Abstract This study investigated the performance of aerofoils for use in a helicopter or fixed wing aircraft on Mars. As the Martian atmosphere has a density of approximately 1% of the Earth atmosphere, the chord-based Reynolds number is in the order of 104. This low Reynolds number will likely result in laminar flow across the aerofoils, therefore turbulence modelling may not be required. SU2 open source CFD software was used to obtain the time-averaged coefficients for the aerofoils considered. To determine the changes in aerodynamic performance as the Mach number increases, the simulations were carried out at different 2D sections of the blade as the velocity increases with the distance from the axis of rotation. The highest performing aerofoil in this study was the cambered plate with a maximum lift to drag ratio of 17.1, followed by the E63 aerofoil and flat plate with maximum lift to drag ratios of 14.7 and 10.9 respectively. The performance of the aerofoils generally increased with radial position although there was not a significant difference between radial stations 5 and 6. This suggests that the increase in performance as radial position increases is due to the increase in the Reynolds number. The results obtained for radial station 7 were inconsistent for all aerofoils as the maximum local Mach number exceeded 1, which affected the convergence of the simulations.