Analyzing Airline Fuel Costs These Days

Last week the CEO of United Airlines ($UAL) warned that the war in Iran and the subsequent soaring price of oil and jet fuel will have a “meaningful” impact on the company’s financial performance this quarter. 

How meaningful, exactly? That’s for financial analysts to model on their own — but Calcbench does have multiple data feeds on airline fuel costs that can help analysts build those models and evaluate what might happen next.

For starters, we have an airlines industry template that tracks all the standard non-GAAP financial disclosures that airlines make. Those disclosures include fuel consumed (in gallons), average price per gallon for the period, and cost per available seat mile — all of which are heavily influenced by the cost of fuel. 

You can download our airlines template from DropBox, although the template won’t work automatically unless you (a) are a Calcbench professional subscriber; and (b) have our Excel Add-In already installed. If you need help with either of those things, email us at us@calcbench.com any time. 

Analysts can also use our Company-in-Detail page or Multi-Company page to look up information from specific airlines to see what disclosures they’ve made in recent periods and what stories arise from those numbers. 

For example, we used the Multi-Company page to pull up total fuel costs and operating expenses for six major U.S. airlines, and then calculated fuel as a percentage of total operating costs for the last five years. The result is Figure 1, below.

As you can see, fuel costs were a huge part of all operating expenses in 2022, which was the last time recently that oil traded at $100 per barrel (due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine). Oil prices slowly trended downward since then, and fuel costs fell as a portion of airlines’ overall operating costs to the 25 to 35 percent levels seen recently.

Company-by-Company Examination

You can also use our Company-in-Detail page to look at an individual airline’s financial statements and get a sense of how fuel costs have changed over time. For example, Figure 2, below, shows United’s income statement for the last several years, with the fuel expense line shaded grey. 

Notice that fuel costs fell from $13.1 billion in 2022 to $11.4 billion in 2025, and went from 30.7 percent of all operating costs to 21 percent of operating costs across the same period.

Now do some math. In fourth-quarter 2025 United reported total fuel costs of $2.92 billion and an average cost of $2.49. As of last week, jet fuel cost $3.58 per gallon, an increase of 44 percent. If we apply that 44 percent increase to the $2.92 billion United spent last quarter and passenger traffic volume holds steady, it would imply total fuel costs this quarter of $4.2 billion.

To be clear, this is just crude mathematical speculation on our part; we have no idea what United will actually report, since that number depends on a host of factors: how much fuel United already purchased before hostilities broke out, passenger traffic, and more. Our point is only that we have the data that can let analysts run their own models for this sort of forecasting. 

Don’t Forget the Footnotes

As always, analysts can also dig through the footnote disclosures to see what airlines are saying in narrative form about fuel costs, too. For example, we found this item in JetBlue’s ($JBLU) annual report under the footnote about market risk:

Our results of operations are affected by changes in the price and availability of aircraft fuel. Market risk is estimated as a hypothetical 10 percent increase in the December 31, 2025 cost per gallon of fuel. Based on projected 2026 fuel consumption, such an increase would result in an increase to aircraft fuel expense of $200 million in 2026. As of December 31, 2025, we did not have any outstanding fuel hedging contracts.

According to JetBlue’s earnings release from Jan. 27, average fuel cost at the end of 2025 was $2.51. A 10 percent increase from that number would be $2.76 — but as we noted earlier, the market rate for jet fuel at the moment is $3.58, which is 42.6 percent higher than JetBlue’s year-end price. So if these high prices hold, the additional cost to JetBlue will be a lot higher than the $200 million mentioned above.

Other airlines make similar disclosures in their footnotes. Delta Air Lines ($DAL), for example, notes that “a one cent increase in the cost of jet fuel per gallon would result in approximately $40 million of additional annual fuel expense based on annual consumption of approximately four billion gallons of jet fuel.” (Delta goes on to say it has hedging instruments meant to blunt some of those cost pressures.)

Nor should you forget disclosures about hedging instruments. Some airlines use hedges to prevent surprises in fuel costs, others don’t. For example, JetBlue said this in its footnote disclosure about hedging and derivative instruments:

Translation: JetBlue did have hedging instruments to offset fluctuating fuel prices in 2024, but didn’t have any in 2025. We’re not clear what hedges the airline might have in place now, but if the answer is “none” then that’s going to bring pricing pressure to bear at least in this quarter, if not throughout all of 2026.

So if you follow the airlines industry, there is a lot of data out there to help you understand how today’s soaring fuel prices might affect financial performance. You can find them in our databases through Calcbench.com, or through our airline industry template, or via our API to pipe those data feeds directly into your own models. 

Meanwhile, the airlines will start filing their Q1 2026 earnings reports in about one month. (Delta is scheduled to go first with an earnings release on April 8.) Buckle up and brace for turbulence.