,000 to $10,000 or more when it happens, and in Bozeman in January it happens.
• Airport fees: $500 to $1,500 per segment.

Two of those bullets are averages doing duty as rules. The 96.1-minute daily minimum is a mean across the 500-plus programs that publisher tracks, not any one card’s number: NetJets waives daily minimums outright on the Phenom 300 and four other types, while Jets.com sets a flat two hours. The 36.3 peak days is a mean as well, and the surcharge is not universal either: NetJets charges none on the Card275 or the Card320, and Magellan advertises none at all. Find both numbers in your own contract.

What we do instead is one all-in cost per trip. No investment, no membership fee, no annual dues, no monthly management. Across the flying I can actually measure, three clients’ complete booking histories in light and midsize cabins, our all-in hour came in under the market card average for the same cabin. The honest list of what a card buys instead is on the jet card contract page.

What three clients’ complete booking histories cost against the card averages

We repriced three clients’ complete booking histories at the average card rate for the category they actually flew, then set it against what they paid us.

Cabin	Trips	Hours	What our clients paid	Q1 2026 average card rate
Light	14	50.0	$7,210 per hour	$8,563 per hour
Midsize	11	41.3	$7,760 per hour	$9,639 per hour

Read our column carefully: it is total paid divided by hours in the air, so the empty repositioning legs and the 7.5 percent federal excise tax are already inside it. The card column is Private Jet Card Comparisons’ Q1 2026 average hourly rates for those cabins. Those are rates, so they do not carry the daily minimums a card contract adds on top. On short legs the card side of this table is understated rather than overstated.

Three caveats, because a number without them is a sales pitch. It prices the flying, not the guarantee. It assumes the program had that airplane free on your dates. And it prices trips going back to 2023 at today’s rates, so on older flying the gap is narrower than it looks.

The Typical-Leg Test

I stopped comparing programs by hourly rate years ago, because nobody flies an hour. You fly legs, and legs have a shape. Here’s the method I use with clients.

The Typical-Leg Test is Peak Aviation Solutions’ method for pricing a jet card honestly: take your single most common leg, bill it under the card’s full contract (rate, taxi minutes, daily minimum, peak surcharge if it lands on a peak day, fuel adjustment, and FET), then compare that number to a live on-demand quote for the same leg.

Here’s a real one from our book. Bozeman to Santa Barbara, one way, on a Phenom 300: $22,800 in August 2026, fuel and crew inside the number.

Now price that same leg on a card. Call it two hours fifteen minutes of flight time, typical for that run, and 12 minutes of taxi makes 2.45 billable hours. The NetJets and Flexjet rows above price that exact type and Sentient’s is a light-jet rate, so a Phenom 300 jet card is a fair like-for-like comparison.

• Sentient Jet at $7,324 an hour: about $17,900, or about $19,300 once the 7.5 percent federal excise tax goes on, and more again when the fuel surcharge lands.
• Flexjet 25 at the trade-reported $7,937: about $19,400, or about $20,900 with FET, plus the monthly fuel adjustment.
• NetJets Card275 at $8,600 with tax already inside the rate: about $21,100, with no fuel surcharge as of April 2026 and no daily minimum on this type.

So the card wins this leg, and not by a rounding error: roughly $1,700 to $3,500 under what we booked, before any fuel surcharge lands at the two programs that charge one. That is the opposite of the answer a broker is supposed to give, so here is why it happens. A one-way is the best case a card can be handed. A card bills the time you are on the airplane, while my quote carries the empty flight that brings the airplane to Bozeman and whatever it does after Santa Barbara.

Change the shape of the leg and the result changes with it. Run a 50-minute hop and a card carrying the average 96.1-minute daily minimum bills you for time you did not fly, though NetJets would not on the Phenom 300. Run out and back on the same aircraft in a day and my repositioning problem mostly disappears. And whatever you fly, $183,000 or more is sitting unflown in someone else’s account, a cost that appears on neither side of this arithmetic.

Then flip the leg to a Thursday before Presidents’ Day with four days’ notice, and the card’s guaranteed availability at a fixed price can beat anything I can source. Check your own contract’s peak callout first, though, because several programs want five days on a peak date. The Typical-Leg Test is rigged toward your actual calendar, not toward charter.

The quoted hourly and the trip total are two different numbers

Two kinds of number sit on this page, and setting one against the other without saying so is how comparisons go wrong.

The hourly rates in the price table are what an aircraft bills for time in the air. A jet card cost per hour, quoted that way, is a rate and nothing else, unless the row says otherwise.

The booked figures measure something else. The $22,800 leg, and the $7,210 and $7,760 per hour those three clients averaged, are total paid divided by hours airborne, so repositioning, the operator’s daily minimum, the one-way premium, and the 7.5 percent federal excise tax are all already inside them. That is why $22,800 for about two and a quarter hours in the air works out near $10,100 an hour, well above the $7,210 those clients averaged across fifty hours of light-jet flying.

These are real booked trips, picked because they show what a complete trip costs. They are not a price list, and on a well-positioned day, with the airplane already where it needs to be, the same flying prices materially lower. Both numbers are true. They measure different things, and anyone showing you one against the other owes you that sentence.

Everything above is the rate side of a card. The contract side decides the rest: the notice a program needs, the dates it will not fly you at all, what a one-way costs, and what a cancellation does to hours you already paid for. That material now has its own page, together with the safety checks behind every trip I book, so read what is in a jet card contract before you sign one.

What a card buyer never sees from the ops side

Here is what I took away from working inside a program early on, and it isn’t a scandal, it’s structure. When a program controls both the fleet and the schedule, your departure time is one of the levers it can pull to make the day work economically. Aircraft get repositioned, crews get reassigned, and departure windows shift so the fleet as a whole flies efficiently.

The schedule you were quoted belongs to the program’s day, not only to your trip, and that is the mirror image of what you give up booking per trip. I go to the market every time, but the trip is yours, and so is the airplane’s day.

When a jet card is the right buy

I’ll say plainly what a lot of broker blogs won’t: the one structural edge a card has over a broker like me is pricing certainty. You know the number before you call, and some of my clients have gone to a card for exactly that reason.

Utilization decides the rest. Under 50 hours a year, a card is usually the wrong tool and fractional definitely is. Between 50 and 100 hours a card earns its price if your trips cluster on peak days or inside short callouts. Past 100 hours the conversation shifts toward a share, and past 250 toward owning the airplane. The full ladder is on the private jet membership hub.

As of August 2026, several programs are running heavy first-time incentives: five hours free, $25,000 in flight credits, a guaranteed aircraft type written into the contract. Take one if it fits, but price the second contract before you sign the first, because the incentive is a one-time acquisition cost and the renewal is what your next five years cost.

What happens to your money if the program fails?

A prepaid card is an unsecured loan to the program, and this question gets skipped on most jet card cost pages.

When JetSuite shut down in April 2020, an estimated $50 million in SuiteKey deposits was at stake (Private Jet Card Comparisons, Apr 20, 2020). Jet It grounded its fleet in May 2023 and filed Chapter 7 in December 2025 listing $36.2 million in liabilities (Private Jet Card Comparisons, Dec 30, 2025).

The largest programs have deeper balance sheets or corporate parents behind them, which lowers the odds without taking them to zero. At any size of program, the refund terms, the escrow arrangements, and the expiration clause deserve more of your reading time than the rate does. Magellan advertises refundable, non-expiring funds; Jets.com forfeits unused hours after 24 months.

Jet card vs charter on demand, and jet card vs fractional ownership: what actually changes

The structural differences in the jet card vs charter decision, without the sales pitch:

• Rate: fixed for the length of the rate lock on a card, typically 12 months, versus quoted per trip on demand.
• Money up front: $183,000 to $215,000 prepaid on a card, versus nothing until you approve a specific trip.
• Availability: contractually guaranteed inside the callout at most card programs but not all, versus sourced from the market.
• Aircraft: a cabin category on a card, versus a specific tail with its year, refurbishment, WiFi, and safety audit named in the proposal.

For the three-model view, including the fractional ownership vs jet card memberships comparison, charter vs jet card vs fractional lays it out, and private jet charter cost covers what drives an on-demand quote. For the two biggest card sellers, see what a NetJets card costs per hour and how much Flexjet costs, and fractional jet ownership cost runs the residual math on a share.

Frequently asked questions about jet card cost

Is a jet card worth it?

A jet card is generally worth it for flyers who log 50 or more hours a year, book often on peak days or inside 48 hours, and value a fixed hourly rate over choosing the specific aircraft. Below 50 hours it usually is not, because daily minimums and prepaid capital push the true jet card cost per trip above on-demand charter.

How much does a 25-hour NetJets card cost, and what is a private jet card cost overall?

NetJets’ Card275 on the Phenom 300 was priced at $215,000 for 25 hours, or $8,600 per hour including 7.5 percent federal excise tax, when the lineup launched in January 2025. In late July 2026 NetJets limited new 25-hour card and lease sales, while existing cardholders can still renew, according to Private Jet Card Comparisons and SherpaReport.

What is the cheapest way to fly privately?

For most people who fly fewer than 50 hours a year, on-demand charter is the cheapest way to fly privately, because it requires no deposit, dues, or expiring hours. Empty leg flights, repositioning flights sold at a discount, can be cheaper still when your dates are flexible.

Do jet card hours expire?

Most jet card hours expire, and 24 months is the common term: NetJets gives cardholders 24 months to use theirs, and Jets.com forfeits unused hours after 24 months. Magellan Jets and Sentient Jet, as listed on their sites in 2026, advertise non-expiring hours. Expiry is a separate clause from the rate lock, which typically runs 12 months.

Is federal excise tax included in jet card pricing?

It depends on the program. NetJets quotes its Card275 rate of $8,600 per hour with the 7.5 percent federal excise tax included, while Sentient Jet and Flexjet list rates before FET and fuel surcharges. FET applies to domestic flights, so two cards with similar headline rates can differ by 7.5 percent once it is added.

The number that matters is yours, not the brochure’s

A jet card is a good product for the right calendar and an expensive one for the wrong calendar, and the brochure can’t tell you which you have. Your last twelve months of trips can. Run the Typical-Leg Test on your three most common legs, then count how many landed on peak days and how many you booked inside two days.

If most of your flying looks like that, buy the card. If it doesn’t, the real jet card cost is insurance you are prepaying for and will not use.

Want the same legs priced without the deposit?

Send me your typical leg and I’ll quote it the way we quote everything at Peak: no initiation fee, no annual dues, no prepaid block. You get a proposal in about 4 to 5 hours with two to five hand-picked options from the one to three dozen operator quotes we pull per trip, each naming the exact tail number, year, and ARGUS or Wyvern rating.

We quote on estimated flight time and hold it, so a weather reroute is our problem, not your bill. An Operator Vetting File sits between the operator quotes and your proposal, and a Total Flight Review sits between your signature and your departure. Both are set out on the jet card contract page.

Request a quote for your typical leg and set it beside your jet card cost math.