How many business jets are there in Brazil?

How many business jets are there in Brazil?

"Jatinho" ("little jet") is the popular nickname for the business jet, so the answer to "how many jatinhos are there in Brazil" is the same. The number changes every week: the RAB receives new registrations, cancels old ones and suspends others, and Jet Tracker imports the official database at each ANAC update.

What goes into the count (and what stays out)

Counting jets seems simple until the first spreadsheet. The RAB lists registrations, and a registration is not necessarily an aircraft. The yardstick used here has four decisions, all public:

• Business jets only. Models in the VLJ, light, midsize, super-midsize, large and ultra-long-range categories of the Jet Tracker catalog are included. Airline jets (RBAC 121, such as the E-Jets of scheduled carriers) and military aircraft are left out.
• One aircraft, one number. The same aircraft can carry more than one registration, for example an operational one and a reserved one on the same serial number. The count joins those marks by airframe (serial number plus model family) and counts the aircraft once.
• Status in the RAB. "In operation" is a registration without an interdiction: normal status or temporarily stopped for maintenance. A suspended, canceled or merely reserved registration does not enter the main number.
• Operator's state. Each jet's state is the operator's UF in the ANAC registry (the owner's when there is none). The RAB does not publish the aircraft's base, and the operator's address is not the hangar. A leased jet counts in the state of whoever operates it when the registry carries that UF; where the aircraft actually flies is another layer.

By size: the Brazilian jet is light

Source: RAB/ANAC via Jet Tracker, data as of Oct 12, 2026. Together, VLJ and light jets are 72.3% of the fleet. It is the short and medium mission aircraft. The large-cabin jet, able to cross the Atlantic nonstop, is a minority.

Which business jets are the most common in Brazil?

Source: RAB/ANAC via Jet Tracker, data as of Oct 12, 2026. The ranking separates versions that have their own page in the catalog (the Phenom 300 and Phenom 300E appear on separate lines, for example). The leader is the Embraer Phenom 100, with 76 jets in operation. What it costs to operate each of these models is on How much does it cost and, in text, in the guide how much a jatinho costs.

In which state are the jets' operators?

São Paulo is the operator's state for 404 jets, or 34.6% of the fleet in operation. The count follows the operator's UF in the registry, and only without it the owner's; the operator's address is not the hangar. The full list for each state, with model and operator, is on the fleet-by-UF pages: SP, MG, PR and GO. The all-classes breakdown, state by state, is in the article on the business fleet by state.

How old is the jet fleet?

Half of the business jets in operation in Brazil were manufactured in 2010 or earlier: the median age is 16 years. The calculation uses the year of manufacture declared in the RAB, present for 1,160 of the 1,168 jets (data as of Oct 12, 2026). For anyone selling maintenance or insurance, the fleet's age says as much as the total.

Jets are a minority in business aviation

In the Jet Tracker business segment, in operation, there are 1,941 piston aircraft, 1,596 helicopters, 1,451 turboprops and 1,168 jets. The jet sits at the top of the pyramid: fewer units, more value per tail.

Why does the press talk about 11,000 aircraft?

In July and August 2026, Forbes Brasil (Jul 28, 2026) and Poder360 (Aug 10, 2026) published ABAG's count on ANAC data: 11,362 aircraft in business aviation in May 2026, 8.5% more than a year earlier. Forbes's headline summarized it as "11,000 business aircraft," and from there to "11,000 jatinhos" is a short step. The breakdown published by Poder360 shows that jets are a little over a tenth of the total:

Source: ABAG on ANAC data, May 2026, as published by Poder360 on Aug 10, 2026. The same report records that the jet fleet grew 12.5% in one year (from 1,060 in May 2025 to 1,193) and 31.7% in two years.

The two yardsticks arrive at very close numbers for jets. The remaining difference comes from three sources: the cutoff date (May versus today), the validity criterion (ABAG looks at the airworthiness certificate; Jet Tracker, at the registration status) and the handling of duplicate registrations of the same aircraft. Where the yardsticks truly diverge is in the rest of the fleet: according to Poder360, ABAG includes operation categories such as flight instruction and specialized air services, which Jet Tracker's business segment does not fully cover.

Older numbers keep circulating. In August 2025, according to Exame, there were 1,103 jets in Brazil, behind only the United States. In 2026, reports on ABAG's count continue to place Brazil as the second-largest business aviation market in the world. What changed was the pace: in one year, the jet fleet grew 12.5%, against 8.5% for business aviation as a whole.

"How many jatinhos does Brazil have" and "how many business aircraft does Brazil have" have different answers. The first is close to 1,200 aircraft; the second is over 11,000.

The full ABAG math, with the yardstick-by-yardstick comparison, is in the article on the business aviation fleet by ABAG.