IATA Data Shows Airlines Piling Into SAF Deals as EU and UK Mandates Bite

Airlines are signing sustainable-aviation-fuel contracts at a pace they never showed when SAF was voluntary. IATA's economics team, in a Chart of the Week note dated August 8, 2025, tallies 81 carriers behind about 170 SAF offtake agreements built up since 2013, with nearly 40 percent of those airlines holding more than one deal. The message under the tally is blunt: the deals are stacking up because the law now says they have to.

That is the real story behind the numbers. January 2025 was the first month European and British carriers operated under hard SAF blending rules rather than pledges. The EU's ReFuelEU Aviation regulation set a 2 percent SAF share at airports across the bloc, rising to 6 percent in 2030, 34 percent in 2040 and 70 percent by 2050. The UK's separate SAF Mandate started at the same 2 percent, then diverges upward toward 10 percent by 2030. Two mandates, one deadline, and a fuel that barely exists at scale. Airlines responded the only way they could, by locking in whatever supply they could find on paper.

The deals are a compliance reflex, not a green sprint

Read the IATA count the wrong way and it looks like an industry racing to decarbonize. Read it against the calendar and it looks like a scramble to avoid fines. From a standing start in 2013, the agreement tally sat low for a decade. The steep part of the curve lines up with the run-up to the 2025 mandates, not with any breakthrough in fuel economics.

A lot of these 170 deals are memoranda and multi-year framework contracts rather than guaranteed liters in a wing tank. That matters because offtake announcements and delivered fuel are different things. IATA and outside analysts both warn that the paper commitments on the books do not add up to enough physical SAF to satisfy 2025 obligations across Europe. When almost half the carriers on the list hold multiple deals, part of what you are seeing is buyers spreading bets across suppliers who may or may not deliver on schedule.

How much fuel the mandates actually demand

The volume math is smaller than the political noise suggests, and still hard to meet. The EU burns roughly 46 million tonnes of jet fuel a year and the UK about 11.9 million tonnes. A 2 percent blend across both works out to just over 1.2 million tonnes of SAF for the year. Against global SAF output measured in a couple of million tonnes, one region's 2 percent floor swallows a large slice of world supply.

The supply side has not cooperated. Shell paused its Rotterdam biofuels and SAF plant. BP scaled back earlier ambitions. European feedstock for the dominant HEFA pathway, which turns waste fats and oils into jet fuel, is limited, so the continent leans on imports from North America and Asia. Forecasts through the mandate's first year pointed to real-world blend rates well under the 2 percent target, closer to the low-1-percent range in some estimates, with the gap papered over by blending certificates rather than molecules.

Who pays, and how the bill lands on airlines

Here is the part carriers keep flagging. ReFuelEU puts the legal obligation on fuel suppliers, not airlines. In practice suppliers pass the cost straight through as a compliance fee on the ticket for jet fuel. So the mandate that formally targets refiners becomes a line item for airlines anyway, plus a markup.

The premiums are steep. IATA pegged SAF's average cost at about 3.1 times conventional jet fuel in 2024, and projected the multiple climbing to roughly 4.2 times in 2025. The association's tally for 2025 put the SAF premium airlines paid at about 2.9 billion dollars for only 1.9 million tonnes of fuel, of which around 1.2 billion dollars was the plain price gap over kerosene and roughly 1.7 billion dollars was compliance surcharges layered on top. IATA has separately quoted an average SAF cost near 3,505 dollars a tonne against a market price closer to 1,846, and warned that supplier compliance fees quoted in 2025 offers could add on the order of 1.7 billion dollars in extra fuel cost across the bloc. IATA chief Willie Walsh has not been shy about calling parts of that spread profiteering.

What the offtake curve tells us going forward

The 81-carrier, 170-deal figure is best read as a compliance indicator, not a supply guarantee. It tells you demand is now mandatory and buyers are behaving accordingly. It does not tell you the fuel will show up. The risk for 2026 and beyond is a widening gap between contracted volumes and delivered gallons, filled by certificates and buy-out payments that raise costs without cutting much carbon.

Two things are worth watching. First, whether SAF production actually scales toward the 6 percent EU and 10 percent UK targets for 2030, or whether HEFA feedstock limits force a hard pivot to synthetic e-SAF that is even pricier today. Second, whether regulators tighten the certificate and compliance-fee mechanics so airlines stop paying a premium on a premium. Until then, expect the offtake tally to keep climbing, and expect airlines to keep saying, correctly, that a longer contract list is not the same as fuel in the tank.