Occupation / job
Airfield Operations Specialists
Median annual pay. Half earn less than this.
Hourly at a standard 2,080-hour year. We do not yet have unpaid-time or cost data for this, so this is not an adjusted figure.
The middle half. A quarter earn below this range.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 · view
What this figure cannot tell you
It covers people EMPLOYED in this occupation. Anyone who trained for it and was never hired is not in the median above, and neither is anyone doing the work self-employed. No verified count of qualified people exists for this occupation, so this page shows none rather than an estimate. Why that matters · The occupations where we could source it
Who this suits
A $56,850 midpoint puts Airfield Operations Specialists $569 a month ahead of the $50,020 typical American job. Real, but small enough that a change of employer or metro would move it as much as the occupation itself does.
Employment as Airfield Operations Specialists is 15,190 nationally. At that size a large city holds a working market and a small one holds almost none, so where you live changes the number of employers available to you by an order of magnitude.
Air transportation work suits people who can follow a procedure exactly, every time, and who are comfortable that the whole safety case rests on that being true.
How long it takes to become one of the 15,190 people doing this is not something we have a source for. BLS counts and pays them; it does not record how they got there, and we would rather say so than guess.
Who should not do this
A quarter of the field earns under $42,000 and a quarter over $77,340: $35,340 between them, a ratio of 1.8x. Wide enough that the first offer you get tells you more about your prospects than the median does.
The 25th percentile of $42,000 is only $8,020 off the $50,020 national midpoint. Being in the worst-paid quarter of Airfield Operations Specialists still means being paid close to what the average American job pays.
Avoid it if irregular sleep, time zones and nights away would not be sustainable for your household.
You will not find a "what share make it" figure here. 15,190 is a headcount of the employed, which is a numerator without a denominator — everyone who qualified and never got hired is missing from it, and we will not estimate them to complete a percentage.
What the spread tells you
At 1.8x, the distribution for Airfield Operations Specialists is open enough that specialisation starts to pay. The distance from $42,000 to $77,340 is mostly what you can do that others in the same title cannot.
The middle half of this field earns between $42,000 and $77,340. That is $35,340 of range, with $56,850 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
Between $42,000 and $77,340 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $56,850. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $20,490; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $35,340.
The climb from $56,850 to $77,340 is $20,490, against $14,850 down to $42,000. Rather more of the range sits above the midpoint than below it, so the realistic upside in Airfield Operations Specialists is larger than the realistic downside.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $20.19 at the bottom quarter, $27.33 at the midpoint, $37.18 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.
What these figures are, and what they are not
Employers reported these wages for people already working as Airfield Operations Specialists. The self-employed are excluded, so $56,850 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Airfield Operations Specialists, the hourly figure is $56,850 over a 2,080-hour year — a unit conversion, not an adjustment.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else