Comparing F-35 and Typhoon Operating and Support Costs

Background

The 2025 Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report on the ‘Availability, Use, and Operating and Support Costs of F-35 Fighter Aircraft’ showed that progress had been made in reducing the cost per flying hour of the F-35A fleet, which in 2023 fell below $50k for the first time. The same report also documents the cost of operating and supporting other US Fighter Aircraft. On a cost-per-flying-hour basis, the F-16C/D is the cheapest at $32k (in 2023 dollars), with the F-15C/D, F-15E, and F-35A all in the $45k-$55k range. The outlier is the F-22 at $80k per hour.

Managing to operate and support the 5^th Generation F-35A aircraft for $47k an hour appears quite an achievement, especially when the same platform’s costs were nearly 50% higher in 2018. There are reports from April 2026 that the Typhoon costs between $60k and $65k per flight hour, which is 20% to 30% higher than the F-35. This has led several online commentators to criticise the perceived expense of operating and supporting the Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft and to speculate about the impact of a twin-engine design and of inefficiencies in multinational programmes. However, confusingly, an article on the same website from March 2026 quotes a value of $20k to $25k per flight hour for Typhoon, compared with $33k for F-35. This gives rise to three questions:

1. What concrete evidence is there about the operating and support costs for Typhoon?
2. How much effect should we expect the scale of the F-35 programme to have on operating and support costs?
3. Based on these insights, where should the GCAP programme concentrate its efforts to optimise the in-service costs?

Typhoon Operating and Support Costs

As the Typhoon aircraft is operated by all four partner nations (UK, Germany, Italy, and Spain) and by five export customers (Austria, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia), there is a wide range of areas from which cost data might be collected. To cover all these potential sources and languages, MS Copilot was used to identify data sources and the quoted values. It identified a good range of independent sources that confirmed the $60k to $65k figure. For completeness, the quoted sources were followed up to verify the original data sources.

The top source cited was a news site that used the unsubstantiated data source identified in the introduction. Worse still, the article's wording appears to have led Copilot to believe that the data was substantiated by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) or the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). It then provided references for and links to non-existent GAO and CBO documents. A similar pattern emerged across most of the sources it quoted and linked to. When pressed about the provenance of these incorrect sources, it blamed a range of posts on discussion forums, again none of which could be found.

Despite these disappointments, a 2013 report from the Austrian court of auditors was identified, which quotes costs per flight hour of EUR 56k for 2010 and EUR 63k for 2011 (roughly equivalent to $60k and $70k). The data from which these calculations were made are tabulated below:

Table 1 - Austrian Typhoon Operating Costs and Flight Hours

This data indicates that in 2010 the cost per flight hour was EUR 27k, and in 2011 it was EUR 81k. The figures quoted above (EUR 56k and EUR 63k) are the cumulative totals for the whole programme, up to and including the year quoted. If the same calculation is made using the F-35 data in the CBO report for the first five years of the programme, a figure of $103k per flight hour is obtained.

There are various UK sources, such as parliamentary questions and freedom of information requests, which provide partial answers; however, the current UK government policy is not to publish cost-per-flight-hour figures for commercial reasons. Therefore, the widely misunderstood Austrian data appears to be the only complete public domain statement of Typhoon operating and support costs.

Thus, whilst commentators may speculate that factors such as twin engines and inefficiencies in multinational programmes increase Typhoon’s operating and support costs and that better programme management and general economies of scale reduce those for the F-35, there is little evidence that Typhoon is more expensive to own, let alone the reasons for any difference.

Even though we cannot make direct comparisons between the cost of the Typhoon and F-35 programmes, we can still examine the likely impact of the different scales of the two programmes and the relative importance of operating and support costs.

How much impact could programme scale have on operating and support costs

As the CBO report does not report how the operating and support costs scale with aircraft fleet size and activity level, we shall make some modelling assumptions. We shall assume that three cost elements are present:

1. The fixed costs of operating and supporting the first aircraft. These include significant ongoing engineering and design effort, aircrew and engineering training syllabi, software maintenance, and obsolescence management.
2. The cost of supporting each additional aircraft in the fleet and keeping them ready to fly. This includes infrastructure, indirect personnel, and training costs, calendar-based scheduled maintenance, etc.
3. The additional costs of the flying hours undertaken. This includes fuel, spares and consumables, direct personnel costs and a share of activity-driven scheduled maintenance.

Further, if, from 2021 to 2023, each of these costs was roughly constant (in 2023 dollars), the information in the CBO report allows us to estimate the values for each element of the F-35A support cost.

1. Fixed cost of operating and supporting the first aircraft is $1 bn
2. The cost of supporting each additional aircraft in the fleet is $500k
3. Additional cost per flying hour is $30k.

These estimated values produce results within 2% of the total annual support cost and thus appear reasonable.

Now, we use these assumptions to assess ‘How much would it cost the RAF to operate and support their Typhoon aircraft, if the base costs were the same as the F-35 costs?’

As the Eurofighter Typhoon is a multinational, multilingual project, the fixed costs might be higher than for a single-nation, monolingual enterprise. However, we assume the annual F-35A value of $1Bn applies, and that the UK pays only one-third of this total, amounting to $334M per annum.

The RAF has received 137 Typhoon aircraft, but a number have been withdrawn for various reasons. To allow for this, we shall assume a current fleet size of 120 aircraft, giving an annual ‘per aircraft’ cost of $60M.

Finally, we observe that the RAF Typhoon fleet flies about 20,500 flying hours per annum, which contributes $615M in ‘per hour’ costs.

Totalling these up, we arrive at a grand total of $1.009Bn, which gives a per-flight-hour rate of $49,200. This is very close to the F-35A value.

Thus, we observe that, if we assume the component costs of the Typhoon operating and support enterprise are the same as those we have imputed for F-35A, then the different scales of the project do not currently have a significant impact on the total cost per flight hour.

Potential Insights for the Global Combat Air Platform (GCAP)

The operation of the whole Typhoon enterprise is now well established, so making changes that have a significant impact on the operating costs is likely to be very difficult. However, the GCAP support enterprise is still being created. Therefore, some insights into where GCAP should concentrate its efforts to optimise the support solution design might be useful.

Figure 1, which uses the Typhoon fleet size and activity level, indicates that for a medium-sized aircraft fleet, which is being actively used, the direct ‘per hour’ costs are the most significant element, with the ‘fixed’ costs also being high.

Figure 2 illustrates that if the annual flying task is halved, but the same number of aircraft are owned and the same proportion of the fixed cost is attributed, then the ‘per hour’ costs are reduced, so that they are similar in magnitude to the ‘fixed’ costs. Additionally, these changes have reduced overall annual spend by 30%, which is a clear bonus. However, if one wished to revert from the lower to the higher activity level, it would be likely to take five years to make the change, as a significant investment would be required in recruiting and training manpower, refurbishing or constraining infrastructure, etc. Temporarily reducing flying rates while retaining the ability to rapidly surge to the full rate would only reduce fuel and spares costs, resulting in a 5% overall cost reduction.

Finally, Figure 3 illustrates what would be expected if the fleet were worked very hard and an annual flying task of 41,000 flying hours was achieved (this activity level could be tricky to achieve on a 4^th-generation platform, let alone a 6^th-generation platform).

These three figures clearly indicate that the harder an aircraft fleet is intended to be worked, the more important it is to optimise the ‘per hour’ operating and support costs.

There could be cost-saving arguments in favour of buying the aircraft, but minimising actual usage rates would only lead to minimal savings, assuming there is still a requirement to surge to higher usage levels in times of tension. Concentrating on providing an operating and support enterprise that allows aircraft to be flown hard at an affordable cost, and then actually flying the aircraft at this rate would have the advantage of both controlling the ‘per hour’ costs and providing more flying hours to amortise the fixed costs over.