The US Air Force Fighter Fleet Has Dropped Below the Number Congress Requires

On September 4, 2026, the Congressional Research Service published a report finding that the US Air Force is flying fewer fighter aircraft than federal law requires. The service reported 1,098 fighters to Congress on May 5, 2026, which is 47 below the minimum of 1,145 written into Title 10 of the US Code. The report circulated widely during the week of September 8.

What the report found

Title 10, Section 9062 has required the Air Force to keep at least 1,145 fighters in its primary mission aircraft inventory, a count that leaves out jets held in reserve, in flight testing, or in depot maintenance. Congress temporarily lowered that floor to 1,112 for fiscal 2024 and 1,101 for fiscal 2025.

The fiscal 2026 defense bill carried no similar provision, so the 1,098 count sits below the standing requirement. Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink reported that figure in a May notification to Congress, according to the Congressional Research Service.

The fleet is also aging. The report puts the average fighter at about 27.4 years old, up from 17.2 years in 1994. The share of fighters ready to fly on a given day has slipped from roughly 72.9 percent in 1995 to 53.9 percent in 2024.

The Air Force has asked Congress to measure the fleet a different way, using a broader “combat-coded total aircraft inventory” that would show about 1,271 fighters for fiscal 2026. Writing on September 8, The Aviationist and Air & Space Forces Magazine both noted that the change would erase the shortfall on paper without adding a single aircraft.

Why the fleet keeps shrinking

The gap is a math problem the Air Force has flagged for years. It has proposed retiring 258 older fighter and attack aircraft, among them A-10 Warthog attack jets, while taking delivery of only about 55 new fighters over the same window, a net loss of roughly 203 airframes.

Congress blocked 124 of those planned retirements in the latest defense bill and has separately barred the service from retiring F-22s and F-15E Strike Eagles. Lawmakers have effectively told the Air Force to keep aircraft it says it no longer wants.

New production has not closed the hole. The F-35 delivery pipeline has repeatedly stalled over software and hardware problems, and the Air Force plans to buy only up to 24 F-15EX Eagle IIs by the end of 2027. The service also says it is about 1,900 pilots short of the roughly 19,136 it needs.

A fighter force is hard to grow quickly. A modern fighter costs tens of millions of dollars per airframe, and production lines cannot simply be sped up without funding and supply-chain capacity that Congress has not fully provided.

The Congressional Research Service frames the decision for lawmakers as a three-way choice: fund the Air Force’s stated goal of 1,558 fighters by 2035, scale that goal back, or change the law so the current fleet is no longer below the minimum. Analysts cited in the report warn that US fighters could be outnumbered by modern Chinese types by 2030, part of a wider debate over how the two air forces compare.