Note · 1,227 cuts logged
What the market did since July.
Every asking-price cut we have logged since Jul 19, 2026: how deep they go, whether the pace is changing, and what happens when a seller comes back for a second one.
Since Jul 19, 2026 we have read every used piston aircraft advert on Barnstormers each morning and compared each asking price against the price it held the day before. That is 1,227 cuts across 4,804 tracked aircraft in 92 days, about 13.3 a day. This is what they look like when you put them all in one pile.
How deep is a typical cut?
The average cut is 9.5%, but the average is doing the usual thing averages do when a few large numbers are present. The median cut is 7.1%, and the distribution explains the gap.
| Size of cut | Cuts | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Under 5% | 380 | 31.8% |
| 5 to 10% | 438 | 36.7% |
| 10 to 15% | 182 | 15.2% |
| 15 to 25% | 128 | 10.7% |
| 25% or more | 67 | 5.6% |
69% of cuts are under 10%. A seller trimming an asking price is usually making a gesture rather than a concession, and the shape of this table is what a market of gestures looks like: a fat cluster in the single digits, thinning out fast.
The tail is the interesting part. 5.6% of cuts are 25% or more, 67 of them. Those are not negotiations, they are re-pricings, and they are the ones worth an alert.
Is the pace changing?
| Month | Cuts | Average cut |
|---|---|---|
| July | 156 | 9% |
| August | 423 | 8.8% |
| September | 392 | 9.8% |
| October | 256 | 10.3% |
Read that table carefully, because two of its rows are not whole months. The record opens on July 19, so the first month is a part-month, and the last row stops this morning. Comparing the raw counts across them would manufacture a trend out of the calendar.
Per day of actual watching, the pace has been close to flat. That is a duller answer than "cuts are accelerating", and it is the one the data supports. What does move is the depth: the average cut has drifted across the months by a point or two, on a base where a point is a few hundred dollars on a trainer and several thousand on a twin.
What happens when a seller cuts twice
890 aircraft have cut their asking price at least once. 27.9% of them came back and did it again.
| Cuts on one advert | Aircraft |
|---|---|
| One cut | 642 |
| Two cuts | 192 |
| Three or more | 56 |
Here is the part we did not expect. The first cut on an advert averages 10.1%. Every cut after it averages 7.7%. The second cut is shallower than the first, not deeper.
Sellers do not capitulate. They edge.
The intuition most buyers carry is the opposite: that a seller who has already blinked once is softening, and the next move will be bigger. What the record shows is a first cut that tries to solve the problem in one go, and follow-ups that shave. If you are waiting for a capitulation, the average advert does not produce one; it produces a staircase.
Which is an argument for watching the count of cuts rather than the size of the last one. An aeroplane on its third cut has a seller who has now been wrong three times about what it is worth, and that is a different conversation from one that has just come down 10.1% for the first time.
What these numbers are not
Every figure here is an asking price. Not a sale price, not an appraisal, not what anybody paid. Nobody publishes real transaction prices for private aircraft sales, and a cut tells you what a seller now hopes for, not what the aircraft is worth.
Nor does a cut predict a sale. We can see an advert come down after a cut, but an advert comes down when it sells, when the seller gives up, and, most often, when its term simply runs out. That last case dominates, which is why nothing on this page claims a cut made anything happen.
The full definitions are on the methodology page: what counts as a cut, why medians rather than averages, and what we do when a seller replaces a number with "call".