How Much Does an F-35 Cost? Price per Jet and per Hour in 2026

The F-35A is the cheapest variant at $92.0 million, the F-35B the most expensive at $121.4 million, and the F-35C sits between them at $110.8 million.

All three got dearer between production batches. In Lots 15 to 17 the F-35A cost $82.5 million, the F-35B $109 million and the F-35C $102.1 million. The rise to Lots 18 and 19 was 11.5% for the F-35A, 11.4% for the F-35B and 8.5% for the F-35C.

The F-35A is the conventional-runway version flown by the U.S. Air Force and most export customers. The F-35B carries a lift fan behind the cockpit and a swivelling exhaust so it can land vertically on small carriers such as the UK’s and Italy’s; that hardware is why it costs the most. The F-35C has larger, folding wings and a strengthened undercarriage for catapult launches and arrested landings on U.S. Navy carriers.

Sources disagree mainly because they count different things: airframe only, airframe plus engine, or a whole package with spares and training.

The Lots 18 and 19 contract itself covers only the airframes Lockheed builds. Defense News reported on September 30, 2025, that the Pentagon finalized the deal for about 296 jets at a combined value of about $24.3 billion. That works out to roughly $82.4 million per airframe across all three variants. The Pratt & Whitney F135 engine is bought separately by the government and handed to Lockheed, which is why the program office’s flyaway figure of $92.0 million for an F-35A is higher.

Export prices are higher still because they bundle far more than the aircraft. Saudi Arabia’s package, approved by the State Department on September 17, covers 48 F-35As, a spare engine, secure communications, spare parts and support equipment for an estimated $24.3 billion, The Aviationist reported. That is about $506 million per jet on paper. Germany’s approved package for 35 jets was valued at $8.4 billion, about $240 million each. Neither number is the price of one aircraft.

Flying an F-35A costs roughly $34,000 to $47,000 an hour, depending on who does the counting and which year’s dollars they use.

The F-35 Joint Program Office says its cost per flying hour fell from $86,800 in 2014 to $33,600 in 2022, measured in constant 2012 dollars, Air & Space Forces Magazine reported in April 2024. The Pentagon’s long-standing target was $25,000 an hour by fiscal 2025, a goal its own cost assessors said in 2019 they saw no path to reaching.

The Congressional Budget Office reached a less flattering picture in June 2025. It found that the F-35A’s operating and support costs were similar to the F-15E’s, lower than the F-22’s and higher than the F-16C/D’s. A King’s College London analysis of the CBO data puts the F-35A at about $47,000 an hour in 2023 dollars, against about $32,000 for the F-16C/D and about $80,000 for the F-22. CBO also found that a seven-year-old F-35A was about as available for missions as a 36-year-old F-16C/D, a point our comparison of the F-35 and Eurofighter Typhoon explores.

The Pentagon estimates the U.S. Air Force will pay about $6.6 million a year to operate and sustain each F-35A, well above its original target of $4.1 million.

That figure comes from the Government Accountability Office’s April 2024 report on F-35 sustainment. The program office counts it differently: it says the annual cost per jet fell from $9.4 million in 2014 to $6.2 million in 2022, in constant 2012 dollars. Either way, over a service life of several decades each jet costs several times its purchase price to keep flying.

The whole F-35 program is now estimated at about $1.93 trillion over its life, down from $2.06 trillion in the previous report, Breaking Defense reported on August 28.

That lifetime figure, from the Pentagon’s latest Selected Acquisition Report, includes fuel, personnel, sustainment and future upgrades across roughly six decades. The report also brings forward the F-35A’s expected retirement, to 2083 from 2088 in the 2023 report. The cost of buying the jets moved the other way. Development and procurement for all planned aircraft rose to about $536.3 billion, from $485.2 billion, with about $19 billion of the increase in development and about $32 billion in procurement.

Sustainment is the largest share. GAO found that the estimate for operating and supporting the fleet rose 44%, from $1.1 trillion in 2018 to $1.58 trillion in 2023. The U.S. plans to buy nearly 2,500 F-35s in all.

The F-35 is expensive because it packs stealth, a powerful engine and a large sensor and software suite into one airframe, and because keeping that system ready costs more than building it.

Stealth coatings, internal weapons bays and the sensors that fuse radar, infrared and electronic-warfare data are costly to build and to maintain. The F-35B adds its lift-fan system on top. The latest acquisition increase came partly from spare parts bought to raise readiness and from a new advanced radar, according to the Selected Acquisition Report figures reported by Breaking Defense.

Running costs also depend on how the fleet is supported. GAO’s 2024 report said the services plan to fly the F-35 less than first estimated, partly because of reliability problems, and urged the Pentagon to manage spare parts better and to rethink which sustainment tasks the government and contractors each handle. Russia has never published a unit price for its Su-57, as our Su-57 vs F-35 comparison explains, so no like-for-like price comparison with Moscow’s stealth fighter exists.