Revealed: Most expensive royal family trips as Prince William tops the list at £130k

Prince William’s visit to Saudi Arabia has topped the list of the royal family’s most expensive annual trips.

William’s three-day official visit to Saudi Arabia in February 2026 on behalf of the UK government, during which he met Saudi leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, cost a total of £130,106, including two additional planning trips by staff.

The second most expensive expense was the £126,946 travel expense paid for the King and Queen’s four-day state visit to Italy in April 2025.

Travel expenses were among the royal accounts released on Thursday. The report covers the 12 months to March 2026 and includes a breakdown of all trips taken by family members where travel costs were at least £20,000.

A total of 37 separate cruises are listed for the year to March 2026. Of these, 13 involved the King and 11 of these were in the United Kingdom.

These included four trips by royal train to perform engagements in Lancaster in June 2025 (cost £48,460), Staffordshire in October (£34,109), Dartmouth in December (£37,466) and Clitheroe in Lancashire in February 2026 (£40,738).

Buckingham Palace announced last year that the royal train would be taken out of service by 2027 to save money.

The King’s two overseas trips listed in the 2025/26 report were both undertaken with the Queen: a state visit to Italy in April 2025 and a visit to Pope Benedict XIV in October the same year. State visit to Vatican City in Rome to meet with Leo.

Travel costs for the Vatican City visit totaled £75,371, making it the fourth most expensive trip of 2025/26, just behind the Prince of Wales’s two-day visit to Belem in Brazil to attend the COP30 climate summit in November (£78,542) but ahead of the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh’s seven-day state visit to Papua New Guinea and Japan in September (£70,541).

All of King’s other travel expenses listed in the report are for charter flights within the United Kingdom.

Just outside the top five most expensive trips is one that doesn’t involve any royals directly.

This was a planning visit to the United States and Bermuda in late February and early March 2026 by staff working for the King and Queen to prepare for the royal visit two months later, taking travel costs to £66,060.

Expenditure on Charles and Camilla’s actual visit to the US and Bermuda will be included in the 2026/27 report to be published next summer.

As well as the 13 trips on the list involving the King or the King and Queen, 10 were undertaken by the Princess Royal; four by the Prince of Wales (one with the Princess of Wales); three by the Duke of Edinburgh; two by the Duchess of Edinburgh, one jointly by the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh; one by the Duke of Gloucester; one by the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester; and one by the Duke of Kent.

No solo visits by the Queen or Princess of Wales are on the list.

Some 177 helicopter journeys were taken by members of the royal family in 2025/26, with the total cost coming to £733,063.

Total spend on trips over the 12-month period was £3,316,024, including trips costing over and under £20,000.