Occupation / job
Commercial Pilots
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 118,314 holders of an active commercial pilot certificate (2025). Federal employment records account for 47,630 people working in Commercial Pilots — 40.3%.
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 commercial pilot certificate = 118,314 (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
At $123,220 — $73,200 a year clear of the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint — Commercial Pilots sits at the top of what BLS publishes. Read the gate before the figure: at this level there is always one, and it is usually measured in years.
Employment stands at 47,630. Commercial Pilots is common enough to be recruited for continuously and specific enough that the experience travels — the combination that makes changing employer a working pay rise.
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.
We carry no verified training length for Commercial Pilots — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.
Who should not do this
The gap between the bottom quarter of Commercial Pilots at $84,540 and the top quarter at $190,440 is $105,900 — a ratio of 2.3x. Wide enough that the headline median describes almost nobody, and treating it as your number is a planning error.
Even at the 25th percentile Commercial Pilots pays $84,540, $34,520 clear of the $50,020 national midpoint. Almost the entire distribution sits above the typical American wage, which is rare and worth weighing against the entry cost.
Avoid it if irregular sleep, time zones and nights away would not be sustainable for your household.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 47,630 figure counts people already working as Commercial Pilots, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.
What the spread tells you
At 2.3x the range from $84,540 to $190,440 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 $123,220 midpoint.
The middle half of this field earns between $84,540 and $190,440. That is $105,900 of range, with $123,220 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
Getting to $190,440, the 75th percentile, is worth $67,220 a year more than the $123,220 midpoint and $105,900 more than the $84,540 a quarter of Commercial Pilots settle for.
It is $38,680 from $123,220 down to $84,540 but $67,220 up to $190,440. When a range leans this far upward, the interesting question is what puts someone in the top half, because the money is disproportionately there.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $40.64 at the bottom quarter, $59.24 at the midpoint, $91.55 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
This is payroll data: it comes from employers, about people they employ. Anyone doing the work of Commercial Pilots for themselves is not in it, and there is no reason to assume $123,220 describes them.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Commercial Pilots, the hourly figure is $123,220 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