Professional Pilot Salary Survey 2016

What can a young person planning a career expect to earn as a pilot? Professional Pilot answers this question, at least retrospectively, every year. The 2016 survey is out.

Involvement with turboprops is bad. The manager of a corporate aviation department, responsible for the hiring of pilots, supervising $400,000 engine overhauls, etc., earns on average about $70,000 per year, as does the chief pilot. A captain responsible for the lives of up to 10 passengers clocks in at about $60,000 per year. Being a unionized regional airline turboprop captain can boost this up to $85,000 to $100,000 per year.

Jets in the corporate world result in higher pay. The flight department manager involved with midsize jets will earn about $120,000 per year, supervising a chief pilot at $105,000 per year, captains at $95,000 per year, and first officers at $55,000 per year.

Midsize jet charter pilots earn about 25 percent less and are presumably away from home more than a corporate jet pilot with a home base and executives who want to return to it.

Flying an epic-size corporate jet internationally for a huge company can pay as much as $150,000 per year, but there are a lot of Cessna Citations for every Gulfstream G650.

Regional jet captains harvest union wages of about $90,000 per year, with the right-seat pilot earning $45,000 per year. The real money is in major airlines. A 10th year captain on the smallest aircraft in the fleet ears a base annual salary of $205,000 at Delta, $225,000 at Fedex, and $190,000 at JetBlue. They can work their way up to $281,000 at American and $275,000 at Fedex on the largest jets. These numbers don’t include flying hours beyond 960 per year, per diem rates, and other bonuses that would typically add at least $25,000 per year.

Remember that the airline salaries are tainted by sample bias. Pilots who end up at airlines that don’t grow can upgrade to captain only very slowly. By union rules, pilots who end up at airlines that go bust have to start over as the lowest-seniority first officer at a new airline.

The helicopter world is arguably more fun and typically involves fewer hours in the seat (if only because the helicopter runs out of gas after 2-3 hours!). The corporate flight department managers earn $80-125,000 per year depending on helicopter size while the chief pilots and captains are at $80,000 to $120,000 per year. Cut those numbers by 30 percent in the charter world. Sikorsky (S-76 or S-92) is what you want to fly for maximum earnings, but most of those jobs may be snapped up by military veterans.] Police helicopter pilots can earn over $100,000 per year and they don’t even need an FAA pilot certificate, but typically those jobs are restricted to people who are already police officers. Offshore (oil rig transport) Sikorsky captains can earn just over $100,000 per year. News helicopter flying pays less than corporate: $70,000 per year on average. Medevac helicopter pilots don’t fly much so the per-hour rate is high but the annual salary averages only about $80,000 per year, which is not a great return on the training investment (but perhaps there is a lot of satisfaction from helping people?). The hardest helicopter jobs, in logging and construction, pay less than the easiest (flying executives around in Sikorsky S-76s), about $80,000 per year.

[From this chapter on Massachusetts family law:

“There are a lot of women collecting child support from more than one man,” Nissenbaum noted. “I remember one enterprising young lady who worked as a waitress at Boston’s Logan airport. She targeted three airline pilots, had a child by each of them, and back then was collecting $25,000 in tax-free child support from each pilot. …”

How would the numbers work out today? Assuming that the woman studied airline uniforms and limited her partners to men wearing four stripes, she would be collecting child support from defendants with an earning potential of at least $250,000 per year (attorneys we interviewed said that airline pilots, like deployed members of the U.S. military, are nearly 100-percent guaranteed to lose any custody lawsuit, even if they switch to a 9-5 job, due to the fact that they cannot win under a “historical primary caregiver” standard). Under the Massachusetts child support guidelines she therefore collects $40,000 per year from each pilot and has a tax-free spending power of $120,000 per year for 23 years. It would be typical to obtain court orders for the pilots to pay additional child-related costs such as day care, after-school activities, health insurance, unreimbursed medical expenses, private school tuition, college tuition, etc. Thus she might actually be able to spend $150,000 to $200,000 per year on a household basis. Had she invested $150,000 and four years in college, $100,000 in flight training, spent 25 years living out of a suitcase, and been fortunate enough to work for a successful airline, she would have earned $250,000 pre-tax and been able to spend $160,000 per year after taxes. An important difference is that the waitress/child-support plaintiff could start her earnings at age 18, or younger, while the woman who chooses the pilot career won’t enjoy a comparable spending power until she is 40 or 50 years old. The pilot will also likely be burdened by student loan debt through age 35.]