Vimana Private Jets CEO Ameerh Naran said the firm recently booked a $520,000 flight from Dubai to London on a Boeing business jet for a client. That same trip cost the client $400,000 in 2023. The difference was entirely due to jet fuel prices — which now average about $4.65 a gallon globally — Naran said.

It’s yet another ripple in the recent disruptions to air travel.

More customers turned to private air travel during the pandemic to avoid crowds. The option remains popular and has become more important to the aviation sector as wealthier households prop up spending in travel and other sectors.

These deep-pocketed travelers are less likely to get priced out as airfares rise, but they have to navigate unexpected fees as brokers and charters differ on how they pass along fuel costs. Jet fuel prices in major U.S. cities were up more than 80% last month, according to Airlines for America, an industry group, citing Argus data.

Jet charter brokers like Vimana arrange flights with jet operators, which own the planes and buy fuel, on behalf of passengers. Naran said Vimana does not renegotiate contracts and does not reprice flights, but that charter prices have surged quickly.

He advised travelers to book sooner than later, saying any price hikes are likely to be sticky even if the Iran war ends soon.

Larger jet operators are slower to pass along fuel costs to passengers as they buy fuel in bulk and want to avoid alienating customers, according to Naran. However, operators will likely have to pay more at the pump when they replenish their supplies, and some are taking losses by not repricing flights, he said.

“There’s a long-term effect, because a lot of companies now will be making losses,” he said. “They’re not going to renegotiate the contract because they don’t want to spoil the relationship with the client, but if they’re making a loss today, they’ve got to recoup it.”

Jet charter prices have increased by 5% to 15% on average, with some rising by as much as 20%, since the Iran conflict began, according to charter broker Amalfi Jets’ database.

“It’s not only the price [of the stocks] turning around but the fundamentals turning around,” he said. “Go back four quarters and all the earnings growth was coming from the tech sector and Nasdaq 100. Those dividends growers year-over-year, earnings were shrinking a little bit. But now the gap has closed and may shortly go the other way. We’re almost now to parity,” he said, referring to Bloomberg data cited by ProShares in a recent blog post on the topic.

ProShares S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats ETF (NOBL) is one of the many exchange-traded funds that offers exposure to large-cap U.S. stocks that pay healthy dividends. Its top three holdings are Chevron, Exxon Mobil and Target.

ETF experts agree that the outlook for dividend stocks has improved across the market.

“Growth characteristics of companies in the financial sector, the health care sector, the industrial sector … those are where you often find dividend growth. They continue to experience more and more growth,” Todd Rosenbluth, head of research at VettaFi, told CNBC.

A long history of dividend increases reflects consistent cash flow and disciplined management, however, it has not traditionally matched the rapid profit expansion seen in the technology sector. But strong operating performance and improving margins have helped boost profits for many dividend-payers from other sectors. And as earning rise, these companies continue to increase dividends while strengthening their balance sheets. At the same time, expectations for technology stocks remain extremely high after several years of strong gains, and as tech firms are spending huge sums on AI buildouts which is stressing their balance sheets and cash flow. Dividend-paying companies outside of tech often trade at more moderate valuations, and as their earnings growth improves, investors may increasingly view them as offering both stability and expansion.

Of course, if the U.S.-Iran war — and factors such as oil prices persistently above $100 and a Strait of Hormuz closure that is prolonged — pushes up prices across a supply-depleted economy and sends the global economy into a recession, there is no sure thing for stock investors. Dividend stocks and the ProShares NOBL ETF have been caught up in the recent stock market negative sentiment, down 5% in the past month but still up close to 8% over the past year.

Hyman said in his view this is “certainly not a time to capitulate, but maybe a time to tweak around the edges,” and focus more on quality stories. “We love our dividend growers,” he said.

He noted that after the two prior Gulf wars which were prolonged conflicts, stocks were higher in the six to 12-month periods after initial pullbacks, and up by as much as 25-30%. “The history is pretty darn clear … markets do rebound,” he said.

The history is also clear, Hyman said, on dividend stock outperformance having “some durability to it.” And right now, these stocks are pulling even more weight in the market. “In addition to the durable outperformance opportunity from the dividend growers, the other thing that is very important is that it has kept overall S&P 500 fundamentals stable” Hyman said. “They are now filling the gap,” he said, as mega cap tech earnings growth slides, “and that suggests a little bit of a soft landing,” he added.

Disclaimer

That leads him to conclude that a $20 move in oil prices could mean consumers spending $150 billion more at the pump. The Tax Foundation estimates that the individual tax cuts from the “big beautiful bill” total $129 billion for 2025, with the overwhelming majority of it set to appear through tax refunds this filing season. 

U.S. oil before the war on Feb. 27 closed at $67.02. As of Tuesday morning, after a major whiplash in prices on Monday, oil is still trading more than $20 a barrel higher at $88.20.

Stephanie Roth, chief economist at Wolfe Research, said in an interview Monday that her estimations for the hit consumers could take with elevated oil prices are also similar to the elevated spending she projected from the tax law. Wolfe said in a Tuesday note, though, that oil prices would need to remain above $100 for some time for that to happen.

“In all these scenarios, it has to last longer than it is now,” Roth said. “The impact on gas prices so far has been short-lived, and modest compared to how it may ultimately play out.”

But it will take time for oil prices to come down after the end of the war. Trump said in an interview with a CBS News reporter on Monday that the war is “very complete,” though he didn’t give a timeline for the war’s end in a press conference the same day.

McCourt noted that after the Gulf War in 1990 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 it took about six months for oil prices to get back to levels where they were before. 

Consequences of weaker stimulus

Fiscal stimulus from the tax law was expected to boost the economy in 2026, with some economists predicting a reacceleration of U.S. growth partially thanks to the law. 

Now, an oil price shock is hitting right as consumers are set to get those tax refunds. Citadel Securities last week estimated that only 30% of refunds had been distributed by March 1, with the figure expected to rise to around 75% by May 1.

“The bottom line is that if we were expecting those tax refunds to lift consumer spending, these higher oil prices are just redirecting all that cash toward energy costs,” wrote Gabriel Shahin, CEO of Falcon Wealth Planning, in an email to CNBC. “It’s essentially voiding out the economic boost we were set to see.”

But Dan Niles, portfolio manager at Niles Investment Management, framed the situation as the refunds helping the economy weather higher oil prices. 

He pointed to when oil hit similar prices in 2022 and 2023 while Wall Street broadly predicted a recession on the horizon thanks to rising interest rates. 

“You already had that stress tested a bit,” Niles said. “So if that’s the case back then, and coming off of inflation surging in 2021, and you still didn’t get a recession, why would you think inflation down at 3% and oil at $100 would cause a recession now?”

Many on Wall Street have drawn similarities between the current surge in prices to that of four years ago, when Russia invaded Ukraine. 

Roth, though, cautioned investors against relying too much on that comparison.  

“The economic backdrop is not a mirror image of where we are today,” she said. “Core inflation was running at 5.5% compared to 3% today. Job growth was running at around 500,000, now we’re at 37,000 over the past couple of months. So it’s just an entirely different backdrop.”

McCourt said he thinks if the stimulus from the tax bill isn’t as strong as originally thought, that likely won’t change too many outlooks for the year, particularly in stocks, which he said never priced in a big surge in consumer spending. He noted that consumer discretionary stocks have underperformed the S&P 500 in 2026. 

But he also said the economy, not just the stock market, could weather oil prices and weaker-than-expected stimulus so long as the labor market remains intact. 

“We just have never had a sustained pullback in consumer spending without substantial job losses,” McCourt said. “We’ll have some shifts in spending … But it’s probably not going to impact the overall consumer spending levels.”