Yacht Depreciation

Depreciation Is the Cost That Never Sends an Invoice

Depreciation is the largest single cost in most yacht ownership periods and the only one that never issues an invoice. A marina sends a berthing contract, an insurer sends a premium notice, a boatyard sends a tariff. Lost resale value arrives once, at disposal, as the difference between two prices years apart.

That structure is why depreciation is the line most often omitted from an ownership budget altogether. It does not hit any month's cash position, so it does not enter most owners' arithmetic until the vessel is listed for sale.

This is part five of a series building the cost of owning a yacht from published documents. Part one established that the purchase price is the smallest number in ownership. Depreciation is the mechanism that makes that true, because it converts a share of the acquisition price into an operating cost spread across the holding period and paid at the end of it. It is also the number any charter income and returns case has to clear before it is a case at all.

What the Brokerages Publish About the First Five Years

Two brokerages publish year-by-year depreciation bands, and both are commercial sources rather than independent studies. YATCO, the yacht listing platform, published depreciation guidance on 27 June 2025 and last modified it on 5 September 2025, giving a year-one loss of roughly 10 to 20 per cent, a cumulative loss of 30 to 40 per cent by year three, and 40 to 50 per cent by year five.1

YATCO adds that the curve flattens after about year ten, with minor annual depreciation continuing beyond it.1 The guidance does not quantify the post-ten-year rate at all.

IYC, the international brokerage and yacht management firm, publishes the same first-year figure from the other side of the same transaction: once a yacht shifts from new to pre-owned, its valuation "typically corrects by 10-20%".2 Neither firm publishes the sample behind its band, and neither is a disinterested party. Both sell used yachts, and both benefit from the conclusion that used hulls represent value.

The Same Number With Two Opposite Meanings

The two published five-year figures are the same number carrying opposite meanings, and the gap between them is twenty percentage points of residual value. YATCO states a cumulative loss of 40 to 50 per cent at five years, which leaves a residual of 50 to 60 per cent.1 IYC states that most yachts reach "40-50% of their original price in five years", which is a residual of 40 to 50 per cent.2

Read literally, the two cannot both be right. On a €900,000 hull, YATCO's reading leaves €450,000 to €540,000 at five years and IYC's leaves €360,000 to €450,000. The two bands overlap at exactly one point, €450,000.

Neither firm publishes the sample, geography, size band or period behind its figure, so the disagreement cannot be resolved from the documents themselves. This series states the disagreement rather than splitting it, because the average of two unsourced bands is not a better-sourced number than either one.

The Curve Priced Against a Fifteen-Metre Hull

Applying YATCO's published bands to a €900,000 fifteen-metre yacht shows where the money actually goes. The table runs the cumulative loss band across the three ages YATCO quantifies and converts each into a residual value and a period cost.

At the top of the published band the first twelve months shed €180,000. That is the same as years two and three combined, and twice what years four and five cost together.

Why Buyers Target Hulls Three to Five Years Old

Buying a used hull is the only depreciation strategy either brokerage actually recommends, and both name the same age window. YATCO's guidance advises avoiding the biggest drop by purchasing a yacht at least three to five years old, which it describes as sidestepping the "new boat penalty".1 IYC states that many prospective buyers look in the three-to-seven-year range, because those vessels combine modern design and technology with a curve whose steepest section is already behind them.2

The arithmetic supports the advice on YATCO's own numbers. A buyer entering at year three pays 60 to 70 per cent of the new price, and if the five-year band holds, exits at 50 to 60 per cent.

Two years of ownership therefore costs ten percentage points of the original price at either end of the band, against the ten to twenty points the first owner absorbed in twelve months. The same hull, held for a comparable period, costs the second owner roughly half what it cost the first.

What Five Years in Charter Does to Residual Value

Charter fleets are the one part of the market where a five-year residual is quoted as a working number, because that is the standard programme length in charter management. Catamaran Guru, a brand-independent yacht brokerage, states that based on historical data a catamaran is worth approximately 60 to 65 per cent of original value after five years in charter.3

The same brokerage's principal gave a lower figure in a named interview. Estelle Cockroft told Yachting World in March 2022 that an owner recovering 55 per cent of invested value at the end of a charter agreement is "probably doing quite well", and that a buyer of an ex-charter yacht should not be paying over 60 per cent of the new yacht value.4

Neil Bingham, broker for Sail Ionian's in-house brokerage, told the same publication that most of that fleet is sold at around the five-year mark, and that a five-year-old charter yacht is comparable to a car with 60,000 miles on it. At seven to eight years, he said, an ex-charter yacht starts to need significant money spent on it.4

The Contract That Prices the Residual in Advance

Some charter operators publish a programme structure that fixes the residual contractually rather than leaving it to the brokerage market. Catamaran Guru describes a lease-purchase programme in which the buyer pays 35 per cent of the price at the outset and a 25 per cent balloon at the end of a 66-month term, at which point title transfers. The owner acquires the yacht for 60 per cent of the new price.3

The Moorings publishes the other common shape. Its guaranteed income programme runs five to six years and pays a monthly income equivalent to 8 per cent of the purchase price, which the company describes as guaranteed by contract and unaffected by the boat's actual charter activity. The operator pays berthing, maintenance, insurance and repairs, and at the end the owner can keep, trade or sell the yacht through the operator's brokerage at a standard 10 per cent commission.5

Both structures do the same thing to the depreciation line. They move it from an unknown settled at sale to a number fixed at the outset, which is why whether a yacht is a good investment turns on the exit.

Depreciation Against the Rest of the Annual Stack

Depreciation dwarfs every cash line this series has priced so far, which is the reason it belongs in the budget rather than in the footnotes. On a €900,000 fifteen-metre yacht, the published cash stack is a €6,150 annual berth at Marina di Ragusa, €4,500 to €18,000 of insurance at Fraser Yachts' 0.5 to 2 per cent band, and €45,000 to €90,000 of maintenance at Fraser's 5 to 10 per cent band.67

That totals €55,650 to €114,150 a year in cash. Year-one depreciation on the same hull is €90,000 to €180,000.

At the top of both bands, the first year of lost value exceeds the entire cash operating stack. At the bottom of the depreciation band it is still 14.6 times the annual cost of the berth, eight times the midpoint of insurance, and at the upper end of a full year of yard and maintenance spending. An owner who models the berth precisely and depreciation not at all has modelled the small number, which is the point the full ownership cost breakdown makes at every size band.

Where This Analysis Is Weakest

Four limitations sit under everything above. The first is that no source here is transaction data. No brokerage, index publisher or regulator makes a matched new-versus-used price series for production yachts public, so every band in this article is practitioner guidance published by firms that sell yachts.

The second is the unresolved contradiction in section three. Two brokerages publish 40 to 50 per cent at five years and mean opposite things by it, and neither publishes enough method to say which reading holds.

The third is age and scope. The Yachting World interviews date from March 2022 and describe a supply-constrained market. The 60 to 65 per cent charter residual is stated for catamarans specifically, not for monohulls, which is one reason catamaran and monohull ownership costs are worth separating.

The fourth is currency and geography. The euro figures above are arithmetic on percentage bands, not observed prices, and a percentage drawn from a global brokerage's guidance carries no information about any specific market. The final part of this series divides the whole stack by days of actual use, which is where depreciation stops being an abstraction.

HelmShare publishes this analysis because the same operating stack sits underneath a charter fund. Returns from any such structure are targeted rather than promised, and capital is at risk.