What a Lease Really Costs
The entry price on a lease is low by design. An accounting of everything else in the contract: deposits, maintenance reserves, auto-renewal, the eight-year factory commitment, and the cost of getting out.
The pitch for leasing writes itself: no purchase price, a flyable aircraft this week. It is how most airlines in PlaneSim start, and there is nothing wrong with that. But a lease is a stack of obligations, and the headline rent is the only one anybody reads before signing. This is an accounting of the rest.
The stack
In worlds with leasing companies, every listing is a specific airframe, an exact tail with its own age, hours and history. The contract you sign against it carries four distinct commitments (defaults shown; your world may differ):
| Obligation | Typical shape |
|---|---|
| Weekly rent | A fraction of appraised value: roughly 0.28% per week for young metal, up to 0.45% for old |
| Security deposit | 12 weeks of rent, paid up front. Refundable, carried as an asset on your balance sheet |
| Maintenance reserve | $300 per flight hour, billed to the lessor as you fly. Non-refundable |
| Term | 52 weeks, auto-renewing |
The reserve is the line that surprises people. It scales with utilization rather than the calendar, so the harder you work the tail, the larger the bill, and unlike the deposit none of it ever comes back. On top of the contract you also carry the ordinary operating obligations of any aircraft on your certificate: routine maintenance billing, crew, heavy checks while it flies for you. Older worlds that use the anonymous broker instead of leasing companies run simpler terms, with smaller deposits and no reserves.
The factory lease is a different animal
Leasing brand-new metal straight from the manufacturer is a separate contract. Rent is a fixed share of the aircraft's list price, 0.32% per week by default, locked at signing rather than tracking the airframe's condition as it ages. The deposit is the familiar 12 weeks of rent. The commitment is not familiar at all: the minimum term is 416 weeks, roughly eight years, and breaking it early costs the remaining rent up to a cap of 52 weeks (your world may differ).
Read that cap as the exit price. Walking away from a fresh factory lease costs up to a full year of rent, per tail. It is the cheapest way for a young airline to fly modern aircraft without capital, and the hardest contract in the game to leave. Sign it for types you are certain of, in quantities you are certain of.
Getting out without paying twice
Leases auto-renew by default: reach the end of the minimum term and the contract quietly rolls into a fresh one at the same rate. If you want out, flag non-renewal on the Leasing page and the return happens automatically at term end. The tail's flight numbers are deactivated, the aircraft goes home, and your deposit comes back.
The trap sits in the middle of that sequence. Any flights still booked at the return are cancelled with passenger compensation. Wind the schedule down yourself over the final weeks and the compensation line stays at zero; let the automatic return do your planning for you and you pay your own passengers on the way out. The lessor takes the tail either way.
Returning early is possible once the tail has no active flight numbers or pending flights. Broker leases charge an early-termination penalty, 8 weeks of rent by default, and the deposit is still refunded.
The whole book on one page
The Leasing page shows both sides of your position, aircraft leased in and leased out, with each contract's next billing date, weeks remaining, and the rent still committed through term end. A rollup totals the weekly bill, deposits held out, and total committed rent. That last figure is the honest size of your lease exposure, and it is the one to check before signing the next contract. The Upcoming Events calendar projects each installment against your cash. If you lease your own tails out, the deposits you hold appear as liabilities on your balance sheet, because they are owed back.
Wear is priced, eventually
Aircraft never vanish from a world. Return a tail and it goes back to its owner carrying every hour and cycle you put on it; the leasing company refurbishes idle metal, relists it, and eventually sells aging airframes outright. The wear you inflict is priced into that airframe's next appraisal, and into the rent its next lessee pays. In a persistent world, the hours you fly follow the airframe long after you hand it back. The full contract mechanics, including the lessor side of the trade, live in the wiki's Lease obligations article.