Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

A percentile marks a point in this occupation's pay distribution: the worker one quarter of the way up the Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $154,360. BLS top-codes very high wages ($239,200+ a year, $115.00+ an hour) and marks estimates it cannot publish as n/p.

Employment and concentration

BLS counted 99,300 Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers jobs in May 2024, which is 0.06% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Alaska, where the location quotient is 7.82, meaning the occupation holds 7.82 times its national share of local jobs. Texas employs the most people outright, 10,050 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 26.8% of the national total.

BLS top-codes or suppresses part of this occupation's national ladder, so the published center is the median of $226,600 and the mean of $280,570. The state table below is the more useful negotiating document: it shows how far the same job title travels across the 40 states with published estimates.

Pay by state

Alaska posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $226,490, and Texas the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers stands number 270 by employment and number 20 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Transportation and Material Moving Occupations, the group median wage is $52,310 across 50 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 333% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.7% of the group's 13,645,590 jobs. In 0 of the 29 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $226,600, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 9,680 jobs, 9.7% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia, NC-SC posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $148,410 a year, against $390,770 in Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers paycheck, gross, is $8,715 every two weeks on an annual $226,600, which is $18,883 a month and $4,358 a week. The top of this ladder is top-coded by BLS (shown as $239,200+), so the full experience premium cannot be printed from the published table; the 25th percentile, $154,360, is the firmest anchor for an early-career offer. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

Related occupations in Transportation and Material Moving Occupations

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Material Moving Workers, All Other, Transportation Inspectors, Air Traffic Controllers, Taxi Drivers, Wellhead Pumpers, Airfield Operations Specialists. The full directory is on the Careers hub.