The 75% Rule: Why North America Owns Three Quarters of Global Business Aviation

TL;DR

North America accounted for 75.49% of global business jet flights in April 2026 — 188,597 of 249,830 worldwide departures. Over the seven months from October 2025 through April 2026, that share has held in a narrow 74.6%–77.4% band. Europe contributed 13.07% in April; the rest of the world made up the balance. The narrative that "international markets are catching up" is not supported by the data. The concentration is structural — driven by U.S. tax treatment of business aircraft, a U.S.-domiciled fractional ownership market, the density of Fortune 500 corporate headquarters, and an airport infrastructure that no other region replicates. None of those four factors is changing fast enough to move the share materially this decade.

Section 1 — The Numbers

VOLO Insights tracks every business jet sector globally via the Avi-Go ADS-B receiver network. Here is North America's share month-by-month for the past seven months:

Month	Global flights	NA flights	NA share
Apr 2026	249,830	188,597	75.49%
Mar 2026	360,597	273,674	75.90%
Feb 2026	211,153	163,330	77.35%
Jan 2026	263,595	201,356	76.39%
Dec 2025	291,272	221,420	76.02%
Nov 2025	287,715	220,932	76.79%
Oct 2025	300,697	225,583	75.02%
2025 FY	3,515,618	2,623,975	74.64%

Two observations. First, the seven-month standard deviation of North America's share is roughly 0.9 percentage points — exceptionally tight for any market metric tracked in real time. Second, the lowest share in our 15-month tracking window was 73.4% in July 2025, when European summer traffic peaked. The highest was 77.4% in February 2026, when Europe was at its annual quietest. The structural floor sits around 73%; the structural ceiling sits around 78%.

Section 2 — Why the Tax Code Matters More Than People Think

U.S. Internal Revenue Code Section 162 allows ordinary and necessary business expenses to be deducted, including the costs of operating a business aircraft, when those costs are documented as serving a business purpose. The relevant rules — bonus depreciation under Section 168(k), per-diem entertainment disallowances under Section 274, the Sutherland Lumber-Southwest formula for personal-use imputed income — are complex, but the net effect for a profitable U.S. corporation is that the after-tax cost of business aircraft ownership is materially lower than the headline operating expense.

This is not the case in most of Europe or Asia. The European Union does not provide an equivalent operating expense deduction structure for business aircraft, and many member states impose VAT on aircraft acquisition and ongoing operations that the U.S. does not. The United Kingdom withdrew from a comparable scheme after Brexit and has not restored it. China and Japan tax business aircraft as luxury goods. The result: the same transatlantic CEO who would deduct $4 million in flight costs against U.S. corporate income would face a meaningfully different tax position operating from Frankfurt or Singapore.

The flight volume gap that follows is not because European executives travel less — it is because the financial calculation of charter versus airline first-class differs by region, and the calculation runs more often in favor of the business jet inside the United States.

Section 3 — The Fractional Market Is American

NetJets (1,100+ aircraft, U.S.-domiciled), Flexjet (270+, U.S.), Wheels Up (200+, U.S.), Airshare (50+, U.S.), and PlaneSense (30+, U.S.) collectively account for roughly 17% of all U.S. business jet movements. The European fractional market, by comparison, is a fraction of the U.S. equivalent — NetJets Europe operates approximately 90 aircraft, and there is no second-place European fractional operator at meaningful scale.

This matters for share concentration in two ways. First, fractional flights are non-discretionary: an owner who has bought 50 contractual hours per year will fly those hours regardless of macroeconomic conditions, generating a stable demand floor. Second, fractional fleets pre-position aircraft at high-demand airports, generating efficient utilization that drives down per-hour cost — making fractional ownership economically rational at lower wealth thresholds in the U.S. than in any other region. The result is that fractional ownership is a mass-market product in the U.S. (target customer: $5M+ net worth) while remaining an ultra-luxury product in Europe (target customer: $50M+ net worth). The user pool is roughly 10x larger in the United States.

Section 4 — Airport Infrastructure

The United States has more than 5,000 paved-runway airports capable of handling business jets, of which approximately 600 are equipped with full-service FBO facilities. Canada has roughly 200 such airports, Mexico approximately 80. The European Union, despite a roughly comparable population and GDP, has approximately 1,800 paved-runway airports business-jet-capable, of which 250 have FBO facilities. China has roughly 250 business-jet-capable airports despite a larger population than North America and the EU combined.

This is not a small matter. Charter demand is gated by where you can land. A U.S. business traveler going from Chicago to a Wisconsin manufacturing plant has 12 viable airports within 30 minutes of the destination. A German traveler going from Munich to a Bavarian industrial site has 2 or 3. A Chinese traveler going from Shanghai to a regional manufacturing center may have one — or none. Charter aircraft are sold the way taxis are sold: on convenience versus the alternative. Where there is no viable airport at the destination, there is no charter demand to begin with, and the alternative (commercial airline plus ground transport) wins by default.

Section 5 — Corporate Density and Wealth Distribution

The four factors above are infrastructure conditions. The fifth is who is actually flying.

The United States is home to 139 of the world's 500 largest companies by revenue (Fortune Global 500, 2025), more than any other country and more than the next two countries combined. Roughly 65% of those U.S. headquarters cluster in 12 metropolitan areas — New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco Bay, Boston, Seattle, Minneapolis, Detroit, and Charlotte — each of which has at least one major business aviation airport. The geography is dense, and the air corridors between these metros generate predictable repeat charter and fractional traffic.

On the wealth side, the United States is home to approximately 22.4 million millionaires (43% of the global total) and roughly 45,000 individuals with $50M+ in net worth. China has roughly 6.4 million millionaires; Germany has 3.6 million; the United Kingdom has 3.1 million. The distribution is not just larger in the U.S. — it is also more concentrated in metro areas with mature business aviation infrastructure.

What This Means

For operators: the price of a Challenger 350 sector in Teterboro–Palm Beach is the global benchmark, because that corridor sees more flights of that aircraft type than any equivalent corridor in any other region. European and Asian charter brokers price relative to the U.S. benchmark with regional adjustments — not the other way around. This is unlikely to change.

For aircraft buyers: if you are basing operations in North America, the resale and charter-back market is structurally deeper for nearly every model. If you are basing operations in Europe or Asia, expect to specialize earlier — fewer aircraft types have meaningful resale liquidity in those regions, and charter-back hours are harder to source.

For analysts watching for inflection: the metric that would matter is whether Europe's share crosses 15% in a non-summer month, or whether Rest of World ever crosses 13% at all. Until either of those happens, the share story is "stable concentration." The data has not produced either signal in the past 15 months.

For the full April 2026 dataset including airport-level rankings and operator market share, see VOLO Insights — April 2026 Global Business Aviation Report. For long-term regional comparison, see North America entity page.

Methodology Note

Flight counts cited are sourced from the VOLO Insights monthly Global Business Aviation Reports, aggregating ADS-B sector data from the Avi-Go global receiver network and cross-validated against FAA records (North America) and Eurocontrol filings (Europe). North America is defined as the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Europe is defined as the European Economic Area plus the United Kingdom and Switzerland. Rest of World covers all other countries. Tax treatment claims reflect general tax-code structure and should not be interpreted as tax advice for any specific transaction.