Where margin sits in business aviation services, and why buyers cannot see it
Business aviation runs on invoices that few buyers can read. A catering total, a fuel line, a trip support figure: each may hold several costs from several parties, aggregated into a single number.
This study sets out where margin sits in those invoices, across the United States, Canada and Mexico. It is built on public sources, and every claim carries a label showing how well it is evidenced.
It is written for the dispatchers, flight departments and brokers who pay these invoices, and it ends with four questions any of them can put to a supplier.
No rule requires a business aviation service supplier to disclose its fees. The only US federal rule on ancillary fee disclosure covered scheduled airlines, and it was vacated in February 2026. Business aviation was never in scope.
When a federal auditor checked, disclosure failed. Of forty-five fixed-base operators surveyed by the Government Accountability Office in 2026, sixteen said they charged mandatory fees beyond fuel. Not one of the sixteen had complete and accurate information about those fees across the four online sources checked.
Eight years of voluntary transparency produced roughly a quarter of the market. An industry campaign launched in 2018 with support from more than three hundred organisations reached about 25% of US operators by 2021. The attempt to make disclosure mandatory was removed from the 2024 FAA reauthorisation.
In catering, the dominant compensation model leaves no trace on the buyer's invoice. Where an intermediary is paid by the kitchen rather than by the buyer, the commission is priced into the food and the buyer pays it without a line to read. The service is described as free to the buyer. It is not free.
Payment fees are the one charge a buyer can verify, and the gap is often wide. Processor pricing is public. Payment fees charged in this market reach the high single digits and occasionally double figures, against processing costs that are typically lower. The difference is revenue presented as a bank charge.
Outside the United States, the data does not exist. Neither Canada nor Mexico has published service fee data, a disclosure programme, or a measure of network pricing. Any figure quoted for those markets is extrapolated from US sources.
This study examines five mechanisms by which margin enters a business aviation services invoice: catering commission, fuel spread, trip support pass-through, currency conversion, and payment fees. It covers the United States, Canada and Mexico.
It is built entirely on public sources, each named in the text. No supplier, kitchen, handler, fixed-base operator or coordinator is named. This study is not an investigation into any company, and none of the mechanisms described requires wrongdoing by anyone to produce the effect observed.
The evidence is uneven, and the study says so rather than smoothing it over. Fuel pricing is documented in public studies. Catering margins are documented nowhere. Every substantive claim therefore carries a label.
A public, verifiable source. The number following the label refers to the source list at the end of the document.
One case, one practitioner account, or a trade source with no underlying data.
A reasonable deduction that no public source establishes directly.
Where verification failed, the study records the failure. A study of transparency that overstated its own evidence would defeat itself.
The author is a services broker operating in this market and publishes its own pricing in full. That pricing is reproduced in the annex, so it can be tested against the same questions the study puts to everyone else.
A single trip may touch a kitchen, a delivery service, a handler, a fuel supplier, an into-plane operator, an airport authority and a national navigation service provider, across two or three countries, each with its own billing conventions. Somewhere in that chain, several costs are aggregated into one figure. The aggregation is where visibility is lost.
Practitioners who run trip support desks describe the mechanics openly. In a July 2026 piece in AvBuyer, Graham Jarvis put the question to several of them. Ryan Frankhouser of Prime Trip Support attributed unexpected costs to fragmented international supply chains, local airport practices and a general absence of transparency. Colin Cao of Avi-Go pointed to missions that change once the aircraft is moving, to pass-through ambiguity, to bundled wording, and to markups applied by local third parties. Abdul Charafeddin of UAS made the structural point most directly: most trip support providers act as fuel resellers with a margin built in, and his position was that such a margin has to be communicated upfront.
Whether any given aggregation is deliberate is not a question this study can answer, and it is not the important one. A margin you cannot see works the same way whether it was hidden or simply never separated. The buyer cannot tell how much the intermediary earns, cannot judge whether it is reasonable, and cannot compare two offers on the same basis. That result holds regardless of intent, and it is the norm in this market rather than the exception.
02 · The regulatory vacuumIt would be reasonable to assume that fee disclosure in aviation is regulated. In business aviation it is not.
The clearest recent attempt concerned scheduled airlines. The US Department of Transportation published a rule in April 2024 requiring airlines and ticket agents to disclose baggage and change fees. Its scope never extended to Part 135 operators, charter brokers or the service suppliers around them. It was stayed in July 2024, vacated by the Fifth Circuit in February 2026 on procedural grounds, and in July 2026 the Department restored the prior rules in the Code of Federal Regulations.
The one federal action aimed at ground service pricing is a study rather than a rule. In August 2026 the Government Accountability Office published the review mandated by the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024. Investigators posed as pilots and contacted forty-five fixed-base operators across forty general aviation airports. Business aviation sits inside general aviation, and these operators are the same companies that handle business jets, so the audit measures the same infrastructure and the same disclosure practices. Fuel prices were widely available and broadly consistent. Required fees were not. Of the sixteen operators who said they charged mandatory fees beyond fuel, none had complete and accurate information about those fees across the four sources checked.
The fee levels the audit recorded, ramp fees between eleven and forty-five dollars and facility fees between ten and eighty-eight dollars, reflect the aircraft type the investigators presented and are not the levels charged on a business aircraft. What carries across is not the size of the fee but the fact that it is not published, and nothing indicates that disclosure improves as the amounts rise.
The industry route has been voluntary, and its results are measurable. In October 2018, six associations launched a campaign asking operators to publish their fees online, and it gathered support from more than three hundred organisations. By April 2021, AOPA estimated that around a quarter of the roughly 3,300 US operators had published fees voluntarily. Three quarters had not. An attempt to convert the campaign into a legal obligation was removed from the 2024 FAA reauthorisation and replaced by the GAO study cited above.
Neither Canada nor Mexico has an equivalent disclosure campaign or requirement for service fees.
INFERENCE, based on the absence of any such programme in the public record rather than on confirmation that none exists.
The problem is publicly acknowledged, has been audited by a federal auditor, and remains unaddressed. Waiting for a rule is not a strategy.
03 · Catering: the commission that leaves no traceCatering is where the distance between what a buyer believes they are paying and what they actually pay is widest. There are two ways for an intermediary to be paid on a catering order, and they are not equally visible.
The first is a fee charged to the buyer. It appears on the invoice as a line. The buyer can read it, divide it by the total, and check the rate. Whether it is fair is then a judgement the buyer is equipped to make.
A documented example: a boxed chicken sandwich meal invoiced at $177.05 at a US mountain-resort airport, broken down as $51.98 for the food, $16.95 in airport fees, $8.11 in tax and a $100 service fee. The figures were published in October 2024 by Private Jet Card Comparisons, sourced from a charter broker who had queried the charge. The network explained the fee as covering sourcing, follow-up and order confirmation. The same broker reported re-sourcing an equivalent meal directly for $67.
The second is a commission charged to the supplier. This one is invisible by construction, and it is the model a buyer is most likely to encounter without knowing it.
The intermediary takes a percentage from the kitchen rather than from the buyer. To the buyer the service looks free, because there is no fee line. But a kitchen that pays a commission on every order prices for it. The commission is absorbed into the menu price. The buyer pays it inside the cost of the food, with no line to read and nothing to divide.
When an intermediary is free to the buyer, someone else is paying it, and that someone passes it on.
A platform with staff and infrastructure is funded by one side of the transaction or the other. There is no third possibility.
The second consequence matters more than the money. An intermediary paid by the supplier has a financial reason to prefer suppliers who pay more. An intermediary paid by the buyer does not. The question that separates the two is not what the fee is but who pays it, because that determines whose interests are served when a supplier is chosen on the buyer's behalf.
The limits of the evidence should be stated plainly. No public source establishes an average catering markup for this market, in any of the three countries. This study will not invent one. What it can establish is that both structures exist, that the second leaves no trace on the document the buyer receives, and that the absence of a fee line is not evidence of the absence of a fee.
Fuel is the best-documented part of this market, and the documented margin is legitimate.
Three parties can take a margin between the refinery and the tank, and they should not be confused with one another. The fixed-base operator sells the fuel and delivers it into the aircraft. A reseller, whether a contract fuel programme or a trip support provider, may sit between the FBO and the flight operator. The airport itself takes a levy on every gallon moved. What this study is concerned with is what the flight operator pays, which is the sum of all three.
The FBO's retail margin is documented, and it is legitimate. It funds the hangar, the ramp, the line staff and the opening hours. The National Air Transportation Association has put average jet fuel margin in a range of roughly $1.30 to $1.60 per gallon, and has indicated that below about $1.10 per gallon the operation struggles to break even. An Airport Cooperative Research Program study published through the Transportation Research Board records a target markup around $2.00 per gallon on jet fuel, alongside real cases showing considerably thinner margins in practice. These figures describe the price paid by the flight operator. They are the supplier's margin on its customer, not an internal airport accounting margin.
Wholesale benchmarks are public and volatile. The Argus US Jet Fuel Index, a daily average across four major US hubs, stood at about $2.90 per gallon in early July 2026, and the index has traded above $4.00 at other points in the year. Over the same period the average price US airlines actually paid was $4.09 per gallon in May 2026, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Posted retail prices at business aviation terminals run well above either figure.
The spread between posted and paid is real and widely used. Contract fuel programmes commonly reduce the price by something in the range of $0.50 to $1.50 per gallon against the posted price, and most fuel is not sold at the posted number. Two further layers sit on top. Into-plane fees are charged for the physical delivery of another company's fuel into the aircraft. Flowage fees, typically a few cents to a quarter per gallon, go to the airport.
Airport flowage fee and into-plane fee apply between the FBO and the tank; the airport levy attaches at every point fuel is moved.
The least documented layer is the reseller. As the practitioner quoted in section 1 put it, most trip support providers act as fuel resellers with a margin built in. That margin appears in no public source. It is not posted like an FBO price, not published like a wholesale benchmark, not regulated like an airport levy. No range for it can be given here. It is the only link in the fuel chain where a buyer has no comparison point at all.
The rest is not concealed. The posted price is posted, the benchmark is published, the fee structure is described in trade material. The difficulty is reconciliation: knowing which price was actually applied, what was added between the benchmark and the invoice, and who received each part of it. A buyer holding an invoice and a published benchmark still cannot answer those three questions, and that is the finding.
05 · Trip support: the pass-through that cannot be auditedTrip support invoices aggregate. One figure may contain government charges, airport charges, handler charges, coordination work and fuel, sourced from several parties. The aggregation is where auditability disappears.
The practitioners quoted in section 1 converge on the same remedy. Ask for the quote broken out by category: government fees, airport fees, handler fees, trip support fees, fuel, crew logistics, passenger services. Then compare the final invoice against the original estimate, line by line, and ask what moved.
Two structural cases show that opacity does not require intent.
In Mexico, navigation charges are calculated by wingspan and great-circle distance, and the entity that provides the service does not issue invoices for them. Operators calculate the amount themselves and pay through a Mexican bank. The agency is expressly barred from issuing invoices for its own services, which puts the burden of calculating, reporting and paying onto the operator. In practice, for flights into Mexico, these charges are settled at the time of the fuel uplift, and therefore inside another total. The billing architecture does not produce a separate document, so one is rarely provided.
That vacuum creates a margin layer of its own. Operator-facing procedural material circulated by a local provider prices the service fee for settling these charges on a client's behalf at 20%. The charge itself is a known, calculable sum owed to the state. The fee added on top is neither.
In Canada, air navigation charges are set by a private not-for-profit corporation under a federal statute, tied to cost recovery and subject to regulatory supervision. The framework is public and the rates are published. Whether they reach the buyer's invoice as an identifiable line depends entirely on the coordinator in the middle.
The conclusion is the same in both cases. The absence of a line does not mean the absence of a charge, and a pass-through that cannot be audited functions as a margin.
06 · Payment fees: the charge a buyer can testOf the five mechanisms, this is the only one a buyer can settle without cooperation from anyone, because the underlying costs are published.
Payment processors post their rates. Anyone can look up what a given processor charges a merchant to accept a card, for a given card type and currency corridor. The test follows directly. Ask what the supplier's processor charges them, then compare it with the payment fee on the invoice. A payment fee equal to the processing cost is a pass-through. A payment fee materially above it is a service fee that has not been labelled as one.
The gap can be substantial. Payment fees in the mid to high single digits, occasionally into double figures, appear on invoices in this market, against processing costs that are typically lower. Where the gap exists, it is revenue. Earning revenue is legitimate. Presenting it as a bank charge is not, and a buyer told that a fee is what the bank takes has been told something that can be checked.
One clarification, because it is routinely misunderstood. Card surcharging is regulated, but the applicable rule depends on the jurisdiction where the merchant's payment account is held, not on where the customer is or which card they hold. Some jurisdictions cap surcharges, some prohibit them, and processors enforce these rules contractually. In Mexico, card surcharging is prohibited. A reform of the Ley Federal de Protección al Consumidor adopted unanimously in April 2024 bars a supplier from passing any card-related charge to the customer, and article 7 Bis requires the displayed price to be the final price, commissions included. PROFECO enforces this with fines ranging from a few hundred to over two million pesos, and also treats a discount offered for paying in cash as a disguised version of the same charge.
No single percentage works as a universal ceiling, and a fee that is legitimate in one configuration may be prohibited in another. What travels across all of them is the comparison between the fee charged and the cost incurred.
07 · What the public record does not supportMost of the evidence above is American. This section records where it stops, country by country, because a study presenting uniform confidence across three markets would misrepresent its own basis.
United States. The strongest evidence base. Fuel margins are studied, fee disclosure has been audited, and the regulatory history is public. Even here, there is no published figure for average catering markup and no dataset of service fees.
Canada. The structures are documented, the pricing is not. Air navigation charges are public and cost-regulated. The federal fuel excise tax, normally four cents per litre on aviation fuel, has been suspended at zero since 20 April 2026. The suspension was extended on 2 September 2026 to run through 31 January 2027, followed by half rates from 1 February to 31 March 2027 and full rates from 1 April 2027.
Against that, this study found no public data on service fee levels, no fee transparency programme, and no measure of contract fuel network density. Any US figure carried across the border is an extrapolation.
Mexico. The most concentrated market and the thinnest data. A state entity supplies the large majority of domestic jet fuel and dominates into-plane services. An administrative charge on storage and supply, the CSAC, is levied by that entity inside the fuel price. Its discount schedule was tightened in two phases during 2026, from 15 February and then from 1 July: large buyers who had held discounts near 99% were moved towards 40%, and IATA put the additional cost at $56 million for airlines operating in the country and asked for the measure to be withdrawn. The charge falls hardest on low-volume and foreign operators, categories that include business aviation.
Navigation charges are structurally difficult to see, for the reason set out in section 5. Standard value added tax is 16%, and its application to specific fuel uplift and ground handling line items follows the general rule, though no tax authority determination naming those items explicitly was located.
Publishing this section costs the study nothing it was entitled to claim.
Four questionsThe findings above can be acted on without waiting for anyone. Four questions establish most of what a buyer needs to know about any coordinator.
If the answer is the supplier, or if the service is free to the buyer, the cost sits inside the quoted price and the intermediary has a financial interest in which supplier is chosen. A useful answer names the payer in one word.
Not the total. The underlying document. A coordinator working on a published fee can answer without difficulty.
Then compare it with the payment fee on the invoice. This is the one figure verifiable from public sources in minutes.
Government charges, airport charges, handling, coordination, fuel, crew logistics, separately. Then check what moved, and ask what moved it.
A supplier who can answer all four in writing is transparent. A supplier who cannot is not, whatever the marketing says.
Annex · The author's own pricingThis study was produced by Skystar Aviation Services, a broker operating in the market it describes. The four questions above apply to it as much as to anyone else, so the answers are set out here. All of it is published at skystar.flights/pricing, with no account required.
The kitchen cost is invoiced at what the kitchen invoiced. Delivery and handling are passed at cost, on their own lines. There is no markup inside any item line. Fuel: the fuel supplier invoices the client directly, and Skystar invoices only its coordination fee. Card processing is what the processor charges to take the payment, with no margin on that line; bank transfer is available at no charge, so the fee can be declined rather than being a condition of payment.
No commission is taken from suppliers. Payment comes from the client, on a visible line, which is what allows a supplier to be chosen on merit. The rate is identical on a $500 order and a $20,000 order, because publishing a rate and discounting it privately would make the publication meaningless.
A worked example on a real order shape, a Challenger 350 at Teterboro with seven passengers, is published in full on the same page: kitchen subtotal, coordination fee, service total, card processing, invoice total.
This is not presented as the only defensible model. A supplier-funded intermediary can serve clients well, and a bundled price is not automatically a worse deal. The claim is narrower and harder to argue with: a buyer should be able to tell which model they are dealing with, and today, in most of this market, they cannot.
SourcesFree Skystar account. It also gives full access to the dashboard, including airport fee data.