Flight Attendants Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

The five rows are five different workers in the same occupation, from the 10th percentile ($34,030) to the 90th ($138,040). BLS suppresses cells that fail its reliability rules (n/p here) and caps the highest wages at $239,200+ a year or $115.00+ an hour; in this ladder that top code appears at the very top rows only.

Employment and concentration

The occupation employed 130,110 people in May 2024, 0.08% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 15,760 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 31.4% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Nevada, whose location quotient of 3.14 says this work is 3.14 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $138,040, which is 4.1 times the $34,030 at the 10th, a difference of $104,010 annually. Because the mean wage ($78,950) sits above the median ($67,130), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 21 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is New York at $128,050; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Flight Attendants stands number 229 by employment and number 310 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 28% more than its group median, and it supplies 1.0% of the group's 13,645,590 jobs. In 7 of the 21 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $67,130, 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 16,500 jobs, 12.7% 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, Las Vegas-Henderson-North Las Vegas, NV posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $48,930 a year, against $128,190 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $5,594 a month before tax, $2,582 biweekly, $1,291 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($52,280) to the 75th ($98,160) is worth $45,880 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. To turn any of these gross figures into spendable money, run them through the paycheck calculator; to weigh an offer against your current role, use the salary calculator; to test a raise against prices, the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $73,843 would sit between the median ($67,130) and the 75th percentile ($98,160), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $52,280, is $14,850 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: Ambulance Drivers and Attendants, Except Emergency Medical Technicians, Transportation Workers, All Other, Tank Car, Truck, and Ship Loaders, Aircraft Cargo Handling Supervisors, Subway and Streetcar Operators, Ship Engineers. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.