Ryanair Doesn't Make Its Money From Fees. It Makes It From the Plane Being Cheaper.

You can fly across Europe on Ryanair for less than the taxi to the airport, and most people draw the obvious conclusion: the ticket is bait. The real money, the story goes, comes after you've bought it — the priority queue, the seat next to your kid, the bag that won't fit the sizer. It's a tidy theory. It is also wrong, and Ryanair's own accounts say so in plain figures. In its FY2025 Annual Report, scheduled ticket revenue came to €9,230m. Ancillary revenue — every fee, every upsell, every add-on combined — came to €4,719m.² Tickets are roughly two-thirds of the business. The bait, it turns out, is the meal.

The official story is that Ryanair gives away the flight and gets rich on fees. The real story is that Ryanair sells the flight for real money, makes most of its profit on the flight, and can charge less than anyone else for one reason: the flight costs it less to operate. The fees are a useful sidecar. The engine is buried in the cost of the aircraft and the price of the runway.

Cut the fare and the profit goes with it

Here is the test that settles the argument. If the ticket were just a loss leader and the fees were the real business, then when fares fall, profit should hold — the fees would carry the company. That is not what happens. In FY2025, average fares dropped about 7%, and profit after tax fell 16% to €1.61bn.² In the first quarter of that year, fares fell 15% and scheduled revenue fell with them, while ancillary revenue per passenger sat at roughly €23.40 — modest, and barely moving.⁴ Ryanair's own results described ancillary revenue as 'resilient.' Read that word carefully: resilient is the polite term for it didn't rise to save you. The fees stayed flat while the fare collapsed, and the profit followed the fare down.

The reverse case is just as telling. In the first half of FY2026, Ryanair pushed fares up about 13%, scheduled revenue jumped 16% to €6.91bn, ancillary crept up 6% — and profit after tax rose 42%.⁵ Same fleet, same fees, same bag sizer. The swing came almost entirely from the price of the ticket. Whichever way the fare moves, profit moves with it. That is the signature of a business whose marginal profit lives in the seat, not the surcharge.

The real moat is what the plane costs before a passenger ever boards

So if Ryanair makes its money selling tickets, why can it sell them for so little and still profit? Because every seat costs it less to fly than it costs almost anyone else, and that gap was negotiated long before you booked. The first lever is the aircraft itself. Ryanair buys Boeing 737s in enormous lots and squeezes the price hard. Exact figures are commercially confidential — when Ryanair ordered 300 of the new 737 MAX-10, its own investor deck disclosed only '$40bn+ list price – competitive discount agreed,' and stated bluntly that the deal would 'widen the cost gap between Ryanair and competitor EU airlines.'⁶ Outside-in analysis of disclosed capex puts the discounts in the region of 56–65% off list for older 737-800s and around 69% for the fuel-efficient MAX 'Gamechanger' — estimates, not confirmed prices, but estimates that all point the same way: Ryanair pays a fraction of sticker.⁷

The second lever is the single-type fleet. One aircraft family means one set of spare parts, one pilot rating, one maintenance regime, one training pipeline. Every operational decision that a mixed-fleet carrier has to make twice, Ryanair makes once. And the new MAX-10 carries 228 seats — about 21% more than the planes it replaces⁶ — so the fixed cost of a crew, a gate slot, and a takeoff is spread across more paying passengers on the same flight. The discount and the seat count compound: a cheaper aircraft, bought in bulk, flying more bodies per departure.

The secondary-airport bargain everyone misremembers

The third lever is the runway. Ryanair famously flies to airports an hour from the city they're named after, and the myth is that it pays nothing to land there. It does pay — airport and handling charges are a real and rising cost line, not a zero. What Ryanair actually extracts is leverage. By promising a small regional airport guaranteed passenger volume, it negotiates deep discounts, revenue-sharing, and in some historical cases outright annual payments, sometimes commanding the great majority of an airport's traffic.⁸ The bargain is not free access; it is a discount won by being the only customer big enough to fill the place. The strategy has limits set by law: EU state-aid investigations into deals such as Charleroi found that some of those secondary-airport arrangements amounted to illegal subsidies, and Ryanair was made to repay.⁸ The advantage is negotiation, not a loophole.

But aren't the fees still the clever part?

The fair objection is that ancillary revenue is the part Ryanair pioneered, the part rivals copied, and the part with the fattest margin per euro — so dismissing it as a 'sidecar' undersells it. That's partly true. Ancillary revenue is structurally resilient: it held roughly flat in FY2025 even as fares cratered,² and across the nine months to December 2024 it rose 10% to €3.79bn while total revenue grew only 3%.³ A flat, high-margin line that doesn't fall when fares do is genuinely valuable — it's ballast. But ballast is not the engine. Ancillary per passenger sits near €23.40 and grows slowly;⁴ it cushions a bad year, it does not power a good one. The thing that actually decides whether Ryanair makes €1.6bn or €1.9bn or more is the fare — and the fare is only profitable because the cost base sits beneath everyone else's. The fees are the smart trim on a much bigger machine.

Ryanair makes its money the way the cheapest factory on the block does: not by some clever trick at the till, but by paying less for everything that goes into the product. The plane costs less. The runway costs less. The complexity costs less. So the seat can cost you less and still leave a profit on the way to two hundred million passengers a year.² The fees are real, and they're a comfort when fares turn against the company. But the genius was never 'charge for the bag.' It was buying the airplane at a price no rival could match, and then daring everyone else to fly for less.