Ryanair’s Margin Lead: Why Europe’s Budget Airlines Can’t Close the Gap

The usual version of this story is that Ryanair is the only European budget airline that makes money. That’s no longer quite true. Norwegian had a record year in 2025, and easyJet is solidly and consistently profitable. The real story is narrower than the myth, but still striking. Ryanair’s margin isn’t just the best in the group. It’s roughly double its nearest real rival’s, and in a bad year it’s several times ahead of airlines that are barely breaking even.

The real numbers, side by side

Five airlines, five different outcomes from the same basic low-cost model, all from figures reported in the last year:

What Ryanair actually does differently

None of this is secret. It’s the same discipline covered in Ryanair’s own case study on this site; the margin table above shows what it’s worth in practice. A 25-minute scheduled turnaround keeps aircraft flying more hours a day than an airline working to 35-40 minutes. One aircraft type (737 family only) cuts the training, spare parts and maintenance costs a mixed fleet always carries. And 620 of Ryanair’s 647 aircraft are unencumbered, meaning owned outright, not financed. That removes an interest and lease cost that appears on every other airline’s accounts every quarter, in good years and bad.

None of these levers is exotic. In theory every airline in this comparison could copy them. Most haven’t because each one comes with a trade-off Ryanair accepted and its rivals didn’t: secondary airports instead of city-centre convenience, one narrowbody type instead of route flexibility, and owned aircraft instead of the faster growth that leasing allows.

Why Wizz Air’s margin collapsed to nearly zero

Wizz Air isn’t badly run. Revenue grew 8% and passenger numbers 10% in FY2026. Yet net profit came to just €1.3 million, effectively break-even on €5.69 billion of revenue. The cause is specific and largely outside Wizz Air’s control. At the peak, 42 aircraft, roughly 20% of its active fleet, sat grounded by the Pratt & Whitney geared-turbofan engine inspections affecting the A320neo family across the industry. Grounded aircraft still cost money to finance while earning nothing. Ryanair’s owned, single-supplier fleet of CFM-powered 737s doesn’t carry that cost. Fleet strategy isn’t only about cost per seat. It’s also about which single point of failure an airline is exposed to.

Why Eurowings loses money in a market where the tourists never stopped flying

Eurowings’ first half of 2025 is the cleanest example of a cost problem that has nothing to do with how well an airline is run day to day. It flew over 10 million passengers on 77,000 flights, with 99% of scheduled flights operated and 80% on time. Those are strong operating numbers. It still made a €137 million adjusted operating loss for the half, which Lufthansa Group blamed on rising German aviation taxes and fees. A budget airline’s whole model depends on a low cost per seat. When the state adds a large, fixed cost per passenger that a UK- or Ireland-based rival doesn’t pay, no amount of operational skill closes that gap on its own.

Norwegian: the real counter-example

Norwegian nearly got left out of this piece’s headline. Its 2021 restructuring followed years of overexpansion into long-haul low-cost flying, a model most of the industry, Norwegian included, has since abandoned (see the pattern across most forgotten long-haul budget attempts of the 2000s and 2010s). Norwegian rebuilt around a much simpler short-haul Nordic network. 2025 was the result: a record operating margin of 9.9% and the highest operating profit in its history, on 27.3 million passengers. It isn’t Ryanair’s margin, but it’s a real, sustained turnaround built on the same basic idea: do less, with more discipline, instead of doing more less profitably.

What actually separates the winners from the rest

Line the five up and the pattern isn’t “budget airlines are hard to run profitably”. Three of the five are profitable. The gap between the best and the rest comes from a few specific structural costs. How much of the fleet is financed rather than owned? How exposed is the fleet to one supplier’s problem? And how much of each fare does the home country take before the airline sees any of it? Ryanair’s margin lead isn’t a mystery or a moat nobody else could build. It’s the result of years of turning down the convenient option on almost every one of those choices.

A different, much harder game: long-haul low-cost

Every airline in the table above flies short-haul, single-aisle routes, the segment where the low-cost model has worked. Stretch the same idea across an ocean with a widebody and the economics change completely. A long-haul jet can’t be turned around in 25 minutes like a 737 or A320, fuel is a much bigger share of a long flight’s cost, and the aircraft cost several times more to buy or lease. Norse Atlantic Airways, the transatlantic budget airline built from the remains of Norwegian’s abandoned long-haul division, lost $61.9 million in 2025 on $734 million of revenue, a net margin of about −8.4%. That was less than half its 2024 loss of $135.5 million, and by the end of the year it was openly exploring a possible merger. French bee, the Groupe Dubreuil-owned long-haul budget airline flying A350s from Paris Orly to the Caribbean, French Polynesia and North America, is privately held and doesn’t publish its own margins. It sits in the same category, though, competing with the same widebody economics that have sunk most long-haul budget attempts before it, including Primera Air, WOW air and Norwegian’s own first long-haul push.

None of this means long-haul low-cost is impossible; Norse’s shrinking losses suggest there may be a path. But it explains why these airlines don’t belong in the same table as Ryanair or easyJet. They aren’t failing at the game Ryanair is winning. They’re playing a harder one, with much less room for error and a much shorter list of airlines that have ever made it work.