What Is the Difference Between a Dry Lease and a Wet Lease?

How it works

A lease of an aircraft can be structured in two very different ways, and the difference turns on who supplies the crew and who holds operational control of the flight.

In a dry lease, the aircraft owner or a leasing company hands over the aircraft itself, with no crew, no maintenance and no insurance included. The lessee must supply its own pilots, arrange its own maintenance, and hold its own authority to operate the aircraft — normally its own Air Operator Certificate (AOC) if the aircraft will carry passengers or cargo for hire. The lessee is treated, in law, as the operator of the aircraft for that period.

In a wet lease, the arrangement includes crew, maintenance and insurance along with the airframe. The lessor keeps operational control of the flight and continues to operate it under its own AOC, even though a different company's name may appear on the ticket or the charter agreement. The lessee is, in effect, buying capacity rather than an aircraft.

In the United States, the FAA treats this distinction as a question of operational control under 14 CFR Part 91 and 14 CFR Part 135. A dry-leased aircraft is operated by the lessee, who must hold the certificate appropriate to the flying it does — private under Part 91, or commercial under Part 135. A wet-leased aircraft continues to be operated by the certificate holder that supplies the crew, and large aircraft leases are subject to the FAA's truth-in-leasing disclosure requirements, which require the parties to state, in the lease, who has operational control. This describes the position as of September 2026.

In the United Kingdom and the European Union, the same distinction exists under UK retained law and EU Regulation 965/2012 (Air Operations). A wet lease is formally defined as the lease of an aircraft together with a crew supplied by another AOC holder, and it generally requires prior approval from the national authority — the CAA in the UK, or the relevant authority in an EASA member state — particularly where the crew-supplying operator is based outside the UK or EU. A dry lease requires the lessee to hold its own AOC and add the aircraft to it before commercial flights can be operated. These are the rules as they stood in September 2026, and the approval process can vary by member state.

For a charter client, the practical effect is that the aircraft named on a quote is not always operated by the company issuing the quote. An operator may wet-lease in a tail from another certificate holder to cover a gap in its own fleet, in which case the flight is legally conducted under the crew-supplying operator's AOC, safety record and audit history, not the marketing operator's.

Cost impact

Dry lease versus wet lease has little direct effect on a retail charter or jet card price, because it is a wholesale arrangement between operators, owners and lessors rather than a line on a client invoice. Its cost impact falls mainly on the lessee.

A dry lease usually carries a lower headline rate, because it does not include crew, maintenance or insurance; the lessee absorbs those costs separately, and they can be substantial for a jet-owning company or a fractional programme managing its own pilots. A wet lease usually carries a higher all-in rate, similar in structure to a charter price, because crew, maintenance, insurance and often fuel are bundled into the hourly or daily figure.

For a charter client, the term matters less for the number on the invoice and more for which safety record and certificate applies to the flight actually flown. Where an operator wet-leases in an aircraft to fulfil a booking, the flight's safety oversight and insurance belong to the crew-supplying operator, not necessarily the one that sold the trip. A buyer who wants to know who is actually flying the aircraft can ask the broker or operator to confirm whether the tail is on the marketing operator's own certificate or wet-leased in.

Example

Suppose, for illustration, a corporate owner buys a light jet and dry-leases it to a management company for an illustrative $180,000 a year. The management company supplies its own pilots, arranges maintenance and insurance, and operates the aircraft under its own AOC; those crew and upkeep costs sit outside the lease payment and are billed separately.

Compare a wet lease of a similar aircraft from an air taxi operator at an illustrative $3,200 per flight hour, inclusive of crew, maintenance and insurance. A company needing occasional lift for two years might find the wet lease cheaper overall, because it avoids the fixed cost of employing pilots and maintaining its own AOC, even though the per-hour figure looks higher than a dry lease's implied hourly cost.

For a charter client booking a single trip, the distinction rarely appears as a separate charge on the invoice; it surfaces instead in the operator's disclosure of which certificate the flight operates under, which determines which safety and audit record applies to that flight.