At some point, every repeat charterer thinks it. Usually around the third evening, anchored somewhere perfect, glass in hand, kids finally asleep below deck.
The thought lands quietly: What if I just bought one?
It is a fair question. And there is a fair answer, which involves a spreadsheet that most yacht salespeople would prefer you never see.
This is that spreadsheet. Or at least the readable version of it.
The Purchase Price Is the Cheap Part
Let's work with a concrete example. A well-maintained, pre-owned 30-metre motor yacht. Something like a late-model Sunseeker 100 or a Benetti Delfino. Five cabins, space for ten guests, crew quarters for six. The kind of boat most people picture when they think "proper yacht."
On the brokerage market these days, you are looking at roughly €8 to €12 million depending on age, condition, pedigree, and how urgently the current owner wants out. We will use €10 million as our working number.
That €10 million gets you the hull, the engines, the furniture, the tender, and the water toys. It does not get you permission to leave the dock, a crew to operate it, a place to dock it, or the several hundred thousand euros per year required to keep it from slowly falling apart.
The Annual Bill
The yacht industry has a well-worn rule of thumb: expect to spend 10 to 15 percent of the purchase price, every year, just to keep the thing operational. For a €10 million yacht, that lands between €1 million and €1.5 million annually.
Here is where that money actually goes.
Crew: €450,000 to €650,000 Per Year
A 30-metre motor yacht needs a minimum of four to five full-time crew: Captain, Chef, Chief Stewardess, Engineer, and Deckhand. That is the bare minimum for safe operation and decent service.
Captain salaries for a yacht this size range from €7,000 to €13,000 per month. Engineers and Chefs sit between €4,500 and €8,000. Stewardesses and Deckhands between €2,500 and €4,000. Those are base salaries. Add employer contributions, health insurance, travel costs for crew rotations, paid leave, food (the crew eats too), uniforms, training renewals, and recruitment fees when someone inevitably leaves.
The total crew cost for a 30-metre yacht, realistically managed, runs between €450,000 and €650,000 per year. And that is whether you use the boat or not. The crew is employed year-round. The Captain does not hibernate from October to April. The Engineer is running maintenance schedules in a Palma shipyard while you are in a boardroom in Brussels.
Insurance: €50,000 to €100,000 Per Year
Hull and machinery insurance for commercial or charter-ready vessels typically runs 0.5 to 1 percent of insured value annually. For a €10 million yacht, that puts you at €50,000 to €100,000 depending on the vessel's age, flag state, cruising area, claims history, and whether you operate it commercially or purely for private use. P&I (Protection and Indemnity) coverage adds to this.
Berth and Docking: €80,000 to €250,000 Per Year
Your yacht needs a permanent home. Annual berth contracts in popular Mediterranean ports vary enormously. Antibes or Palma will cost you €80,000 to €150,000 per year for a 30-metre berth. If you want Monaco or Porto Cervo, add at least 50 percent to those numbers.
Then there are transit fees, short-stay marina costs during summer cruising, port charges, and the occasional fine for overstaying in a harbour that was only supposed to be a quick fuel stop.
Maintenance and Repairs: €200,000 to €500,000 Per Year
Industry data consistently puts routine maintenance at 5 to 10 percent of purchase price annually. For a new yacht, the lower end holds. For a ten-year-old boat, budget the higher end and don’t be surprised when you exceed it.
This covers engine servicing, antifouling, exterior and interior upkeep, electronics updates, safety equipment certification, tender maintenance, and the thousand small jobs that accumulate on a vessel that spends its life in saltwater.
Then there are the non-routine events. Every five to seven years, a major refit is standard. Paint, machinery overhaul, interior refresh, regulatory compliance updates. A proper refit on a 30-metre yacht easily runs €500,000 to €1 million. Spread that over the cycle, and it adds €70,000 to €150,000 per year to your running average.
Fuel, Provisioning, and Operating Costs: €100,000 to €200,000 Per Year
Fuel is usage-dependent, obviously. A 30-metre motor yacht cruising the Greek islands for four weeks in summer will burn through €30,000 to €60,000 in diesel alone, depending on cruising speed and distance covered. Add generator fuel for air conditioning at anchor, lubricants, water-makers, and provisioning for owner trips.
Regulatory, Management, and Administration: €50,000 to €100,000 Per Year
Flag state compliance, annual surveys, ISM code audits (if applicable), accounting, legal, VAT administration, yacht management fees if you use a management company (most owners do, at roughly 5 to 8 percent of operating budget or a fixed monthly fee). The administrative machinery of yacht ownership is not trivial.
The Total
Add it all up. For a €10 million, 30-metre motor yacht operated to a reasonable standard with full-time crew:
Conservative estimate: €1 million per year
Realistic mid-range: €1.2 to €1.5 million per year
High-specification or ageing vessel: €1.5 million and up
That is before you factor in depreciation.
Depreciation: The Number Everyone Forgets
Yachts are not real estate. They do not appreciate. A production motor yacht typically loses 20 to 30 percent of its value in the first few years of ownership. After ten years, you are often looking at 40 to 50 percent of the original purchase price, sometimes less, depending on market conditions and how well the yacht has been maintained.
On a €10 million purchase, losing 50 percent over ten years means roughly €500,000 per year in paper depreciation. Some of that can be slowed with meticulous maintenance and well-timed refits. Some of it cannot.
Custom builds from top-tier Northern European yards (Feadship, Lürssen, Heesen) tend to hold value better than production boats. But they also cost two to five times more to buy in the first place, which creates its own arithmetic.
So How Much Time Do Owners Actually Spend On Board?
This is where the conversation gets uncomfortable. Various industry surveys paint slightly different pictures, but the commonly cited figure in the superyacht world is that the average owner uses their yacht around 30 to 40 days per year. A Superyacht News crew survey found a wider range, with many owners on board for two to three months, while others logged less than two weeks annually.
Let's be generous and say six weeks per year, or 42 days.
On a €1.2 million annual operating budget (not including depreciation), that works out to roughly €28,500 per day of actual use.
Include the depreciation spread, and you are north of €40,000 per day.
For context: chartering a comparable 30-metre motor yacht in the Mediterranean costs between €70,000 and €130,000 per week. Call it €100,000 per week, or roughly €14,300 per day. Add APA, VAT, and gratuity, and your all-in charter cost sits around €20,000 to €25,000 per day.
In other words, owning the yacht costs more per day of use than chartering it. And you have to deal with the crew management, the maintenance yard calls, the insurance renewals, and the existential dread of watching a €10 million asset slowly rust.
The Charter Offset Argument
"But I'll put it on the charter market and offset the costs!"
This is true, in theory. Placing your yacht on the charter market can offset 30 to 50 percent of annual running costs, according to industry estimates from management companies and brokers. On a €1.2 million annual budget, that is a potential offset of €360,000 to €600,000.
But chartering your own boat comes with trade-offs that brochures from yacht management companies tend to gloss over.
First, your yacht needs to be commercially registered, flagged, and coded. That means MCA surveys, ISM compliance (for larger vessels), commercial insurance rates, and crew with the right qualifications and certifications. Some of these are expensive upgrades from private-use standards.
Second, charter guests will use your boat. They will move your furniture. They will scratch things. The wear and tear on a charter vessel is materially different from a private-use yacht, and that shows up in maintenance budgets.
Third, charter availability and personal availability rarely align perfectly. Peak charter season (July and August in the Med) is also when most owners want to use their yacht. If you block four weeks for personal use in high season, you have just removed the most profitable weeks from your charter calendar.
Fourth, the charter market is competitive and getting more so. Over 3,800 yachts were available for charter as of February 2025, a 7.4 percent year-on-year increase. Having a nice boat is no longer enough. You need the right crew, the right marketing, and a competitive price point.
And finally, and this is often forgotten, if you want to use your ‘own’ yacht (your company actually owns it), you need to have a charter contract in place, and rules regarding payments (VAT is due on the charter fee) are strict. Most countries don’t accept anything more than 20% discounts on the charter fee.
So in short, charter income helps. It rarely makes yacht ownership "pay for itself," especially at the 30 to 50-metre range.
When Buying Makes Sense
None of the above is meant to argue that buying a yacht is always the wrong decision. It is the wrong decision only if the financial reality catches you off guard.
Buying makes sense when you genuinely use the yacht 60 or more days per year, consistently, year after year. It makes sense when you want a specific vessel configured exactly to your preferences, with a crew you have personally selected and trained. It makes sense if you want to cruise unusual itineraries that charter yachts rarely cover (Northern Europe, remote Pacific, polar regions). And it makes sense when the emotional return matters more to you than the financial arithmetic, and you have the liquidity to absorb the costs without caring about the spreadsheet.
Some owners fall into all of these categories. Most do not. Most use their yacht intensely for a few years, then gradually less, and eventually sell at a significant loss. The industry sees this pattern constantly.
When Chartering Makes More Sense
Chartering wins on flexibility. You can sail a 25-metre catamaran in Croatia in June, a 40-metre motor yacht in the Cyclades in August, and a 50-metre explorer in the Caribbean in December. Different boats, different crews, different destinations, zero long-term commitment.
Chartering wins on cost-per-day. The numbers above make this clear, and they hold across most size ranges.
Chartering wins on optionality. If you charter twice and decide yachting is not for you, you have lost a holiday budget. If you buy and discover the same thing two years later, you have lost several million euros and a considerable amount of your time dealing with the resale process.
And chartering wins on simplicity. No crew management. No maintenance schedules. No insurance renewals. No awkward phone calls from a Captain in Palma about a hydraulic failure that will cost €85,000 to repair. You show up, you board, you leave.
The only thing chartering does not give you is permanence. You cannot leave your books in the cabin. Your kids cannot consider it "our boat." The crew will also serve someone else next week. For some people, that matters enormously. For others, it does not.
The Hybrid Path: Charter First, Then Decide
The smartest clients I have worked with treat chartering as an extended test drive. They charter different yacht types across different destinations over two or three years. They learn whether they prefer sailing or motor, catamaran or monohull, Cyclades or Dalmatian coast. They figure out how many weeks per year they actually want to spend on a boat (as opposed to how many they imagine wanting to spend, which is usually more).
By the time they buy, if they buy, they know exactly what they want. They have sailed on it, or something very close to it. They have a relationship with a broker who understands their preferences. They know the running costs because they have seen APA statements from the other side.
Some of these clients end up buying. Some keep chartering. Both groups tend to be satisfied with their choice, because they made it with real information rather than a fantasy.
The Summary Table
Factor | Owning a €10M Yacht | Chartering 4 Weeks/Year |
|---|---|---|
Annual cost | €1 to €1.5 million (plus depreciation) | €500,000 to €700,000 all-in |
Cost per day of use (42 days) | ~€28,000 to €40,000+ | ~€18,000 to €25,000 |
Flexibility of yacht type | One yacht | Any yacht, any time |
Destination flexibility | Limited by positioning | Total |
Crew control | Full | Low |
Maintenance headaches | Yes, all year | None |
Depreciation | Significant | None |
Emotional attachment | High | Lower |
Capital tied up | €10 million + operating costs | Zero |
The Only Honest Conclusion
If you use a yacht 80 or more days per year, have a deep personal connection to a specific vessel, and can absorb €1 to €1.5 million in annual costs without it meaningfully affecting your life, buy one. You will love it.
If you use a yacht two to six weeks per year and value flexibility, variety, and simplicity, charter. You will spend less, see more, and sleep better at night knowing you do not own a depreciating asset the size of a small apartment building.
If you are not sure which camp you fall into, charter for two years first. The answer will become obvious.
About the Author
Maurits is a professional yacht charter broker and founder of Frontier Yachting, based in Belgium. With a decade of experience at sea and ashore, including work as a yacht Captain, he has seen both sides of the ownership-versus-charter question from every possible angle. He has no interest in selling you a yacht, which is probably why the numbers in this article are honest.
Contact: hello@frontieryachting.com | +32 487 22 08 22
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