Commercial Pilots Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Commercial Pilots offer sit among all 51,830 workers doing this job? The survey top-codes at $239,200+ and withholds unreliable cells, shown as n/p in the table.

Employment and concentration

The occupation employed 51,830 people in May 2024, 0.03% of every job BLS counted. Florida is the largest employer at 6,100 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 32.1% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Alaska, whose location quotient of 17.36 says this work is 17.36 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

BLS top-codes or suppresses part of this occupation's national ladder, so the published center is the median of $122,670 and the mean of $142,960. The state table below is the more useful negotiating document: it shows how far the same job title travels across the 50 states with published estimates.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 50 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Connecticut at $227,140; the jobs leader is Florida:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Commercial Pilots stands number 384 by employment and number 66 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 135% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.4% of the group's 13,645,590 jobs. In 17 of the 49 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $122,670, 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

Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL is the largest metro employer with 3,340 jobs, 6.4% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, FL posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $108,990 a year, against $231,160 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $122,670 a year is $10,222 a month gross, $4,718 every two weeks, $2,359 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($81,660) to the 75th ($175,050) is worth $93,390 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. The next step from a gross figure is a net one: run the $10,222 monthly figure through the paycheck calculator applies your state's taxes, the salary calculator compares two offers in any unit, and the raise vs inflation calculator tells you whether a nominal raise is a real one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $134,937 would sit between the median ($122,670) and the 75th percentile ($175,050), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $81,660, is $41,010 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Transportation and Material Moving Occupations

Sibling occupations in Transportation and Material Moving Occupations: Aircraft Service Attendants, Conveyor Operators and Tenders, Passenger Attendants, Material Moving Workers, All Other, Transportation Inspectors, Air Traffic Controllers. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.