Journal of Airline Operations and Aviation Management

The integration of unmanned aircraft systems into European airspace under the U-space regulatory framework raises unresolved questions about how shared infrastructure should be financed and how service charges should be designed. This paper proposes a structured, rule-based cost-recovery pricing methodology for U-space services, grounded in the EU regulatory framework and in economic theory on infrastructure pricing. The framework decomposes total charges into three layers: infrastructure costs, operational costs, and an operator-complexity weighting factor (Operator and Complexity Indicator, OACI). To test the framework, a synthetic traffic generator covering approximately 1,470,000 flights across five operator classes and four mission categories is used to evaluate a range of market-maturity scenarios. The results demonstrate robust cost recovery, a proportional distribution of fees across operator classes, and moderate sensitivity to calibration of the rate coefficient. The qualitative ordering of fee burdens remains stable across 125 rate-coefficient combinations. The methodology is presented as a structural template for regulators, Common Information Service Providers, and U-space Service Providers, intended to be populated with empirical cost and traffic data as European U-space deployment matures.