Who owns America’s business jets? mostly LLCs, trust companies and registered agents

METHODOLOGY

How the fleet and its owners are counted

• Source. The FAA Releasable Aircraft Database (the MASTER registration file joined to the aircraft and engine reference files), file of October 9, 2026. The page is rebuilt from the newest FAA file with each site update.
• Which aircraft. The same fleet as the US private jet fleet census: fixed-wing turbofan and turbojet aircraft in 64 business jet model families and turboprops in 18 business and utility families, matched on the FAA make and model designation (and serial number where one designation covers two families, such as the Challenger 601 and 604). Airliners and corporate airliners (Boeing Business Jet, ACJ), former military jets, crop sprayers, experimental aircraft and N-numbers assigned but not yet registered are left out.
• Owner type. The registrant type on the registration. A registrant whose name includes “trust” or “trustee” counts as a trust. Co-owners and partnerships are one group.
• Trustees. A trust registration names its trustee. A trustee is named here only when it is an organisation (a bank, trust company or other company); spellings of one company are folded together (for example, every TVPX entity counts as TVPX). People acting as trustee are counted and never named.
• Registered agents. Matched by the agent’s own published office address, for LLCs and corporations only. Street addresses are used to match and are never published. A “shared address” is one where 10 or more aircraft are registered to five or more different registrant names.
• State. The mailing address on the registration, which is often a trustee or an agent and is not where the aircraft is based.
• Withheld records. 1,259 registrations have no name or address in the public file because the FAA withholds them at the owner’s request. They count in the national totals by their registrant type and are left out of the state figures.
• Age and certificates. Age is the file year minus the year of manufacture. Certificates are counted by issue date for aircraft still on the register, so a certificate issued to an aircraft that has since left the register is not counted.
• Privacy. Counts and company names only. No N-number, serial number, person’s name or city appears on this page, its embeds or its CSVs. Counts of individually owned or co-owned aircraft under five in a state or model are shown as “<5”. No flight data is used, so aircraft in the FAA’s LADD and PIA privacy programs appear only inside these totals, like every other aircraft.

Each table has its own page with a chart and a CSV: business jets by state, who owns private jets, most common business jets, average age of business jets, aircraft owner trusts, registrations by month. All of them are listed on the open data page.