Occupation / job
Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers
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
How many people are qualified for this, and how many are doing it
The pay figure above only describes people who got the job. This is the part it leaves out.
There are 181,742 holders of an active airline transport pilot certificate (2025). Federal employment records account for 103,560 people working in Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers — 57.0%.
The remainder is a ceiling, not an unemployment rate. Holding the credential is not the same as wanting a job with it, and the remainder also holds everyone who moved into management or teaching, retired without giving the credential up, or works self-employed in a way the employment survey misses. What the pair does establish is that the pay figure above is a survivor's figure, and roughly how many people it is silent about. Everything else that gap contains
Denominator: holders of an active airline transport pilot certificate = 181,742 (Standing count of people holding the credential, as at 31 December 2025) · FAA, US Civil Airmen Statistics 2025, Table 4 — Estimated Active Pilot Certificates Held · view
Who this suits
The $232,140 midpoint is $15,176 a month above the $50,020 typical American job, which puts Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers near the ceiling of published federal wage data. Everything at this level is gated, and the gate is usually years long.
National employment is 103,560. At that scale hiring is continuous, the market rate is well established, and your leverage comes from being credibly willing to go somewhere else.
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.
No verified preparation time is on file for Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers. The wage survey behind every figure on this page asks employers what they pay, not what they required, so the honest answer here is that we do not know.
Who should not do this
A quarter earn under $182,280, a quarter over $384,440: $16,846 a month between them at a 2.1x ratio. Planning around the midpoint of a spread this wide is planning around a number very few people in Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers actually earn.
The bottom quarter of this field earns $182,280 — $87.63 an hour, $132,260 above the $50,020 national midpoint. When even the worst-paid quarter of Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers is this far ahead, the barrier to entry is doing the work of keeping it there.
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. 103,560 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 2.1x the range from $182,280 to $384,440 is doing more explaining than the job title is. Something sorts people across that distance — sector, speciality, or who employs them — and finding out what it is matters more than the $232,140 midpoint.
Put in money rather than ratios: $182,280 at the 25th percentile, $232,140 at the midpoint, $384,440 at the 75th. $202,160 separates the quarter of Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
Between $182,280 and $384,440 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $232,140. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $152,300; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $202,160.
$49,860 below the midpoint, $152,300 above it. That asymmetry is extreme even for this data, and it means every summary of Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers that is not a median — including any average you see quoted elsewhere — is describing the top of the range rather than the middle.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $87.63 at the bottom quarter, $111.60 at the midpoint, $184.82 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
The $232,140 figure is what employers pay employees. It is before tax and before deductions, it excludes the self-employed entirely, and it says nothing about anyone who does this work on their own account.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers, the hourly figure is $232,140 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