$2.1 Trillion for the F-35? Yes, But That’s the Total Fighter Cost for Almost 100 Years

Summary and Key Points: The Pentagon recently detailed the F-35 fighter’s enormous $2.1 trillion lifetime cost, clarifying the figure covers all expenses—procurement, maintenance, upgrades, spare parts, and fuel—over a 94-year period ending in 2088.

-Approximately $1 trillion reflects inflation. Despite skepticism from Elon Musk, who advocates unmanned drone swarms, experts emphasize the F-35’s unmatched range, payload, and stealth capabilities.

F-35B Armed with Meteor Missile. Image Credit: UK Government.

-Still, upcoming sixth-generation fighters like the Air Force’s F-47 and Navy’s F/A-XX create competition for defense funds.

-Amid record-breaking budgets, rising costs, and tariff-induced uncertainty, America faces difficult choices in balancing investment between legacy systems like the F-35 and cutting-edge future technologies.

The F-35’s $2.1 Trillion Price Tag Explained: Is America Getting Its Money’s Worth?

A recently released report by the F-35 Joint Program Office explains that the figure covers every nut and bolt of all F-35s over a 94-year program lifespan.

The F-35 Joint Program Office, responsible for the F-35 fighter, recently released incredibly rich financial data on the stealth jet. The data outline virtually every cost detail for that program and confirm its $2.1 trillion price tag.

Perhaps the most significant takeaway from Tuesday’s announcement was that the $2.1 trillion figure is an attempt to account for every single airframe that will ever be produced for its entire lifetime and includes spare parts, maintenance, operational costs, future upgrades to the aircraft, and even jet fuel for the entire F-35 program lifetime. The Joint Program Office estimates clock the project lifetime at a whopping 94 years until the jet’s anticipated retirement from service in 2088.

Importantly, the $2.1 trillion number is “calculated in “then-year” dollars, meaning it is inflation-adjusted to reflect the projected value of money over the program’s 94-year span. Around $1 trillion of this total is influenced by inflationary effects over the years.”

The breakdown also breaks down the three main factors in the program’s costs: 

Scale: The program is set to become the largest single air system procurement in DOD history, with thousands of units planned for production.

Concurrent Phases: The program’s 40 years of development and modernization, along with simultaneous efforts in development, production, and sustainment, contribute to its increased complexity and cost.

Duration: The long-term nature of the program, spanning nearly a century, results in significant inflationary effects.

It explains that these encompass both the scope of the F-35 program in its entirety and its program costs.

The timing of the data is no coincidence—it’s a reaction to the current uncertainty swirling through the Trump administration’s Department of Defense, caused in part by the widespread cost-cutting, firing, and overall unclear messaging by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

A Skeptic at the Helm

Musk has been openly hostile to the F-35 platform. Late last year, he took to X to lambast the fighter, characterizing the engineers and designers behind the design in blunt terms and calling them “idiots.” In one post, Musk called the F-35 a “complex jack of all trades, master of none.

Also the owner of Tesla, Musk would like to pioneer autonomous vehicles, a goal that he apparently would like to see in military aviation. In another post on X, Musk uploaded a video of a drone swarm, indicating his preference for unmanned semi-autonomous platforms over manned jets like the F-35.

Online commentators were quick to note that a drone swarm would be particularly vulnerable to electronic warfare. It would also lack the range and payload capacity of manned fighter jets, not to mention the stealth capabilities of the F-35.

The F-35 can “fly much much higher, much much faster, for an exponentially longer time (can cover around 3200km without mid air refuelling and without external fuel tanks), and most importantly, can carry highly advanced air to air and air to ground munitions,” one commentator pointed out.

Given the current political context, it was perhaps not surprising that the F-35 Joint Program Office took the initiative and released a more detailed financial breakdown of the program to allay concerns about its financials.

Show Me the Money on F-35

The Pentagon and Office of Management and Budget are close to completing the budget request for the 2026 fiscal year. The budget will likely be the biggest Department of Defense budget in history, with President Trump saying on Monday that it would be the first American defense budget to reach the $1 trillion mark.

Though a mature program — in fact, the world’s most successful fifth-generation fighter, and successful in its own right — faces potentially stiff headwinds from the upcoming generation of aircraft. 

The United States Air Force’s newest aircraft, the F-47, is a sixth-generation fighter that President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced last month from the Oval Office. While that fight will likely fly in tandem with the F-35 for several decades, the F-47 and F-35 will both be competing for a finite amount of dollars in investment despite next year’s record-breaking budget. The F-47 is expected to cost around $20 billion for its first decade in service.

In that same vein, the United States Navy is expected to make an announcement sometime soon about the winner of its next-generation fighter, for now provisionally called the F/A-XX. Like the F-47, the F/A-XX will fly off of American flattops alongside the F-35 before the Joint Strike Fighter’s eventual retirement from service — placing both of those platforms in a kind of competition for Department of Defense investment.

The pressing question now is which of the three aircraft programs — the F-35, F-47, or F/A-XX — will be given preference? Further complicating the already complex calculus is that all three aircraft will fly alongside Collaborative Combat Aircraft, semi-autonomous and uncrewed aircraft that the fighters will control.

What Happens Next?

Despite the widely expected record-setting fiscal year 2026 Defense Department budget, costs related to new and upcoming programs, as well as the costs of legacy systems and projects just over the horizon, are anticipated to be steep. Given the wild uncertainty of the current economic environment caused by President Trump’s levying of tariffs on virtually the entire world, these costs are very likely to increase.

Not only does the United States source raw materials for some defense projects from elsewhere abroad, but the components of many systems, particularly the F-35, are manufactured by close American allies abroad, and tarries levied on those friends will not make American defense programs cheaper.

About the Author: Caleb Larson 

Caleb Larson is an American multiformat journalist based in Berlin, Germany. His work covers the intersection of conflict and society, focusing on American foreign policy and European security. He has reported from Germany, Russia, and the United States. Most recently, he covered the war in Ukraine, reporting extensively on the war’s shifting battle lines from Donbas and writing on the war’s civilian and humanitarian toll. Previously, he worked as a Defense Reporter for POLITICO Europe. You can follow his latest work on X.