Flight School Fuel Surcharge: Raise the Rate or Add One?

GlobalAir put the August 2026 national average for 100LL at $7.45 a gallon across 3,226 reporting FBOs. If your rental rates were built around $6 fuel, a trainer burning 8 or 9 gallons an hour is giving away $11 to $13 every time the Hobbs turns over. If you expect fuel to come back down, add a flight school fuel surcharge tied to a published base price and each airplane's measured burn, and take it off when the price falls. If the move looks permanent, fold it into the rate at your next review. Either way, publish the formula.

1. Surcharge or rate increase: what do schools actually do?

They split almost down the middle. When fuel spiked in 2022, the Flight School Association of North America ran a quick survey of its contacts. 83% of schools said they had raised aircraft rates because of fuel. 51% did it with a fuel surcharge and about 48% raised the base rental rate. For single-engine airplanes, the most common increase was $6 to $10 per hour (38% of schools), followed by $11 to $15 (27%).

Jason Blair, writing in AOPA's flight school business newsletter that year, made the practical case for the surcharge. It's easy to add, easy to remove when prices fall, and customers get it because they're paying more at the pump too. His one condition was advance notice with an explanation, not a surprise line at the bottom of the bill.

Our rule of thumb: a surcharge is for a move you expect to reverse within a year. If you've carried the same surcharge through two rate reviews, treat it as part of the rate. Rebuild the rate on the new fuel price and reset the surcharge base to match.

2. How to calculate a fuel surcharge per hour

The formula is one line: surcharge per billed hour = (current fuel price - base fuel price) x gallons burned per billed hour. The arguments come from the three inputs.

• Base price. The fuel price your current rate already assumes. If you can't say what that number is, dig out the spreadsheet you built the rate from. Without it, students have no way to check the surcharge.
• Burn per billed hour. Use your own fuel logs, not the POH cruise figure. Divide gallons pumped into the airplane by the hours you actually billed over the same period. Pattern work and long ground runs burn differently than cross-countries, and if you bill tach the number per tach hour comes out higher than per Hobbs hour.
• Current price. Say exactly where it comes from (your own pump price, your delivered cost, or a public index) and which day of the month you read it.

A worked example

Say a 172's rate was built on $6.00 fuel. Over the last two months it took 1,240 gallons and billed 142.5 Hobbs hours, which is 8.7 gallons per billed hour. On the first of the month your pump price is $7.20.

• Price over base: $7.20 - $6.00 = $1.20 a gallon
• Surcharge: $1.20 x 8.7 = $10.44 per Hobbs hour, published as $10.50
• At 80 hours a month, that's about $835 a month this one airplane was absorbing

You can recalculate every month, which is what ATP does, or publish bands so the number doesn't move every few weeks. Bands are easier to print on a rate sheet, but write the band edges down before you need them. Otherwise every band change looks like a decision you made on the spot.

3. What published surcharge policies look like

Here are a few real policies, from the most explicit to the least.

• ATP Flight School. Starting April 7, 2026, ATP compares a Federal Reserve-published Gulf Coast premium gasoline price index, which it says tracks 100LL most closely, against a $4.00 threshold. Single-engine surcharge is (index - $4.00) x 10 per flight hour, multi-engine is x 20. The index is checked monthly, surcharges are never applied retroactively, and there's no discount when the index is below $4.00.
• Borden Flying Club (Canada). Wet rates carry a surcharge when fuel tops $3.15 a litre, charged on the litres actually used. Its example is fuel at $3.20 with 100 litres burned, which comes to $5.00. The page says it applies to all wet rates, and its block rates are wet.
• Moses Aviation Services (Texas), as reported by GlobalAir. Its 172 rate was built on $5 fuel. It added $10 an hour when 100LL hit $6.24, went to $20 at $7.34, and kept the $20 when fuel slipped to $6.97 because that was still nearly $2 over the base.
• Dallas Flight Center, per the same report. A 5% surcharge on each flight hour since April, coming off when fuel falls below $5.
• AvSport. A variable surcharge, listed at $19.81 per flight hour and subject to change, with a promise to phase it out at the earliest opportunity. The page doesn't say what fuel price it's measured against.

GlobalAir's piece, by Michael Wildes, a customer of Air America Flight Center in Daytona Beach, describes the other end of the spectrum. An August 3 notice raised the temporary surcharge to $13.30 an hour for the Cessnas and the Arrow. It didn't give the previous surcharge, the fuel benchmark, the calculation, or the price that would make it go away. As he points out, once a surcharge sits on top of a published wet rate, the wet rate stops being the whole price. Embry-Riddle went the other way for 2026-27 and itemizes fuel at $49.63 per 172 hour, fixed through August 30, 2027.

What your policy should say

1. The base fuel price built into each rate.
2. The source of the current price and the day you read it.
3. Gallons per billed hour for each aircraft type, and whether that's per Hobbs or per tach hour.
4. The formula and how you round, or the band table.
5. How often it resets.
6. The price at which it comes off. Moses kept the higher band on the way down, and that ratchet is the part students resent.
7. The effective date, and that it never applies to flights already flown.
8. What it means for hours a student has already prepaid.

4. Is a fuel surcharge fair to students with prepaid block time?

That depends on what they bought. If a student bought a dollar balance, it draws down at whatever the posted rate and surcharge are on the day they fly, and that's fair as long as the agreement said so when they paid. If they bought 10 hours at a block rate, putting a surcharge on those hours is a price increase on something they've already paid for.

We'd honor every block bought before the surcharge's effective date for the hours in it, and put the surcharge clause in the block agreement from then on. In the example above, honoring a 10-hour block costs you $105. That's a cheap way to keep a student who prepaid in good faith, and that student is the one most likely to finish the certificate with you.

Before you publish anything, find the fuel price your current rate breaks even at. That's your base, and it's the first line of the policy.