What Is an Aircraft Hangar Worth Per Square Foot?

Abstract

1. Introduction

It is the first question almost everyone asks, and it is close to the least useful measure in this asset class. Not because the arithmetic is difficult, but because floor area is a weak proxy for what a hangar is worth.

The honest answer to what a hangar is worth per square foot is that the range is wide, the distribution is not centered on anything meaningful, and two buildings of identical area at the same airport can differ in value by multiples. Understanding why is more useful than any number, and this paper is about the why.

The argument runs in five moves. Section 2 sets out what the market actually buys and shows that the federal design guidance for hangars contains no area standard at all. Section 3 gives the quantity the agency does publish, which is a footprint derived from two linear dimensions of the aircraft. Section 4 presents a published sizing table in which floor area rises 44 percent with no change in the share of the fleet the building can accept. Section 5 tests the argument against the record, in two appraisals, a statewide census of 101 airports, a controlled comparison at a single field, and the units the profession itself reports in. Section 6 adds the general size effect that makes rent per square foot fall as buildings grow. Sections 7 and 8 address the two variables that usually matter more than the building, the remaining ground lease term and the airport itself. Section 9 identifies where the unit is legitimately useful, which is not nowhere, and Section 10 states what published cost data actually exists. Section 11 sets out the sequence that works instead.

2. Why the Unit Fails

2.1 What the Market Actually Buys

An ordinary warehouse is priced per square foot because square feet are what the tenant buys. Nobody rents a hangar by the square foot. They rent it because a specific aircraft fits, and fit is decided by three dimensions that have little to do with area.

Door clear height. The binding constraint in most cases. A hangar that cannot accept a tail height loses an entire tenant market regardless of how much floor it has.

Door clear width. Wingspan governs, and the usable opening is narrower than the building.

Clear span. Interior columns can make a large building unusable for a single large aircraft while a smaller column-free building serves it without difficulty.

The practical consequence: a 20,000 square foot hangar with a 28-foot door serves a different and more valuable tenant base than a 20,000 square foot hangar with an 18-foot door. Per square foot they look identical. In the market they are not the same product.

2.2 The Mapping, and a Correction

The claim that door height governs is testable, and the data to test it is federal and free.

The Federal Aviation Administration maintains an aircraft characteristics database published by its airports engineering office, giving tail height at operating empty weight and wingspan with and without winglets for each type. The version current at the time of writing dates from October 2024.

Table 1. Tail height and wingspan for representative business aircraft.

Source: Federal Aviation Administration, Aircraft Characteristics Database, version October 2024, fields Tail_Height_at_OEW_ft and Wingspan_ft_without_winglets_shark. The with-winglets field is unpopulated for every one of these types, so the figures above are the without-winglets values and may differ from manufacturer-published wingspans. The G700 and G800 are not in that version of the database.

Two conclusions follow, and the second corrects a conflation common in the practitioner discussion.

Tail height across the business fleet runs from 13.8 feet to 26.7 feet, a spread of 1.93 to one, and wingspan across the same types runs from 42.6 to 110.6 feet, a spread of 2.60 to one. Those ranges, not floor area, define which buildings serve which tenants. A door that clears 20 feet serves everything through the super-midsize segment and excludes the entire large-cabin market.

And the fire-protection classification threshold is not the constraint. Aircraft hangar fire protection classifies hangars in part by aircraft access door height, and the threshold sat at 28 feet for many years before the 2026 edition raised it to 35 feet across the first three groups. No purpose-built business jet reaches either figure. The tallest in the federal database is the Global 7500 at 26.7 feet. Tail heights above 28 feet belong to airliners and military transports. An analysis that treats the classification threshold as the dividing line between tenant markets has borrowed a number from a fire code and applied it to a demand question it was not written to answer. The classification threshold determines what suppression the building requires. Door clear height against specific tail heights determines what fits.

2.3 Clear Span

No civil standard addresses column-free span for hangars. The available authority is military, and it states the principle plainly.

The Department of Defense unified facilities criteria for aircraft maintenance hangars direct the designer to provide a framing system with a completely column-free hangar bay and flight line regardless of the number of hangar modules, so as to allow maximum bay utilization and aircraft layout flexibility. The same document derives door and bay dimensions from the design aircraft plus mandated clearances rather than treating them as free choices, and provides that fixed columns along the hangar door separating bays are considered hangar door jambs for the purpose of determining clearances.

That last provision is the useful one for a valuation. A column at the door line functions dimensionally as a jamb. It narrows the usable opening, and the usable opening is what determines the aircraft. A building with 20,000 square feet of floor and a column in the wrong place may serve a smaller aircraft than a 12,000 square foot building without one.

The criteria also state the design principle this paper is arguing: exceeding minimum requirements for bay widths and depths, door heights, clear heights, or crane hook heights may provide the flexibility to accommodate a future aircraft type without violating required clearances. That is an engineering standard describing door height as an option on future usability, which is a value proposition rather than a construction detail.

2.4 The federal design guidance contains no area standard

The point is not merely that practitioners over-use a ratio. It is that the document governing how hangars are sized does not use one at all.

The airport design circular treats hangars in an appendix on general aviation aprons and hangars, and its sizing paragraph is entirely dimensional: "The type and number of aircraft based at an airport are the primary factors in determining hangar width, height, depth, and number of bays," with instructions to "[s]ize hangar interior space to provide sufficient clearance between aircraft and the structure to limit risk of wingtip conflict" and to "[p]rovide a minimum of five feet (1.5 m) clearance between aircraft and the structure to permit the pilot to walk around aircraft when parked in the hangar" (Federal Aviation Administration 2022, app. E, para. E.3.3). On doors: "Size hangar doors to provide sufficient clearance between the aircraft and the doorframe. Typically, a minimum clearance of 1-2 feet (0.3-0.6 m) is adequate" (para. E.3.5).

Width, height, depth, bays, clearances. No square footage standard appears anywhere in the hangar guidance. The distinction is worth drawing precisely, because the same appendix does state areas elsewhere. Table E-1, "Minimum Parking Position Sizing," three pages earlier at printed page E-2, gives areas of 2,065 to 8,455 square feet for apron parking positions, and states the rule that produces them: "Values for area are calculated by multiplying the sum of the wingspan dimension plus 10 feet (3 m) by the sum of the maximum aircraft length plus 5 feet (1.5 m) and rounding up to the nearest multiple of 5" (Federal Aviation Administration 2022, app. E, para. E.2.2.2 and tbl. E-1).

That is the shape of the federal position, and it is sharper than a blanket absence. Where the circular prices ground for an aircraft standing outside, it states an area, and the area is a function of the aircraft's two horizontal dimensions. Where the circular sizes a building for an aircraft standing inside, it states dimensions and no area at all. A designer following the hangar paragraphs arrives at a floor area as an output of four dimensional decisions, never as an input to them, and the area the circular does publish is an area of aircraft, not an area of building.

The same circular classifies aircraft in a way that makes the logical point exactly. Airplane Design Group is defined as a grouping "related to aircraft wingspan or tail height (physical characteristics), whichever is most restrictive," and the definitions section states the operative rule in its own words: "When the aircraft wingspan and tail height fall in different groups, the larger group applies" (Federal Aviation Administration 2022, para. 1.5 item 8, para. 1.6.2 and tbl. 1-2). That is binding-constraint logic. A ratio does the opposite: it averages two quantities into one and loses the constraint that decides the case.

3. The Federal Footprint Measure

If floor area is the wrong quantity, there is a right one, and the agency publishes it.

The aircraft characteristics database carries a field for minimum parking area, defined as the product of two linear dimensions plus fixed clearances: (wingspan plus 10 feet) multiplied by (length plus 5 feet), sourced to the airport design circular (Federal Aviation Administration 2024). It is the area an aircraft actually requires, derived rather than measured, and it behaves nothing like a building's gross floor area.

Table 2. Minimum parking position area for representative business aircraft.

Source: Federal Aviation Administration (2024), field Parking_Area_ft2, minimum parking position sizing. The circular rounds the computed area up to the nearest multiple of 5; the database field does not.

Across that fleet the required footprint runs 3.77 to one from the Phenom 300 to the Global 7500, while wingspan across the same two types runs 2.16 to one. The quantity that scales with the tenant is an area, but it is an area derived from two linear dimensions of the aircraft, not from the dimensions of the building. A hangar's floor area tells you what the building has. It does not tell you what the aircraft needs, and the two are related only through a door the ratio never sees.

4. The Sizing Table That Settles It

The clean test of whether area or dimension drives usefulness is to hold one constant and vary the other. A planning guidebook published by the national transportation research program does exactly that, and its table is the central exhibit of this paper.

Table 3. Fleet accommodation by hangar dimension and door height.

Source: Transportation Research Board (2014), exhibit 5-16, printed p. 62, credited to Delta Airport Consultants.

Read the last two rows together. Going from a 100 by 100 hangar to a 120 by 120 adds 44 percent to the floor area and adds nothing at all to the share of the fleet the building can accept, because the door height is unchanged at 26 feet. A buyer paying a per-square-foot figure for the larger building is paying 44 percent more for the same tenant market.

Now read the first two rows. Going from 60 by 60 to 70 by 70 adds 36 percent to the floor area and takes fleet access from roughly 28 percent to roughly 70 percent. The area increase is smaller than in the previous comparison and the change in usefulness is far larger, because the door went from 16 feet to 20.

Fleet access is a step function of door height. It is not a function of area, and across this table the two move independently. That is the whole argument of this paper in one published exhibit, and it comes from the planning literature rather than from valuation.

The same guidebook states a sizing convention that matches the federal formula in Section 3: the planner should "add 10 feet to the wingspan of the design aircraft" to set hangar width, apply the same addition to depth, and "allow a buffer of at least 1 foot between the top of the tail and the door opening" (Transportation Research Board 2014, 62).

And it states the substitution problem directly: "A 100-ft-by-100-ft hangar may store one Gulfstream IV, four King Air 100s, or eight Beech Baron 58s" (Transportation Research Board 2014, 62). One building, one floor area, three different capacity outcomes and three different rent rolls, depending entirely on which aircraft the market at that field wants housed.

5. Dispersion in the Field

5.1 Two appraisals on the public record

The argument to this point is structural. It can also be tested, and the test is available because two hangar appraisals sit on the public record, both prepared by qualified appraisers who chose per-square-foot as their unit of comparison.

The first is a market value appraisal of a 10,000 square foot hangar at a Montana airport, prepared for a private hangar owner with an August 2023 valuation date and a concluded value of $1,650,000. It reached the public record as an attachment to a Montana Board of Regents agenda item. The sales comparison grid uses price per square foot. Four indications are carried: three closed sales at $95.03, $130.26 and $168.01 per square foot, and one active listing at $85.00. The three sales alone span 1.77 to one; with the listing the spread is 1.98 to one. The appraiser weights sales comparison most heavily on the reasoning that it is the method the public and the courts tend to rely upon. The subject carries a 65 by 22 foot door and a ground lease running to 2044 at $4,000 a year.

One line on the appraisal's summary page is worth reading alongside Section 7. The property rights appraised are stated as fee simple, for a building standing on airport land under a ground lease that expires in 2044. Whatever is being valued at $165 per square foot, it is not a fee simple interest in the land under the building, and the per-square-foot figure carries no marker of which interest it describes.

The second is a market rent study of 28 general aviation hangars at a Nevada municipal airport, prepared for the city with a June 2020 date. Its comparable summary chart carries twenty-one individual hangar rents at nine airports in Nevada, Arizona and California, stated in dollars per square foot per year. The range runs from $1.84 to $10.32, a spread of 5.61 to one, before the study concludes $4.00.

A range is a statement about two observations. The chart supports a statement about all twenty-one.

Table 4. Distribution of hangar rents per square foot per year across nine regional airports.

Source: computed from Anderson Valuation Group (2020), comparable summary chart, p. 62, twenty-one observations.

A coefficient of variation of 45 percent is a stronger statement than a ratio of 5.61 to one, because a ratio is driven by the two most extreme observations and a coefficient of variation is driven by all of them. Section 9 returns to this figure, because the assessment profession publishes a number for how much dispersion a unit of comparison may carry before it stops being a unit of comparison.

Neither appraisal is criticized here. Both are competent documents doing what the assignment required with the evidence available, and the sales comparison approach is frequently the right emphasis for the reason the first appraiser gives. The point is narrower and it is empirical rather than theoretical.

A unit of comparison that produces a 1.77 to one dispersion across three sales and a 5.61 to one dispersion across twenty-one rents, in the hands of appraisers who selected it deliberately, is not describing a homogeneous product. That dispersion is not noise to be adjusted away. It is the signal that the buildings differ in dimensions the unit does not capture, which is precisely the argument of Section 2.

5.2 A statewide census

Two appraisals establish that the dispersion occurs. A state survey establishes its scale, and the scale is larger than any practitioner range in circulation.

A statewide rates and charges study covering 102 public-use airports reports that conventional hangar rates "range from $0.05 to $5.00 per square foot per month," with $5.00 observed at one commercial service airport and one general aviation airport, and a low of $0.046 per square foot per month at a third-party owned hangar at a general aviation airport (Georgia Department of Transportation 2024, sec. 3.3.3). The study's stated range, $0.05 to $5.00, is 100 to one. Dividing the high by the lowest individual observation it reports gives 108.7 to one, which is a derivation from the study rather than a figure it states. Either way the dispersion is within one state and one property type.

Two provenance points belong with the figures rather than in a footnote. The hangar rate data is 2023 data, not 2024 data: the report states that "all data collected is current as of spring 2024, except for hangar lease rate information, which was collected in 2023" as part of the state's separate hangar inventory and demand analysis (ibid., 6). And the coverage figure that attaches to the hangar rates is 101 of 102 airports, which is the participation in the 2023 hangar survey; the 2024 rates survey itself drew responses from 90 of the 102 study airports.

Community hangar rates in the same study "range from $0.30 to $26.00 per square foot per month," including $26.00 at a commercial service airport, a spread of 86.7 to one (sec. 3.3.4). The study's own characterization is that "monthly rental prices vary widely for conventional hangars."

The $26.00 observation deserves a caution rather than silence. It is the only bullet in either section that omits the words "per month," which every other bullet carries. At $26.00 per square foot per month, community hangar space would rent at $312 per square foot per year, which is not a plausible figure for that product. It is most likely an annual rate or an error in the source. The argument does not need it: the conventional hangar range, whose units are stated consistently, already spans two orders of magnitude.

A unit of comparison whose observed values span two orders of magnitude inside a single state is not measuring a homogeneous product. No adjustment grid recovers a defensible conclusion from a range like that; the dispersion is telling the analyst that the buildings differ in something the unit does not capture.

The same study records a unit mismatch worth noticing. Ground for private hangar development leases at a statewide average of $0.34 per square foot per year, while the buildings on that ground rent at rates quoted per square foot per month. The land and the improvement, in the same transaction, are conventionally quoted in units that differ by a factor of twelve.

The same table carries a figure that belongs in Section 7.1 and is repeated here because the two sections are connected by it. The statewide average length of an initial ground lease for hangar development is 24.7 years (ibid., tbl. 3-11). The Small Business Administration caps real estate loan maturities at 25 years. On average, a new hangar ground lease in Georgia is written about four months short of the longest loan term available against the building it enables, and every year the lease runs off puts the improvement further outside that financing. The land term and the financing term are set by different parties who do not appear to be coordinating, and the per-square-foot rate on either one says nothing about the gap between them.

5.3 A controlled comparison at one airport

The strongest evidence holds everything constant except the variable in question. A published fee schedule at a single county-owned airport does that unintentionally, and the comparison has to be drawn carefully, because the schedule also contains a unit that is not comparable at all.

The airport's master plan lists three hangar products on one fee schedule. One of them, the Gulf T, is recorded in the same document's facilities inventory as "Non-aviation storage" in "Poor" condition, masonry and fiberglass. The other two are recorded as aircraft storage, in "Good" condition, wood and fiberglass, on the same apron, under the same owner. The Gulf T is therefore excluded from the comparison below. A hangar let for non-aviation storage in poor condition is cheaper per square foot for reasons that have nothing to do with the argument of this paper, and including it would prove the point by stacking the deck.

What remains is a genuinely controlled pair.

Table 5. Two aircraft storage hangars on one fee schedule, same owner, same apron, same condition.

Source: Dutchess County Government, Hudson Valley Regional Airport fee schedule, effective 1 January 2026 to 31 December 2026.

Rent rises 58 percent on a 38 percent increase in floor area, and the rate per square foot rises 14.5 percent. The two buildings share owner, tenant class, use, condition, construction, apron, fee schedule and effective date. The recorded physical difference between them is two feet of door height. A per-square-foot figure drawn from either one and applied to the other misstates the rent by about an eighth, and the analyst using it has no way to know, because the unit does not carry the dimension that moved.

The same pattern appears in the older schedule reproduced in the airport's 2024 master plan, which reports rents as of January 2020: Juliet T at $445 a month and Ranch Hangar at $705, a 58.4 percent rent difference on the same pair. Six years apart, two fee schedules, the same relationship.

5.4 The unit the profession actually reports in

If floor area were the operative unit, the industry would quote in it. Largely, it does not.

A statewide hangar study reports average rental rates by hangar unit rather than by area: T-hangar units at $209 a month where airport-owned and $342 where privately owned, corporate or box hangars at $1,323 and $2,071, and community hangar parking spaces at $321 and $507 (Georgia Department of Transportation 2023, tbl. 6-1). Its comparison table sets those against nine other states with published studies, and every one of the ten reports in the same units: the T-hangar unit, the box hangar, the parking space. None reports a value per square foot (tbl. 6-2).

Another state's annual survey makes the switch explicit within a single document. It quotes T-hangar and community hangar rates per month for a named design aircraft, a Cessna 172, and uses a per-square-foot rate only for private, corporate and commercial hangar ground and lease rates (Wisconsin Department of Transportation 2026). The same survey shows how unstable the ratio is at small sample sizes: at large general aviation airports its reported corporate hangar rate fell 52 percent in a year while the commercial rate rose 37 percent and the private rate rose 25 percent, on rates that differ from one another by a few cents.

The practical reading is that the market prices a storage position for an aircraft and prices land by area, and that the per-square-foot value figure is largely an artifact of analysts importing a commercial real estate convention into a market that does not use it.

6. The General Size Effect

There is a further reason a value per square foot is not a constant, and it holds even for ordinary buildings where the unit is otherwise appropriate. Rent per square foot falls as buildings get larger.

A hedonic study of industrial property rents in a large American metropolitan market finds that "[a] 10% increase in square footage decreases rents by approximately 1.5%" in real rent per square foot per year (Clark and Pennington-Cross 2016). The same study finds ceiling height enters non-monotonically, with statistically significant premiums for properties in the 20 to 25 foot band rather than a smooth increase, which is the industrial analogue of the step function in Section 4.

Two consequences follow for hangar work. A per-square-foot figure drawn from small buildings overstates the figure applicable to large ones, and one drawn from large buildings understates it for small ones, before any hangar-specific characteristic is considered. And the practice of adjusting a comparable to the subject on area alone imports the size effect into the adjustment without measuring it.

The land-side literature adds a caution against treating the effect as a constant. A semiparametric analysis of undeveloped parcels finds that the value-to-size relationship "permits the function to be linear, convex, and concave in different regions," without rejecting log-linearity for that sample (Thorsnes and McMillen 1998). The size effect is a local empirical question, not a coefficient to be borrowed.

7. The Land Interest

Most hangars sit on leased airport ground. The tenant owns the improvements for the remaining term, and at expiration they typically revert to the sponsor. A per-square-foot figure is meaningless without the remaining term attached to it.

Two physically identical hangars side by side on the same taxilane, built by the same contractor in the same year, will diverge sharply in value if one has forty years remaining and the other has twelve. The steel is the same. The interest being conveyed is not.

The empirical literature on leasehold discounts is thinner than the argument deserves and is entirely residential. Caesar, Donner and Kopsch measured the effect directly in the Stockholm cooperative apartment market, finding that leasehold status reduces price by roughly 2.3 percent controlling for location and unit characteristics, that the discount reaches 4.2 percent at the point of renegotiation, and that apartments appreciate by 0.22 percent for each additional year remaining until renegotiation. Giglio, Maggiori and Stroebel used leasehold and freehold price differences in the United Kingdom and Singapore to estimate very long-run discount rates, finding that hundred-year leaseholds are valued more than 10 percent below otherwise identical freeholds.

The second of those cuts against a naive reading of the first. Very distant cash flows are discounted lightly, which means the leasehold discount is not spread evenly across the term. It concentrates at the short end. That is consistent with the non-linearity practitioners observe, and it is a more precise statement of it than a general claim that value declines as the term shortens.

No leasehold discount study addressing commercial or industrial property could be located. The entire empirical literature concerns apartments. A hangar is not an apartment, and importing a coefficient from one to the other is not supportable. What the literature establishes is that the effect is real, measurable, and concentrated at short remaining terms. The magnitude in any given assignment has to come from that market.

7.1 The Financing Cliff

There is one place where the non-linearity is not a market observation but a rule, and it is worth citing because it is documentary.

The Small Business Administration's current standard operating procedure addresses collateral consisting of leasehold improvements. For 504 loans, the lease term must equal or exceed the term of the loan. For 7(a) loans it should do so where an assignment of lease and landlord's waiver is obtained, and where the lender is unable to obtain those, the lease term including renewal options exercisable only by the borrower must equal or exceed the loan term. For the operating company structure the lease must have a remaining term at least equal to the term of the loan.

Combine that with the maturity rule, which caps real estate loans including improvements to leasehold interests in land at twenty-five years, and the cliff is arithmetic rather than sentiment. A hangar on a ground lease with fewer than twenty-five years remaining cannot support a maximum-term loan, and the remaining term caps the amortization directly. The same procedure notes that leasehold improvements provide minimal collateral value and directs lenders to consider requiring additional collateral.

The buyer pool narrows as financing availability narrows, and it narrows in steps rather than smoothly. This is the most common reason a hangar sells for far less than it cost to build, and it is invisible in any per-square-foot comparison that does not carry the lease term alongside it.

8. The Airport

Location in this asset class does not mean the neighborhood. It means the field, and the field's characteristics are measurable rather than impressionistic.

Runway length and surface set the aircraft category the airport can serve. Approach capability determines usability in weather and therefore whether a business aircraft can be reliably based there. Tower status and certification status affect operational flexibility. Fuel availability and on-field maintenance affect tenant utility. Proximity to a metropolitan business market drives demand for based corporate aircraft. And hangar supply and waiting lists are the most direct local signal of scarcity.

A hangar at a towered reliever with a low approach minimum near a major business market is a different asset from an identical building at a rural field with a short runway, and the gap between them is wider than any per-square-foot band would suggest. The public use airport directory publishes these characteristics for every operational public use field in the country, which makes them checkable rather than assumed. The airport-level analysis is developed at length in a companion paper (Carter 2026a).

9. Where the Unit Works

The measure is not worthless. It is useful in the places where the underlying quantity really is area.

Construction cost estimating. Building cost does scale with area, adjusted for door type, systems, and region. This is why the cost side of a hangar analysis reasonably uses a per-square-foot figure while the value side does not.

Insurance replacement cost. Same reasoning. What is being priced is rebuilding a structure.

Coarse screening. If a figure is far outside any plausible band, something is worth examining. It flags outliers. It does not price assets.

Note the asymmetry this creates. Cost per square foot is a defensible figure. Value per square foot is not. Confusing the two is how a hangar ends up assessed, insured, or underwritten at the wrong number, because a cost figure was quietly treated as a value figure.

The assessment profession states the conditions under which a unit rate is legitimate, and they are conditions rather than a licence. Its mass appraisal standard endorses unit values for land where they are developed from market analysis and calibrated to sales, and its standard on automated models requires that model output be tested against sales and that ratio study statistics be reported. Both treat the unit rate as a calibrated model parameter that must be validated, not as an observation. A per-square-foot figure quoted without the calibration, the sample, or the ratio statistics is borrowing the form of mass appraisal without its discipline.

That same profession publishes the number against which a unit of comparison can be judged, which turns the argument of this paper from a rhetorical claim into a measurable one. The IAAO Standard on Ratio Studies sets acceptable uniformity by coefficient of dispersion: 5.0 to 15.0 for income-producing property in larger areas with large samples, and 5.0 to 20.0 for income-producing property in smaller areas represented by smaller samples (International Association of Assessing Officers 2013, tbl. 1-3, 17). Twenty is the outside tolerance, for the hardest case the standard contemplates.

Set the evidence in Section 5 against it. Twenty-one hangar rents at nine airports in one regional market carry a coefficient of variation of 45.1 percent. A statewide conventional hangar rate range spans 100 to one. Two adjacent buildings on one fee schedule differ by 14.5 percent per square foot on two feet of door height alone. None of these is a coefficient of dispersion computed against appraised values, so the comparison is indicative rather than exact. But the order of magnitude is not close, and the burden sits with anyone proposing to price a hangar on a per-square-foot figure to show that their sample behaves better than these do.

It is worth knowing how well the unit performs where conditions are favourable. Cannon and Cole (2011) compared 25 years of NCREIF appraisals against subsequent sales and found appraised values more than 12 percent above or below the price achieved two quarters later, on institutional-grade commercial property that is homogeneous, heavily traded and professionally managed. That is the error rate on the easy case. A hangar is the hard case: thin market, no two buildings alike, most of them on leased ground with a reversion.

10. What the Cost Data Actually Is

Since the cost side is where the unit is defensible, it is worth being precise about what published cost data exists. It is less than practitioners generally assume.

The two commercial services both carry hangars, and both are paywalled. The principal square-foot cost reference carries a named aircraft hangar model, one of 77 standard building models, and has done so continuously across recent editions. The principal valuation cost service carries three hangar occupancies: storage hangar, maintenance and office hangar, and T-hangar. Neither publishes its figures openly, and this paper does not reproduce them.

One current figure is on the public record because an appraiser cited it. A 2020 appraisal filed with a Nevada municipality cites the valuation cost service for a maintenance hangar of low-cost class S construction at a base cost of $36.75 per square foot, adjusted by cost and local multipliers to $43.11. That is a single data point from a single assignment at a single location, and it is quoted here as evidence that the services carry hangar data rather than as a benchmark.

The only free government cost figures are one state's planning assumptions, and they are old. A state aviation system plan published unit cost assumptions giving a four-unit nested T-hangar of 5,355 square feet at $182,000, which is $33.99 per square foot, and a 100 by 100 foot conventional hangar at $950,000, which is $95.00 per square foot. Read the exclusions before using either. The document states, for both, that "site preparation including hangar floor and apron are not included in the unit price." A figure that excludes the slab is excluding the working surface of the building.

The same appendix gives the excluded item separately, which means the two halves can be put back together. Site preparation for the four-unit T-hangar is $90,000, and for the conventional hangar $120,000. The completed figures follow.

Table 6. Published state planning costs for hangars, structure and site preparation separated and combined.

Source: Minnesota Department of Transportation (2013), app. F, pp. F-5 to F-6. Dollar totals are stated in the source; the per-square-foot figures are computed from them. The assumptions date from 2012 and 2013.

Two things follow. The structure-only figures understate the completed cost by 49 percent for the T-hangar and 13 percent for the conventional hangar, which is a large difference between two rows of the same table and turns entirely on the ratio of slab and apron to enclosed volume. And the site preparation component behaves like an area cost while the structure component does not, which is why the exclusion matters more for the low building than the tall one.

Everything else is contractor marketing. A search for hangar construction cost per square foot returns builder websites quoting ranges without methodology, scope, or date. Those figures are advertising.

So there is no current, free, authoritative per-square-foot construction cost range for aircraft hangars. A cost approach requires either a licensed cost service, a contractor quotation for the specific building, or a component build-up. It does not have a public benchmark to fall back on, and an analysis citing one is citing something that does not exist.

10.1 A government schedule graduated by height, with area held constant

One published cost schedule demonstrates the paper's argument on the cost side rather than the value side, and it does so in a controlled way no private source matches.

A national valuation authority publishes, for rating purposes, an agreed cost schedule for airport hangars stated per square metre and graduated purely by eaves height. Floor area is the denominator throughout and does not vary. The scale published in the 2023 revaluation practice note for minor airports runs from £150 per square metre below 3.0 metres of eaves height to £160 at 3.2 metres, £170 at 3.5, £180 at 3.7, £200 at 4.0 and £280 at 5.5 metres. The 2017 revaluation cost guide runs from £100 to £198 across a comparable range of eaves heights (Valuation Office Agency 2023, 2017).

The scope of that schedule should be stated, because stating it strengthens the point rather than weakening it. It applies to airstrips, gliding clubs and similar hereditaments, and the note describes the buildings as "normally agricultural type buildings, unheated and unlined providing wind and watertight protection for aircraft." These are the simplest hangars that exist. Even for them, a national valuation authority prices the enclosure by a vertical dimension.

From 3.0 metres to 5.5 metres of eaves height the 2023 schedule rises 86.7 percent per square metre, and the 2017 schedule rises 98 percent across its own band, with no change in the quantity being divided. A government valuation authority has published, twice, the proposition that cost per unit of floor area is a function of a vertical dimension that per-square-foot analysis discards.

The same notes show the ratio moving for a second reason unrelated to the building's envelope: the published rates include a concrete floor, and where the floor is some other compacted surface the rate is reduced by £26 per square metre with an appropriate figure added back, so that a 3.5 metre hangar at £170 becomes £154 with a hardcore surface. That is the authority’s own worked example, and it nets to 9.4 percent once the mandated add-back for the replacement surface is taken into account. Two hangars of identical area and identical eaves height carry costs differing by that much on the floor alone, before any question of height arises.

10.2 What recent public projects and state studies report

Three further figures are on the public record, and the spread among them is instructive.

A statewide hangar study adopted "a cost of $97,200 per T-hangar unit" and "for conventional hangar buildings, a cost of $101 per square foot," while stating that those costs "primarily consider only the hangar structure" and that added costs "may include permitting, site preparation, grading/fill, aprons, taxiways, and/or utilities" (Georgia Department of Transportation 2023, sec. 3.3). Applied statewide to 1,405 unmet hangar spaces, the study reached a total of approximately $450 million, which implies a blended average of about $320,000 per hangar space.

A completed project at a Midwestern airport, opened on 17 July 2026, delivered an approximately 47,000 square foot hangar facility on a stated total investment of $12 million, which is about $255 per square foot. The scope behind that figure is only partly disclosed. The announcement describes the facility and the investment, and separately records that the project "received infrastructure support to fund needed site access" through a state economic development programme, which reads as site access funded alongside the $12 million rather than inside it (City of Gary 2026). The figure is therefore a project cost of undetermined scope, which is exactly the condition this section is about.

Note what separates $101 from $255, and where $107 sits between them. The $101 is a structure-only planning assumption with site work excluded by its authors. The $107 is the same class of building with the site work added back, from a state planning appendix a decade older. The $255 is a delivered project cost on partly disclosed scope, for a facility that is not a bare box. Each is an honest figure for what it measures. Any one of them quoted as "the cost of a hangar per square foot" without its scope is wrong by a factor that runs to two and a half.

The cost side of this subject is therefore in the same condition as the value side, for the same reason. The number is not the problem. The unstated scope behind the number is the problem, and a ratio is a form of expression that hides scope by construction.

11. The Sequence That Works

The order matters, and it runs opposite to the way the question is usually asked.

Income first. What rent does the building command at this field, for the tenant market its door and span actually serve? Capitalize that, using a rate appropriate to a leasehold rather than to fee simple industrial.

Then reversion. Model the remaining ground lease term explicitly. Set the tenant's reversion at its contractual value, which is frequently zero, not at market.

Then a cost cross-check. Build a component-level replacement cost including the door system, the slab, clear span framing, and fire suppression class. Use it as a ceiling and a sanity test, not as the answer, and source it per Section 10 rather than from a published range.

Then reconcile. Where the approaches disagree, the reason is usually informative. A large gap between cost and income value at a short remaining term is not an error. It is the reversion showing up.

The hangar value estimator runs this sequence and returns a range rather than a point, which is the honest output for a screen. For the cost side, the construction cost calculator produces a component breakdown. Neither is an appraisal, and neither should be relied on by a third party. They exist to tell you whether the question deserves a formal engagement.

12. Limitations

Six limitations bear on how this paper should be used.

The dispersion evidence is thin in one respect. Section 5.1 draws on two appraisals, one sale-based and one rent-based, in two states. Two documents establish that the dispersion occurs; they do not establish its typical magnitude. A larger sample would be straightforward to assemble from public records and has not been.

The leasehold discount evidence is residential and foreign. The studies measure Swedish cooperative apartments and United Kingdom and Singapore housing. No commercial or industrial leasehold discount study could be located, and none addresses aviation property. The mechanism transfers; the coefficients do not.

The clear span authority is military. The unified facilities criteria govern defense hangars and state design requirements for military aircraft. They support the narrower principle that columns function as dimensional constraints and that door dimensions derive from the design aircraft, which is an engineering proposition rather than a defense-specific one. No civil equivalent exists.

The aircraft data is a snapshot. The federal database version used here dates from October 2024 and does not include the newest large-cabin types. Door height thresholds should be checked against current manufacturer data for any aircraft the analysis turns on.

The dispersion evidence in Sections 5.2 and 5.4 is drawn largely from one state. Georgia publishes unusually complete hangar and rate data, which is why it appears twice, and a state that publishes well is not necessarily a representative state. The nine-state comparison in that study mitigates but does not remove the concern.

The sizing table in Section 4 is a planning exhibit credited to a consulting firm, not a measured sample. It states typical sizes and approximate fleet coverage for design purposes. Its value here is that it holds door height constant across two rows while area rises, which is a logical demonstration rather than an estimate, and the approximate fleet percentages should not be read as measurements.

13. Conclusion

A unit of comparison is useful when it tracks what the market transacts in. For warehouses that is floor area. For hangars it is not.

What the market transacts in is fit: whether the door clears the tail, whether the opening clears the wingspan, and whether a column is in the way. Those three dimensions vary across the business fleet by roughly two to one in tail height and better than two to one in wingspan, and none of them is a function of area. Two buildings with the same floor plate and different doors are different products serving different tenants at different rents.

The dispersion this produces is visible wherever anyone has looked. Sale comparables spanning nearly two to one and rent comparables spanning more than five to one, in the work of appraisers who chose the unit deliberately. Conventional hangar rents spanning 108 to one across one state in one year. And two T-hangars at the same airport, on the same schedule, differing by 3 percent in area and 67 percent in rent. That is what a unit looks like when it is measuring the wrong thing.

Beyond the building, the remaining ground lease term frequently dominates. The effect is real, it is concentrated at the short end rather than spread evenly, and at least one part of it is documentary rather than behavioral, because lending rules require the lease term to cover the loan term and cap the amortization directly.

Cost per square foot remains defensible, which is the asymmetry worth carrying away. Building cost scales with area. Value does not. And even on the cost side the practitioner should know that no free, current, authoritative benchmark exists, that the licensed services are the real sources, and that the one free government figure in circulation excludes the floor.

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This paper is research and general information for professionals evaluating aviation real estate. It is not appraisal, legal, or tax advice, and it does not create an engagement.