How Much Does It Cost To Charter A Yacht?
From about £200 a head to well over £100,000 a week, and the reasons the gap is that wide.
Rated 4.9 out of 5 based on 258 reviews on Trustpilot
Founding Member: International Federation of Yacht Charter Agents
Verified & Protected by Pantaenius Yacht Insurance.
How Much Does It Cost To Charter A Yacht?
The honest answer is that it ranges from roughly £200 per person for a week to more than £300,000, and anyone who gives you a single number without asking questions first is guessing. What follows is the 2026 picture: the real ranges, what moves them, and the costs that sit outside the headline rate.
Here is how wide the spread gets on one boat. A luxury 46 foot catamaran with two crew runs about $7,000 per person per week with two people sharing in high season, and about $1,000 per person per week with eight sharing in low season. Same yacht, same crew, seven times the difference. That is why the quoted range on any charter page is so broad, and why the useful conversation is about your crew and your dates rather than a rate card.
We have advised on charters since 2011 and we are tied to no operator, so there is no incentive here to steer you up the price list. The number that matters is the all in cost, and the fastest way to get it wrong is to compare two headline weekly rates that include different things.
Quick Navigation
- 1 The Quick Answer Typical Weekly Rates By Charter Type
- 2 By Boat Type Motor Yachts, Catamarans And Monohulls
- 3 What Moves It Cabins, Length, Age And Season
- 4 The Extras Mooring, Fuel, APA And What Else Lands
- 5 Deposit And Cover What You Can Actually Lose
- 6 Adding Crew Skipper, Cook, Hostess And Event Weeks
1.The Quick Answer
Typical Weekly Rates By Charter Type
If you want the shape of it before the detail, these are the typical weekly rates in 2026. Bareboat, meaning you sail it yourself, runs about £3,000 to £15,000 a week depending on size and season. Skippered, with a professional captain aboard the same yacht, runs about £5,000 to £20,000. Fully crewed, with a chef and usually a hostess as well, starts around £15,000 and goes past £100,000. Superyacht territory, the Below Deck end of the market, runs £100,000 to £300,000 and upward.
Those are boat rates, not per person rates, which is the single most common misreading. A £6,000 bareboat week split between three couples is £1,000 a couple before flights and food, and that arithmetic is why the entry point is far lower than most people assume. At the very bottom it can be as little as £200, €220 or $240 per person for a week, though that is uncommon and it buys a specific kind of boat.
What most people actually spend sits around €5,000 and upward for the yacht, shared between two and eight people. That is the honest middle of the market rather than the headline either end of it.
Budgets here exclude your travel to the base, and they assume mid season rather than the August peak. If your dates are fixed to the school holidays, work from the upper end of every range on this page.
One caution on comparing quotes at this stage. What an operator folds into the headline rate varies from one company to the next, so a cheaper looking week can be the more expensive one once mooring, cleaning and the extras are added back. That is the single most common way people overpay, and it is not usually anybody being dishonest, just two quotes drawn up to different conventions. If you want to sketch a figure before you talk to anyone, our yacht charter price calculator will get you an order of magnitude for a given size, region and season.
2.By Boat Type
Motor Yachts, Catamarans And Monohulls
A bareboat monohull is the classic and the cheapest way in. Prices run from about €1,200 a week for a modest 32 footer out of season to €6,000 and upward for a modern 50 foot performance yacht at peak. Qualifications are required, and most operators will want to see an experience log alongside the formal certificate rather than the certificate on its own.
Bareboat catamarans are the most popular option for experienced crews, because of the space and because they sit flat at anchor. A well maintained four cabin catamaran in the Mediterranean typically costs between €3,500 and €8,000 a week in mid season, with newer or larger models above that.
Crewed catamarans start around €8,000 to €15,000 a week for a well appointed 45 to 50 footer with a skipper and hostess, rising past €25,000 for premium 60 foot plus boats with a full crew. Budget an APA of roughly 25 to 35 per cent of the charter fee on top.
Luxury motor yachts are the fast, spacious and thirsty option. Entry level 40 to 50 footers start from about €5,000 to €10,000 a week bareboat. Fully crewed from 60 feet upward typically starts at €15,000 to €30,000 and climbs steeply with size and specification. Fuel is the difference that catches people out: expect an APA of 30 to 40 per cent of the charter fee, noticeably higher than on sail.
Worth saying plainly which way the trade runs. A monohull sails better upwind and costs least. A catamaran costs more for the same length and buys space, shade and a level deck at anchor, which is why families and mixed ability crews keep choosing them. A motor yacht buys speed and deck area and spends the difference on fuel. None of those is the right answer on its own, and the cheapest boat that suits your crew will beat a better boat that does not.
3.What Moves It
Cabins, Length, Age And Season
Four things move the number more than anything else: the type of boat, the number of cabins, the length overall, and the age of the yacht. Catamarans cost more than monohulls of the same length because they offer far more living space. Length is one of the biggest single factors, and price climbs faster than the feet do.
Cabins are the one people underestimate. A cabin is a separate room with a door. A berth is somewhere to sleep. You will see availability written as something like 8 + 2 + 2, which means eight berths in cabins, two more in convertible saloon space, and two in the forepeak. Those are not equivalent sleeping places, and a party that books on the headline berth count can find two of them are on the saloon table.
There is a useful quirk at the top of the cabin range. The price rise per extra cabin flattens out on larger yachts, so a five cabin boat over 15 metres often represents better value per head than a four cabin boat does. If you are a large group, that is the first thing worth testing.
Age is the lever most people ignore and the one that saves the most. An older yacht carries a slightly higher chance of something breaking and a slightly less fresh interior, and it costs meaningfully less. At the bottom of the market you are looking at something around ten years old and roughly 32 feet, which is a perfectly good week if the crew know what they booked.
Season is the fourth lever and the one most people cannot move. The same yacht in the same place can differ by a factor of two between August and late May, and the shoulder months usually sail better as well as costing less. If your dates are genuinely fixed, say so early, because it changes which boats are worth looking at rather than just what they cost. If they are not fixed, moving a week either side of the peak is the largest single saving available to you.
4.The Extras
Mooring, Fuel, APA And What Else Lands
The headline rate is the boat. The extras are where two apparently similar quotes stop being comparable, and they vary more by how you sail than by which yacht you pick.
Mooring is the biggest variable. Anchoring in a bay costs nothing. A town quay berth in a popular harbour in August is a real nightly expense, and a week of them adds up quickly. Fuel depends entirely on how much you motor rather than sail, which is partly weather and partly crew temperament. Water is more variable than people expect: a crew that showers ashore uses a fraction of what a crew that showers aboard does.
Then there is the APA, the Advanced Provisioning Allowance, also called the kitty, the cash box or the purse. On a crewed charter this is a float the yacht runs to pay for fuel, food, drink, mooring and incidentals, and it is typically 25 to 35 per cent of the charter fee on sail and 30 to 40 per cent on motor. It is spent on your behalf and reconciled at the end, so it is a real cost rather than a deposit.
Add local taxes and transit logs, which vary by country, final cleaning, which is sometimes included and sometimes a compulsory extra, and crew tips on crewed charters, which vary by region and are customary rather than optional in some of them. Food and drink is the one entirely under your control, and how often you eat ashore will swing a week's budget more than most people plan for. As a rough working figure, provisioning the boat yourself for a week costs a fraction of eating ashore every evening, and most crews land somewhere in between by choice rather than by plan.
Two extras are worth paying for rather than declining. An outboard for the dinghy is technically optional with most fleets and it is close to essential in practice, because rowing a loaded tender against wind and tide gets old on the first evening. If you are sailing with children, a safety net rigged around the guardrails is cheap and worth every penny; our notes on a family boating holiday cover what else changes when the crew includes young children.
5.Deposit And Cover
What You Can Actually Lose
A bareboat charter requires a security deposit against damage, and it scales with the length of the boat. You are liable up to the value of that deposit and the operator's insurance covers everything beyond it. In practice that means a grounding or a bent anchor can cost you the whole deposit and nothing more, which is worth understanding before you take the boat rather than after.
Insurance against losing the deposit itself is available in some jurisdictions and not others. It is worth asking about specifically, because it is the single most likely money you will lose on an otherwise uneventful week. Some operators offer a reduced deposit option in exchange for a higher charter fee, which is the same trade priced differently.
Two further gaps are worth naming. Your booking deposit is normally non returnable, and since charters are often booked a long way in advance, a change of circumstances between booking and sailing is a genuine risk that ordinary travel insurance may not cover. Separately, and rarely, an operator can go out of business between your payment and your holiday, and liquidation liability is not something a standard policy handles.
None of that is a reason not to charter. It is a reason to ask which of these apply to the specific booking in front of you, and to get the answer in writing rather than in conversation.
Ordinary travel insurance is the last piece and it does not cover most of the above. It handles the usual holiday risks, illness, delay, lost baggage, and it will not generally cover a lost security deposit, a non returnable booking deposit, or an operator failure. Those need either a specific policy or an accepted risk. Read what you already hold before buying anything new, because a decent annual policy may cover the cancellation half of it and nothing else.
6.Adding Crew
Skipper, Cook, Hostess And Event Weeks
Adding crew to a bareboat is the most flexible money on this page, because it does not change the yacht. A skipper handles the sailing and the harbours and takes the responsibility off you, which is the usual choice for a crew that wants to sail without carrying the boat. A cook produces proper meals from local produce. A hostess serves, tidies and generally absorbs the domestic load that otherwise falls on whoever is least assertive.
A skipper is priced differently from a hostess or a cook, and the honest way to read it is the gap between the two ranges at the top of this page: bareboat at roughly £3,000 to £15,000 against skippered at roughly £5,000 to £20,000. That difference is the professional aboard, and it buys the same hull rather than a lesser one. Ask about sleeping arrangements when you price it, because on a smaller yacht the skipper takes one of the cabins you were counting on and on a larger one they have their own. That single detail changes how many of you the boat actually sleeps, and it is the most common reason a skippered quote surprises people.
The rate is around €100 a day for a hostess and a little more for a cook, which against a €6,000 yacht is a modest proportion of the week. One thing to build in: you are expected to cover your crew's food, so add their provisioning to the sum rather than treating the day rate as the total.
Tips are the part nobody quotes. On crewed charters they are customary rather than optional in most regions, commonly in the range of five to fifteen per cent of the charter fee depending on where you are and how the week went, and they are not included in the APA. On a bareboat there is nothing to tip. It is a small thing, but it belongs in the sum at the start rather than as a surprise at the end.
Event weeks are the exception to everything above. During the Monaco Grand Prix, the Cannes Film Festival and similar fixtures, rates run three to five times the standard weekly figure. Yachts in prime viewing positions are booked years ahead and usually carry a minimum number of days. If that is what you are planning, the conversation needs to start much earlier than a normal charter.
Whatever shape yours takes, ask for the all in number rather than the weekly rate: boat, crew if any, mooring, fuel, APA, taxes, cleaning and the deposit terms. Tell us who is sailing, roughly when, and how much of the work you want to do yourselves, and we will come back with the honest total before you commit to anything.
Want the real number for your dates and your crew? Tell us who is coming and roughly when, and we will come back with the honest all in cost, everything counted.
Amazing Sailing Experiences
What our customers say
Christopher Lait
Chris founded Drake Academy, a sailing company that provides leadership training to businesses. Now the CEO of SailChecker.com you will find him handling many of your enquiries as he attempts to drive SailChecker.com forward as the company of choice for yacht charter and sailing by focusing on quality advice and great customer service.
