Passenger Attendants Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Passenger Attendants offer sit among all 25,340 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

May 2024 employment stood at 25,340, or 0.02% of the U.S. total. Texas leads the state table with 4,790 jobs; the top three states sum to 46.5% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Hawaii posts a location quotient of 6.76, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $32,090 at the 25th percentile, $37,560 at the middle, $41,180 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $20,390, a ratio of 1.7 to 1. Where a specific job offer lands on that range says more about the role's level than the occupation's headline median does.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 33 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Alaska at $54,290; the jobs leader is Texas:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Passenger Attendants stands number 510 by employment and number 748 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% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.2% of the group's 13,645,590 jobs. In 13 of the 32 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $37,560, 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 4,180 jobs, 16.5% 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, Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $31,730 a year, against $48,690 in Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV. 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 Passenger Attendants paycheck, gross, is $1,445 every two weeks on an annual $37,560, which is $3,130 a month and $722 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($32,090) to the 75th ($41,180) is worth $9,090 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. 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.

To place a real offer: a salary of $41,316 would sit between the median ($37,560) and the 75th percentile ($41,180), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $32,090, is $5,470 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: Ship Engineers, Traffic Technicians, Gas Compressor and Gas Pumping Station Operators, Rail Yard Engineers, Dinkey Operators, and Hostlers, Bridge and Lock Tenders, Hoist and Winch Operators. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.