F-22 Raptor vs F-35 Lightning II

The F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Lightning II were designed roughly a decade apart to answer two different questions, and this comparison only resolves once you decide which of those questions you are asking.

Lockheed Martin built the Raptor to win the fight for the sky itself: faster, higher, stealthier, and more agile than anything it would meet. It built the Lightning II to survive contested airspace while doing everything else, including strike, reconnaissance, electronic warfare, and feeding targeting data to every friendly unit in the area.

So the measure matters. Ranked on raw air-combat performance, the F-22 wins clearly. Ranked on what an air force can actually field and fly on a given morning, the F-35 wins just as clearly, and by a widening margin.

How we are ranking these two aircraft

Almost every “which is better” argument about these two jets is really an argument about which question is being asked. The honest comparison names the measure first.

This article ranks them on four separate measures: air-combat performance, sensors and information, cost, and availability. The F-22 takes the first. The F-35 takes the other three.

Where a number is officially published, we use the official number. Where it is classified, most notably radar cross-section, we say so rather than repeating figures that no government has ever confirmed.

Where the F-22 Raptor wins

Speed, altitude and supercruise

The Raptor is a Mach 2 class aircraft. The F-35A tops out at Mach 1.6, roughly 1,200 mph, and that gap is not a rounding error in a fight.

The more important number is supercruise. The F-22’s two F119 engines let it hold supersonic speed above Mach 1.5 without lighting the afterburners, which the US Air Force notes “greatly expands the F-22’s operating envelope in both speed and range over current fighters.”

That matters because afterburner burns fuel at a punishing rate. A Raptor can arrive supersonic and still have fuel to fight. An F-35 that goes supersonic is spending its endurance to do it.

Speed also feeds weapons range. A missile launched from a faster jet at higher altitude simply flies further, so the F-22 can shoot from distances the F-35 cannot match with the same weapon.

Thrust, weight and thrust vectoring

Two 35,000-lb class engines against one rated at 43,000 lb is a large advantage, and the F-22 carries it into a heavier airframe with room to spare. Maximum takeoff weight is 83,500 lb (38,000 kg) against the F-35A’s 70,000-lb class.

The Raptor also has something the Lightning II does not: two-dimensional thrust vectoring nozzles that point the engine exhaust up or down. That lets the jet change its nose position at speeds and angles where conventional control surfaces have stopped working well.

The F-35 is a 9g capable fighter and is not clumsy. It is simply not built to out-turn a Raptor, and Lockheed Martin never claimed it was.

Stealth, and the numbers nobody can verify

Both are fifth-generation stealth aircraft, and the consensus among analysts is that the F-22 is the harder of the two to detect from the front, because it was optimized for the air-to-air fight against radar-guided threats.

The F-35’s shaping made compromises the Raptor did not have to make, mostly to fit deeper internal bays for bombs and, in the F-35B, a lift fan.

What you should not trust are the precise radar cross-section figures that circulate online. Those numbers are estimates repeated until they sound official.

Where the F-35 Lightning II wins

Sensors and sensor fusion

The F-35 was designed a decade later, and it shows most in what the pilot can see. Its AN/APG-81 active electronically scanned array radar, Distributed Aperture System, and Electro-Optical Targeting System are fused into a single picture rather than presented as separate feeds.

The Distributed Aperture System gives the pilot spherical coverage around the aircraft, including the ability to look down through the floor. There is no head-up display, because the helmet is the display.

The F-35 is also built to share that picture. It is as much a sensor node for everyone else in the fight as it is a strike aircraft, which is a role the F-22 has always been comparatively poor at because its datalink was designed to talk to other Raptors.

Lockheed Martin completed the Technology Refresh 3 hardware and software upgrade in 2025, the foundation for the wider Block 4 capability set. The Raptor receives upgrades too, but its production line closed in 2011 and its software base is a generation older.

Cost per jet and cost per hour

The US Air Force lists the F-22’s unit cost at $143 million. The F-35 Joint Program Office put the F-35A’s average flyaway cost across Lots 18 and 19 at $92.0 million in current-year dollars, engines and radars included.

That is a real increase for the F-35, up 11.5 percent from the $82.5 million of Lots 15 to 17, and it is worth being honest about. It is still comfortably cheaper than a Raptor.

Operating cost is the wider gap. Published figures put the F-22 in the region of $85,000 per flight hour, roughly double the F-35A, largely because the Raptor’s stealth coatings need intensive maintenance between flights.

Those specific hourly numbers deserve a caveat. The Government Accountability Office’s most recent public tactical-aircraft report withheld per-aircraft cost figures at the Pentagon’s request, so the widely quoted values come from older data.

Numbers, production and allies

This is the measure that decides real wars. Lockheed Martin delivered 195 Raptors in total and shut the line in 2011. No more will ever be built.

The F-35 passed 1,355 deliveries and one million fleet flight hours during 2026, after a record 191 aircraft delivered in 2025 alone. The US program of record stands at 2,470 aircraft.

The F-22 is also barred from export by US law, so no ally flies one. Twenty nations participate in the F-35 program, which means shared spares, shared training and a fighter force that can operate as one.

Variants matter here too. The F-35B lands vertically and flies from amphibious assault ships, and the F-35C operates from carriers, so one program covers three very different basing problems that the Raptor cannot address at all.

Would an F-22 beat an F-35 in a dogfight?

In a within-visual-range fight between equally skilled pilots, the F-22 should win most of the time. It is faster, it climbs better, it has a superior thrust-to-weight ratio and it has thrust vectoring. Nothing about the F-35 was optimized to beat that.

The catch is that a close-in dogfight is the scenario both aircraft were designed to avoid. Fifth-generation air combat is meant to be settled beyond visual range, by whichever jet sees the other first and shoots first.

Measured that way the answer gets less comfortable for the Raptor. The F-35’s sensors and fusion are a decade newer, and detection usually decides the engagement before maneuvering ever becomes relevant.

The realistic conclusion: the F-22 wins the merge, the F-35 is more likely to prevent the merge from happening. If you want the broader field, our ranking of the best fighter jets in the world places both against their international rivals.

Why was the F-22 discontinued?

Production was capped at 187 operational aircraft, 195 including test airframes, by a decision Defense Secretary Robert Gates drove in 2009. The last Raptor left the Marietta line in December 2011.

Gates argued that a dedicated air-superiority stealth fighter answered a threat that had not appeared. The United States was fighting two counterinsurgencies at the time, against enemies with no air force at all.

Cost did the rest. Total program spending reached roughly $67 billion, which pushed the effective cost per airframe far above the flyaway figure, and the money was redirected to other priorities.

It is a decision that looks very different from 2026, with China fielding the J-20 and Russia the Su-57. We cover that shift in our comparison of the F-22 against the Chengdu J-20.

The 2026 picture: readiness and what comes next

The Raptor’s real problem in 2026 is not the F-35. It is arithmetic.

Of roughly 184 airframes, 32 are Block 20 aircraft used mainly for training and not considered combat capable. The Air Force has repeatedly asked to retire them, and Congress has repeatedly refused, barring any Raptor retirement before September 2027.

Bringing those 32 jets up to combat standard would cost at least $3.3 billion and take around fifteen years, according to contractor estimates reviewed by the GAO. That is a lot of money and time for 32 aircraft from a closed production line.

The F-35 has its own troubles, and they are not small. GAO found that all 110 aircraft delivered in 2024 were late by an average of 238 days, and that Block 4 is running more than $6 billion over budget and at least five years behind schedule.

The difference is direction of travel. The F-35 line is running at record output and its capability set is still growing. The Raptor is a fixed number of aging aircraft being asked to hold the line until a sixth-generation fighter arrives, and even the Air Force has stopped calling the F-47 a direct Raptor replacement.

For a wider view of how both aircraft sit among low-observable designs, see our roundup of stealth fighter jets and the full spec pages for the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor and the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II.

The verdict

If you could take one aircraft into a fight for control of the sky and nothing else mattered, take the Raptor. It remains the best pure air-superiority fighter ever flown, and twenty years after entering service nothing has clearly surpassed it in that narrow role.

If you are building an air force, take the Lightning II. It costs less to buy and about half as much to fly, it is still in production, allies fly it, and its sensors improve with every software block.

The US Air Force did not choose. It flies both, uses the Raptor to clear the airspace and the Lightning II to exploit it, and that pairing is the actual answer to F-22 versus F-35.