The yacht at the top of any honest list has a price set by the US Treasury, an owner a German court says the authorities never connected to her, and a shipyard that sued so it could send its bill.
The highest price anyone in authority has put on a private yacht is $735m, and it came from the US Treasury, in a sanctions notice. Shipyards do not publish what their clients pay. The yacht at the top belongs, on paper, to a trust. So the lists passed around online quote one another, and several put a $4.8bn yacht called History Supreme at the top, though nobody has ever verified that figure independently. The prices that hold up were all set during freezes, seizures and lawsuits, which is why the best-priced yachts in the world are mostly the ones that got into trouble.
Ranked on figures that carry an official or professional name, the order runs Dilbar, Sailing Yacht A and Nord. Scheherazade, Azzam and Eclipse, three of the best-known names in yachting, follow on numbers nobody official has confirmed. Koru, the Oceanco sailing yacht linked to Jeff Bezos and delivered in 2023, has never had its construction cost disclosed at all. Owners’ private fortunes stay out of it, because a boat’s price tells you nothing reliable about whoever owns it.
15,917 tons
Dilbar was launched by Lürssen, the German yard, in 2016. The US Treasury describes her as Cayman Islands flagged, with a gross registered tonnage of 15,917, two helipads and one of the largest indoor pools ever installed on a yacht. Its estimate of her worth starts at $600m and runs up to the sum above.
NPR reported that Lürssen calls her, at 511 feet, the largest motor yacht in the world by gross tonnage. Tonnage measures volume, and a pool of that size takes up a great deal of it.
Length is a separate contest, and Dilbar loses it to a boat further down this list.
$60m a year
That is Treasury’s figure for keeping Dilbar running for twelve months, and the bills kept coming after the sanctions did. Yachts, unlike paintings, cost money even when nobody is looking at them.
After the EU sanctions of 2022, Lürssen went on maintaining her. In 2025 the yard went to court for a declaration that the sanctions no longer applied, so that it could bill the owners. The Moscow Times, reporting the case, put her running costs higher still, at more than $70m a year.
A shipyard will wait a long time for a cheque, though not forever.
€530m
Sailing Yacht A has the most official-sounding price of the lot. When Italy froze her in 2022, the Guardia di Finanza, the country’s financial police, valued her at that sum, according to La Revue du Luxe.
Andrey Melnichenko is the businessman publicly linked to her, though her legal ownership has been disputed. A police valuation records what a state believes it is holding, which can be a long way from what a buyer would pay.
56 yachts
In March 2022, as the sanctions lists lengthened, the valuation firm VesselsValue helped compile a list of 56 superyachts believed to be owned by Kremlin-aligned oligarchs. Their combined market value came to more than $5.4bn.
Nord was on it, with a market value of $500m. A market value is the one figure in this ranking that imagines a buyer, which makes it the closest thing yachting has to a price anyone might pay.
$700m
Scheherazade has carried that figure since her seizure. La Revue du Luxe notes that the shipyard never confirmed it, so it is a number that has stuck to the boat without anyone in particular standing behind it.
Her ownership is publicly disputed, which is reason enough to leave the name blank. She belongs in any serious account of the most expensive superyachts, but on a figure that has no author.
180 metres
Azzam has never been frozen, so no government has ever had cause to price her. When Lürssen delivered her in 2013 she took the title of longest yacht, at 180 metres, with exteriors by Nauta, interiors by Christophe Leoni and a top speed above 30 knots. Few vessels that long can do that.
She was built for Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Emir of Abu Dhabi and president of the UAE, who died in 2022. Her name has since been linked with the Al Nahyan family, and most often with Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE president. That link rests on association. Nobody has produced a document of title.
Trade lists disagree about her price by hundreds of millions of dollars. The longest yacht in the world is also among the least documented, and her owners have never needed to change that.
$1.5bn
Eclipse was delivered by Blohm+Voss in 2010 and has been linked to Roman Abramovich through years of reporting. Most of the lists in circulation put her at the top on this figure, yet no shipyard, court or government has put its name to it.
Rank her on that number and she leads every list. Rank her on documents and she drops off altogether, which is why the sum turns up so often in captions and nowhere in court papers.
2 courts
The US Treasury, when it sanctioned Alisher Usmanov in March 2022, said Dilbar belonged to him. He denies it. When Germany seized the yacht in April that year, German police said she belonged to his sister, Gulbakhor Ismailova. In March 2024, according to the sanctions portal run by Ukraine’s defence intelligence agency, Germany’s federal criminal police office removed those statements at the request of his lawyers.
On 11 June 2026, the Frankfurt am Main Administrative Court ruled that BAFA, the German export-control authority, had acted unlawfully when it refused to confirm Dilbar was not a frozen asset. The court found the authorities had not established a link between Usmanov and The Sister Trust, which formally owns her, The Moscow Times reported. The same paper reported that a Hamburg regional court, in a separate case, had barred Mediahuis Luxembourg from describing Usmanov as Dilbar’s owner, finding the claim unsubstantiated.
La Revue du Luxe reports that the Frankfurt judgment is not final and that the vessel remains on the US lists. For now, Europe has let her go and America has not.
So who owns the most expensive superyacht in the world? Washington still says Usmanov. In Frankfurt, on paper, it is The Sister Trust, and the court found the authorities had not established a link between him and it. Lürssen, which went to court to settle exactly that, would simply like to know where to send the invoice.
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