Ryanair's Fees Don't Pay for the Flight. The Fares Still Do — and That's the Point.

Book a Ryanair seat and the price you first see is almost a dare. A fare that looks like a rounding error, then a checkout that asks, gently and repeatedly, whether you'd like a bag, a seat next to your kid, priority down the jet bridge, a hire car, insurance. Each click adds a few euros. Multiply those clicks by 200 million passengers and you get €4.72 billion of fee revenue in the year ended March 2025.² So the legend writes itself: the fare is bait, the fees are the business, and one day the flight will be free. It's a great story. It's also wrong — and you can prove it wrong with the company's own income statement.

The official story is that Ryanair gives away the flight and lives on extras. The real story is duller and more durable: Ryanair sells a genuinely cheap seat, then sells you the things that used to come with it. The fees are large. They are growing. They are not, and have never been, the main event.

The fees didn't even cover the kerosene

Start with the claim that ancillary revenue funds the free flight, and run it against the filings. In FY25 those fees came to €4.72 billion. Fuel — just the jet fuel, before the crew, the leases, the airport charges, the maintenance, the financing — cost €5.22 billion.¹ The fee engine, the supposed profit center carrying the whole operation, fell roughly half a billion euros short of buying the gas to keep the planes in the air. Every other cost in the business still had to be paid. And it was paid, overwhelmingly, by the fare — the line everyone has been told is a giveaway. Ryanair still cleared €1.61 billion in after-tax profit that year, on fares that were actually 7% lower than the year before.² A business where the 'free' part funds a billion-six of profit is not a business giving anything away.

What the fee engine actually is: a third, growing patiently

Strip away the legend and what's left is still a remarkable machine — just a more honest one. Ancillary revenue ran 32.0% of total revenue in FY24 and 33.8% in FY25, a figure Morningstar independently lands at 34%.⁸ So the popular '30 to 32%' number is a touch stale; a third is the right mental model. And the trajectory is the real story: ancillary climbed from €2.15 billion in FY22 to €3.85 billion in FY23 to €4.30 billion in FY24⁴ and €4.72 billion in FY25.² In FY24 that worked out to roughly €23 to €24 per passenger.³ The mechanism is unbundling: take everything that used to be baked into one fare — the bag, the choice of seat, boarding order — and re-price each as an option. The passenger who wants the cheapest possible seat gets it. The passenger who wants comfort pays for exactly the comfort they want, and not a cent more. The airline captures willingness-to-pay it could never have extracted from a single blended fare.

Why nobody can tell you what the baggage line earns

Notice what's missing from every honest version of this analysis: the breakdown. Writers love to assert that Ryanair makes €X from bags and €Y from seat selection. Ryanair discloses no such thing. Its filings state plainly that under IFRS no sub-category disaggregation of ancillary revenue is required, because the economic factors across the categories — priority boarding, allocated seats, car hire, insurance, excess baggage, inflight sales — are treated as homogeneous.⁵ So any precise sub-split you read is an estimate dressed as data. This matters for one reason: the model isn't 'the baggage fee.' It's the whole menu, optimized as a single revenue surface across a customer base that self-sorts by how much it cares. The airline doesn't need to know which lever you pulled. It needs only that enough of you pull one.

Isn't Ryanair the ultra-low-cost extreme?

The fair objection: if a third of revenue from fees is so durable, surely Ryanair is the most fee-dependent airline alive, and surely the model trends toward the zero fare O'Leary kept teasing. Both halves are wrong. On dependence, Ryanair isn't even the extreme case — in IdeaWorksCompany's 2025 yearbook, Frontier broke the 60% ancillary threshold and five carriers now pull more than half their revenue from fees.⁷ Ryanair at 34% is Europe's leading practitioner, not the global outlier; the American ultra-low-cost carriers run a far more aggressive version of the same idea. On the free flight: that prediction lived in press interviews, never in a filing, never operationalized. The average fare in FY24 was €49.80³ and in FY25 it dropped but stayed firmly positive.² The honest read is that the fare and the fees are partners, not rivals. Cheap fares fill the planes; full planes create the audience the fee menu sells to. Push the fare to zero and you'd lose the two-thirds of revenue that actually pays the bills — which is exactly why Ryanair never did.

Here is the thing the legend gets exactly backwards. Ryanair's fee machine is impressive precisely because it isn't doing the impossible thing people credit it with. It isn't levitating a free flight on the back of baggage charges. It's running a low fare that fills the aircraft, then selling options to a captive, self-sorting audience — and adding a third of revenue on top of a business that already works. The fares pay for the planes. The fees pay for the swagger. And the moment you check the arithmetic, the magic trick turns out to be something better than magic: a fully legible, fully optional, fully durable upsell, built on the one thing every passenger still has to buy first — the seat itself.