More companies want to buy SAF certificates than know how the purchase works. GBTA found that 20% of corporate travel programmes bought SAF certificates in 2025, up from the year before (GBTA, February 2026). The rest are still asking the same questions: what exactly am I paying for, who do I buy from, and will my auditor accept it?
This guide answers those questions in the order you will meet them, from footprint to retirement statement.
The short answer. You buy SAF certificates in five steps: measure your flight footprint, set a volume and budget, choose a route, contract and retire the certificates in a registry, and report the reduction separately from your inventory. A first purchase can be a small pilot.
What you actually buy: SAF certificates and book and claim
A SAF certificate (SAFc) is a record of the environmental attributes of sustainable aviation fuel that has been delivered into the aviation fuel system. You do not buy fuel, and your employees do not need to fly on the plane that used it. That separation is called book and claim: the fuel is “booked” where it is used, and the reduction is “claimed” by the company that paid for it.
Under the current RSB Book & Claim Manual (version 4.2, effective since 3 December 2025), one Book & Claim Unit represents one tonne of neat certified SAF, not one tonne of CO2. How much CO2e one unit avoids depends on the fuel pathway. Each unit carries one Scope 1 claim, for the airline that burned the fuel, and up to two Scope 3 claims, for example for a travel agency and its corporate client.
Three rules shape what you can do with the certificate:
It is a reduction instrument for your aviation emissions. You use it for Scope 3 Category 6 (business travel) or Categories 4 and 9 (freight), not for office energy or car fleets.
The claim is capped at your own footprint. RSB states that corporate end-users cannot claim more than their total air travel and air freight footprint in that reporting year.
It is reported separately. The reduction sits next to your Scope 3 inventory and is not subtracted from it, as RSB’s June 2026 accounting guidance explains.
A SAF certificate is therefore a different instrument from a carbon credit. A carbon credit finances a reduction or removal outside your value chain; a SAF certificate represents a reduction inside the aviation sector you buy from. We compare the two in SAF certificates vs carbon credits for business travel.
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Step 1: measure your flight footprint
Everything else depends on this number, because it sets the ceiling for your claim. Use your travel agency’s data or your booking tool and calculate emissions per flight with a recognised factor set.
A common choice is the UK government set, which is updated every year. In the 2026 conversion factors, a long-haul business class passenger-kilometre is 0.33940 kg CO2e and a long-haul economy passenger-kilometre is 0.11704 kg CO2e, both including the non-CO2 effects of flying (radiative forcing).
An example with hypothetical numbers: a company with 200 return trips Amsterdam to New York in business class, about 11,700 km each, has roughly 200 × 11,700 × 0.33940 kg = about 794 tCO2e of flight emissions from that route alone. The same trips in economy would be about 274 tCO2e.
Decide early whether you report with or without radiative forcing, and keep it consistent. The choice changes your footprint, and with it the maximum volume you can claim.
Step 2: set volume and budget
Once you know the footprint, choose the share you want to address with SAF. Most companies start with a pilot covering a small share of flight emissions and build up over several years. We explain how to size the volume in how many SAF certificates do I need.
The conversion from fuel to CO2e is the step most buyers skip. For SAF made from used cooking oil, ICAO’s default life cycle value is 13.9 gCO2e/MJ against a fossil baseline of 89 gCO2e/MJ, a reduction of about 84% (as of November 2025). With an energy content of 44 MJ per kg, one tonne of that SAF avoids about 3.3 tCO2e.
Back to the example: covering 10% of 794 tCO2e means about 79 tCO2e, or roughly 24 tonnes of used-cooking-oil SAF.
Prices are quoted per tonne of CO2e avoided. As an indication only: Patch put SAF certificates at “from the $150s to over $400 per tonne of CO2 abated” in July 2026, and SABA’s latest buyer tender landed between $300 and $500 per tonne (Trellis, May 2025). For 79 tCO2e that would be roughly $12,000 to $40,000. SAF certificate prices vary by pathway, certification, vintage and volume, so treat any range as a starting point and ask for an actual quote. Our article on SAF certificate prices breaks down what drives the number.
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Step 3: choose a route
There are four common routes to buy SAF certificates. They differ in who you contract with, how flexible the volume is and whose registry the certificate ends up in.
Route | Example | How buying works | Fits when |
|---|---|---|---|
Airline corporate programme | Annual investment or per ticket, SAF document from an independent audited platform | Most of your travel is with one airline group | |
Commodity trader | Bilateral deal, small pilot or multi-year agreement | You want certificates not tied to one airline | |
Platform | Avelia (Shell Aviation, Accenture, Amex GBT) | Book-and-claim platform, via Amex GBT or Shell Aviation | You already book through Amex GBT |
Independent advisor | Regreener | Sources per client across suppliers, combines SAF with carbon credits | You want one plan for reduction and residual emissions |
Specialist suppliers such as SkyNRG also sell directly to companies through their own book-and-claim programmes. We compare five partners in detail in 5 partners to source SAF certificates from in 2027.
Whichever route you choose, ask the same due-diligence questions you would ask a carbon credit supplier. Our list of questions for a carbon credit supplier translates well: who certifies the fuel, which registry holds the certificate, and whether it is retired in your name.
Step 4: contract, retirement and the retirement statement
The contract should name the fuel pathway, the feedstock, the certification scheme (RSB or ISCC), the registry, the volume in tonnes of fuel and the CO2e reduction, and the delivery period. Ask who retires the certificates and when. Which pathway fits your claim and budget is covered in the best SAF certificates to buy in 2027.
Certificates are tracked in registries. The main ones are the SAFc Registry, owned by RMI and operated by Energy Web, the RSB Book & Claim Registry, ISCC’s Credit Transfer System, and the SAF Registry run by CADO (the Civil Aviation Decarbonization Organization) that IATA developed. Note that the SAFc Registry is not a marketplace: it records issuance, transfer and retirement, and you buy from a supplier, broker or buyers’ group.
The retirement statement is the document your auditor will ask for. Check that it shows:
your company as the beneficiary of the Scope 3 claim
the volume of neat SAF in tonnes and the tCO2e reduction
the pathway, feedstock and life cycle emissions value
the certification scheme and the registry with a unique serial number
the delivery period, so it matches your reporting year
Tip from Bernard de Wit, Co-founder of Regreener: “Ask for a sample retirement statement before you sign, and hold it next to your flight data. It should name your company as the Scope 3 beneficiary, show the delivery period and carry a registry serial number. A supplier who cannot show you that document up front is the one you will be chasing in January, when your auditor is already asking for it.”
Step 5: report it
Report the purchase as a SAF-supported emissions reduction next to your Scope 3 Category 6 figure, not as a lower Category 6 figure. That is what RSB asks, and it is also where the GHG Protocol stands today: its standard development plan of July 2026 says market-based approaches are not yet allowed inside the Scope 3 inventory, with a revised standard expected in late 2028.
For companies with science-based targets, SBTi’s Corporate Net-Zero Standard V2.0 explicitly includes commodity certificates under book and claim, reported separately and subject to integrity criteria such as volume matching and registry retirement. V2.0 can be used for validation from 1 February 2027 and becomes mandatory for new submissions from 1 February 2028. Our SBTi V2 overview covers the rest of the standard, and how to report SAF certificates in Scope 3 goes through the reporting step in detail.
Be careful with the external claim. In November 2025, 21 airlines committed to the European Commission to stop saying a specific flight’s emissions are offset or reduced by contributions to alternative fuels. “We financed X tonnes of SAF, verified by registry Y” holds up; “our business travel is carbon neutral” does not. Our guide to carbon neutral claims under EmpCo explains the wording.
How long it takes
A first purchase is mostly limited by your own data and approvals, not by the market. The steps that take time are collecting a clean flight footprint from your travel agency, getting internal sign-off on budget and claim wording, agreeing the contract, and opening a registry account if you want the certificates in your own name.
A pilot with one supplier and one retirement statement is the fastest route. A multi-year agreement takes longer because it fixes volumes and prices for several years, but it also gives you predictable supply as EU blending obligations rise: under ReFuelEU Aviation, the minimum SAF share at EU airports goes from 2% in 2025 to 6% in 2030 and 20% in 2035. Plan the first purchase so the retirement statement lands inside the reporting year you want to claim it in.
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Buy SAF certificates with one plan for reduction and residual emissions
SAF certificates reduce the emissions of the flights you cannot avoid. Carbon credits address what remains. Most companies end up needing both, and the order matters: reduce first, then cover the residual emissions with high-quality credits, sized with the same footprint. Our guide on how many carbon credits you need and our reducing and offsetting business travel emissions article show how the two fit together.
Regreener works with more than 200 European companies on their carbon credit portfolios, and every project we offer goes through our 100+ datapoint quality framework. For SAF we work supplier-agnostically: we source per client from recognised certification schemes and registries, from small pilots to multi-year volumes. If you want to know what your first purchase could look like, talk to a SAF specialist.
