Not long ago, the first number in any yacht conversation was length overall. Brokers report a different opening question now: what does she cost to run? After the ordering frenzy of the pandemic years — when shipyard slots vanished and brokerage inventory thinned to almost nothing — the market has sobered into something more interesting. The buyers who remained do arithmetic.
Costs before length
The old rule of thumb survives because it keeps being right: budget roughly a tenth of the yacht's value each year to keep her crewed, berthed, insured, fuelled and maintained. The proportion bends — an older boat burns more in the yard, a bigger one burns more everywhere — but the discipline is the point. Buyers who start with operating costs end up with boats they actually use. Buyers who start with length end up, within a season or two, back at the brokerage.
The stack itself has a shape worth learning. Crew is usually the largest line, followed by maintenance and yard periods, then insurance, berthing and fuel in an order that depends entirely on how the boat is used. A yacht that migrates with the seasons — Mediterranean summer, Caribbean winter — adds repositioning fuel and crew time to every year of her life, and burns more of both than the brochure suggests. Owners who model only the marina they keep her in are modelling half a boat.
Refit against newbuild
With the good Northern European yards booked out for years and new-build prices still carrying boom-era altitude, the refit has become the pragmatist's route. A well-found brokerage hull, ten or fifteen years old, can be taken down to the frames and rebuilt to current taste for meaningfully less than a new contract — and she can be in the water in a fraction of the time.
The catch is the survey. A refit is only as clever as the hull it starts from, and the pre-purchase survey is the cheapest money in the entire transaction. Walk away from anything the surveyor walks away from. There is always another boat.
The survey itself goes deeper than a walkthrough: hull-thickness readings, engine hours checked against service records, the classification society's file, and the history of every yard period she has had. A boat kept continuously in class and continuously maintained costs more to buy and less to own. The bargain with an incomplete file is not a bargain; it is an invoice deferred. A sea trial matters as much — an hour under load reveals what a polished engine room conceals.
The crew problem
Ask any management company what keeps owners awake and the answer is not fuel or berthing. It is crew. The boom pulled thousands of new yachts into the water faster than the industry could train engineers, chefs and captains, and the good ones now choose their boats. Salaries, rotation and training budgets have all climbed.
This has changed buying behaviour in a quiet way. Owners increasingly buy the boat their crew can run, not the boat their ego can berth. A happy crew is a maintenance programme; a miserable one is a depreciation schedule.
The pragmatic band
The centre of gravity in brokerage has settled around 40 to 60 metres, and the logic is unglamorous. Below that band you compromise on range, crew space and seakeeping. Above it, every cost compounds — crew numbers, yard bills, insurance, and the growing list of harbours that cannot comfortably take you. In the band, an owner can cross an ocean, host twelve guests, and still tie up in ports where the point of the trip is the town, not the marina.
Chartering the idle weeks
Most private yachts are used for a small fraction of the year, and chartering the idle weeks has become the standard salve for the accounts. It works, within limits. Charter income offsets running costs rather than generating profit; it demands commercial registration, which brings its own surveys and standards; and every charter guest is a small withdrawal from the interior.
The disciplined approach is to charter the weeks you would not use anyway, and to refuse the fiction that the boat is a business. It is a cost centre that occasionally pays rent. As of late 2026, with brokerage inventory rebuilt and sellers outnumbering committed buyers, the next eighteen months look like a buyer's market for the patient — the first time in years that can be said with a straight face.
