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Through the first 19 weeks of 2026, the Mediterranean charter fleet has booked roughly the same number of weeks as the same period in 2025. The headline rates have not moved much. What has moved is what falls inside the rate. APA is running 2 to 3 points higher on average, and the 50m to 70m size class is quietly absorbing a 4% headline-rate increase that you would not see if you only read the brochure.
The data behind this post is drawn from confirmed-charter feedback supplied by five MYBA central-agency desks between January and May 2026, anonymised and aggregated. Sample size is around weeks across 80 yachts. That is enough to tell a directional story, not enough to publish a heat map by builder.
The size-class headline
The pattern is not uniform across the fleet. There are four bands worth separating.
Below 40m LOA, weekly rates are flat year on year. Booking lead times have shortened by roughly two weeks. APA is steady at 25% to 30%. The sub-40m segment is the most price-sensitive and the first to give up margin to fill the calendar. If you wanted a 35m in late June for 2025 money in 2026, you can have it.
From 40m to 50m, rates are up 2% to 3%. APA is up 1 point. This is the largest single segment of the Med charter fleet and the most competitive. The 40m to 50m yachts that took refits during the 2025 to 2026 winter are pricing slightly above pre-refit levels, which is what owners always do, and the market is accepting it.
From 50m to 70m, headline rates are up 4% on average and APA is up 2 to 3 points. This is the segment where the actual delivered cost of a Med week has moved most. A 60m yacht that charted at €500K plus 30% APA in 2025 is now €520K plus 33% APA. The delivered week cost has moved from €650K to roughly €692K. Call it a 6% effective increase.
Above 70m, the picture splits. Yachts with strong owner-brokers and a 14-month booked-out calendar moved their rate 5% to 7%. Yachts without that demand pressure held flat. Above 90m, the market is so thin that any individual rate move says more about one owner than the segment. We are not going to draw a curve from four data points.
What is actually driving the 4% number
Three things, in roughly equal weight.
First, crew payroll. The 2025 to 2026 winter saw deckhand and stewardess base wages move up another 4% to 6%, on top of the larger 2023 and 2024 increases. The crew shortage we wrote about in 2024 is no longer a shortage in the sense that yachts are unable to staff. It is now a structural cost line that climbs faster than headline inflation. Owners have absorbed two seasons of this. The third is leaking into the rate.
Second, refit and yard costs. Lürssen, Feadship, ICON, and Vitters have all raised standard hourly rates between January 2025 and January 2026. A €5M refit two years ago is €5.4M now. Yachts coming out of refit price to recover capital, and that pricing sets the high water mark for the rest of the segment.
Third, port and dockage. Monaco, Saint-Tropez, and Capri all raised berth tariffs for 2026. We covered the Monaco move in the dockage analysis. For a 50m yacht running a peak-season Riviera week, the marina line is roughly €25,000 higher than the same itinerary in 2024. That moves APA, not the headline rate, which is why APA reads higher this season.
The destinations that moved and the ones that did not
Not every Med destination is pricing the same way.
The French Riviera moved most. June 2026 prices on a 50m Riviera week are tracking 5% to 7% above June 2025. August is the same year on year. June, in other words, has become the new August, which is a pattern we have been writing about for two years and which the rate data has finally caught up to. We covered the June versus August story separately.
The Amalfi Coast and Capri held steady. Capri's Marina Grande tariffs are eye-watering, but most charters anchor off rather than berthing, so the line shows up in dockage only when the captain elects to overnight on a finger. Amalfi rates are flat because demand was already at the level the inventory could absorb.
Croatia moved down on the Split base and up on the Dubrovnik base, which is a pattern we have not seen before. The Dubrovnik effect appears to be Albania. Yachts running a south-bound itinerary out of Dubrovnik can now do four nights of Montenegro plus Albania and price accordingly. We unpack that in the Albania piece.
Greece is up 3% to 5% on the Athens base and flat on the Mykonos base. The post-2025 charter-law changes are still being absorbed by the market. Some Greek-flag yachts have moved licensing arrangements and re-priced. We wrote that up in the Greek charter law update.
Turkey is flat. The cabotage rule still keeps foreign-flag charter limited, and the Turkish-flag fleet is pricing into a deep domestic demand pool that does not care about Euro inflation.
What this means for a 2026 booking decision
If you are booking a Med week for July or August 2026 now, you are negotiating with no leverage. The fleet is roughly 80% booked-out for peak. The yachts that still have peak weeks are either over-priced and the owner is holding line, or they have an issue the broker will not say out loud. We name two in the yachts-to-avoid piece.
If you are booking shoulder, May or late September into October, you have the leverage you have not had since 2019. Brokers will tell you shoulder is "filling fast." On the 50m to 70m segment, shoulder is filling at the same rate it filled in 2024, which was not fast. The yachts that are still open in late September 2026 will accept a 5% to 10% discount on rate and will not push APA above 30%.
For 2027, if you are planning a Med peak week, the smart booking window is now. Yachts going into refit between October 2026 and April 2027 will price the post-refit weeks higher than the pre-refit weeks, and the calendar will fill from the post-refit end first. Two specific 70m+ yachts are in this category. We are not naming them in a public post because we do not want to move our own clients' positions, but you can email the desk.
The Caribbean H1 picture
The Caribbean season runs December to April, so H1 2026 captures the end of the 2025 to 2026 season and the start of the off-season. What we can say:
Rates for the 2025 to 2026 Caribbean season ran 3% above 2024 to 2025. APA was steady at 25% to 30%. Christmas and New Year weeks sold at premiums of 35% to 50% over peak Med rate for the same yachts, which is the pattern we have seen for five years and which is not changing.
The crossing back to the Med has already begun for most of the fleet. The shadow yachts and the explorer fleet stay longer. A few yachts have stayed in the Caribbean for the May to November off-season to position for the Australian or South Pacific 2026 to 2027 season. We covered the Pacific positioning in the fleet additions piece.
What we got wrong in our 2025 H1 piece
We wrote in May 2025 that headline rates would move 6% to 8% in 2026 across the 50m to 70m segment. The actual number is closer to 4%. We were too high. The reason is that owners absorbed more crew payroll than we expected before passing it through.
We also said the 80m+ segment would re-price upward because of constrained inventory. That happened on yachts with strong booked-out calendars and did not happen at all on the rest of the segment. Calling it a segment move was wrong. It is a yacht-by-yacht story above 80m.
Verdict
Mid-2026 is not a dramatic year for charter rates. It is a continuation year. The 50m to 70m segment is doing the heavy lifting, the sub-40m segment is taking the price-sensitivity hit, and the 80m+ segment is splitting between yachts with demand and yachts without.
If you are a returning charter client in the 50m to 70m segment, your delivered cost in 2026 is roughly 6% higher than 2025. That is what the fleet is doing. The yachts that try to charge more than that without a defensible reason are the ones not filling, and the brokers know which they are.
Passed on
We did not include a single yacht's individual rate trajectory in this post because rate disclosure for any specific yacht moves the negotiation. We also passed on quoting any specific 80m+ rate because the sample size is too thin. If you want a confidential read on a specific yacht in any of these segments, we run that through the charter desk.
CTA BLOCKS
Primary: "Inquire about a 2026 Mediterranean charter." Routes to the charter desk and central-agent contact list. Secondary: Newsletter signup, "The Brief," weekly charter market notes. Tertiary: Related-post grid linking to the shoulder-versus-peak gap, the Med fleet additions, the rate-per-meter curve, and the APA fuel pass-through.