We measured every open position on the WingmanPro board, 32,138 jobs from 2,055 employers, to see what aviation actually pays going into the fall. The short version: the market's money is chasing captains, and it is not subtle about it.
By WingmanPro Research · Published August 27, 2026
Operators, airlines, repair stations, and aerospace manufacturers post aviation jobs on WingmanPro every day. This report is what those postings say about aviation hiring heading into September 2026. All figures are medians of posted pay ranges, annualized, in US dollars; the methodology section at the bottom spells out every conversion.
If a search box sent you here, the short answers first. The median posted salary for a US aviation job is $132,000. Pilot listings post a median of $155,000; captains $212,750, first officers $112,500. A&P mechanics post $94,276, avionics technicians $127,500, flight instructors $98,150, flight attendants $79,477. Every number is a median of live posted pay ranges, and the rest of the report is the why.
One thing to keep in mind while reading: this is posted pay, the number an employer is willing to print to attract applicants. It is not average earnings, and the silent 52 percent of employers are absent from every salary figure below. Where that skews a number, we say so.
The clearest signal in the data is what operators will pay for experience. Listings looking for a captain outnumber listings looking for a first officer 1,086 to 417, a ratio of 2.6 to 1. The industry is not short of pilots. It is short of pilots who can sign for the airplane.
Pay says the same thing. Among listings quoting an annual salary, the median captain job posts at $212,750 (482 listings). The median first officer job posts at $112,500 (99 listings). That is a $100,250 premium for the fourth stripe. The cause is structural: the airline hiring wave of 2021 through 2023 pulled thousands of experienced pilots out of charter, corporate, and instruction flying, and those operators are still paying to rebuild the top of their rosters.
Type experience sharpens the effect. Pilot listings that require time in type post a median of $222,000, against $150,000 for listings with no type-time requirement. Only 26 listings carry the hard requirement, so hold the exact figure loosely. The direction is not in doubt: walking in the door already current in the airplane is worth tens of thousands of dollars a year right now.
Among captain listings, the aircraft on the requirements line predicts pay better than anything else we can measure, including geography and the kind of operation.
| Aircraft family | Median posted salary | Captain listings |
|---|---|---|
| Gulfstream | $275,000 | 154 |
| Bombardier (Global, Challenger) | $250,000 | 122 |
| Dassault Falcon | $235,000 | 40 |
| Hawker | $172,500 | 21 |
| Embraer | $170,775 | 30 |
| Cessna Citation | $169,585 | 80 |
| Pilatus | $150,000 | 48 |
| Beechcraft King Air | $100,000 | 40 |
The spread from top to bottom of that table is $175,000. A Gulfstream captain's premium over a King Air captain is bigger than most aviation salaries, full stop. At the top end, a G550 captain seat in the New York metro area is currently posted at $500,000, and a Gulfstream G700 lead captain role in California is advertised at $385,000 to $435,000.
Cabin size works like a pay scale. Ultra-long-range jets fly the wealthiest principals on the longest trips, the pool of pilots typed and current in them is thin, and the airplane costs more per month than its crew. Nobody economizes on the person flying the $75 million jet.
The ladder holds across categories too: jet listings post a median of $175,000, turboprops $104,573, helicopters $90,925. The rotor discount is stubborn. Helicopter flying includes some of the most demanding work in the industry, EMS and utility above all, and its 507 posted jobs with pay still sit $84,000 under the jet fleet's median. We do not think that gap is defensible, but the listings say it persists.
| Operation | Median posted pay | Listings with pay |
|---|---|---|
| Charter (Part 135) | $149,500 | 627 |
| Corporate (Part 91) | $145,000 | 2,039 |
| Flight instruction | $104,564 | 594 |
| Airline (Part 121) | $95,132 | 1,744 |
| Cargo | $59,724 | 106 |
Read that table carefully before quoting it. The airline figure covers every role airlines post, cabin crew and ground staff included, so it is not a pilot-to-pilot comparison. And an airline career can still win on lifetime earnings once seniority, widebody upgrades, and retirement contributions compound.
What the table does show is who is bidding hardest for people today. Charter and corporate operators are posting the strongest walk-in numbers in the industry, because they have to: they recruit from the same experienced-pilot pool the airlines drained, and they have no seniority list to promise anyone. For a pilot who values pay now over pay in 2040, business aviation is the aggressive bidder this fall.
| Position | Median posted pay | Listings with pay |
|---|---|---|
| Aviation management | $166,000 | 2,081 |
| Pilot (all seats) | $155,000 | 958 |
| Avionics technician | $127,500 | 358 |
| Flight instructor | $98,150 | 114 |
| A&P mechanic | $94,276 | 1,111 |
| Flight attendant | $79,477 | 63 |
| Aircraft dispatcher | $54,600 | 45 |
| Ground crew | $42,910 | 197 |
Two of these numbers deserve a closer look. First, maintenance. With 2,356 open listings, aircraft maintenance is the second-largest job family on the board, and the median A&P listing posts at $94,276. The mechanic shortage stopped being a forecast a while ago; it is now a line item with a dollar sign on it.
Second, the avionics premium. Avionics technicians post a median of $127,500, about $33,000 over the general A&P figure. Every glass-cockpit retrofit, ADS-B box, and cabin-connectivity install competes for a specialty the training pipeline produces in far smaller numbers than airframe generalists. If you are picking a maintenance specialization in 2026, the data votes for the electronics bench.
At the other end of the table, dispatch ($54,600) and ground crew ($42,910) remain the affordable way into the industry. Ground crew listings are also, unexpectedly, the most likely of any role to state pay at all: 64.8 percent do.
| State | Open listings |
|---|---|
| California | 6,850 |
| Texas | 2,503 |
| Washington | 1,372 |
| New York | 863 |
| Colorado | 847 |
| Florida | 836 |
California holds roughly one open aviation job in five on WingmanPro, more than the next three states combined. That is partly flight activity, but mostly industry: the largest employers on the board are RTX (4,267 open roles), Airbus (2,890), Anduril (2,865), SpaceX (2,807), Boeing (1,556), and UPS (1,486). Aerospace manufacturing, defense, and space hiring dwarfs what flight departments post.
Which matters for how you read this report: aviation jobs in 2026 means far more than flying jobs. Three of the six biggest employers on the board build autonomous aircraft, rockets, or defense systems. A pilot certificate is one door into this market. An A&P certificate or an engineering degree is another, and the line at that door is shorter.
One distortion to note: California, Colorado, Washington, and New York, four of our six biggest markets, all have pay-transparency laws that force salary ranges into listings. States without such laws are under-represented in every pay figure in this report.
47.9 percent of listings state pay. Disclosure is lowest exactly where competition for staff is fiercest: flight attendant listings show a range 27.6 percent of the time, flight instructor listings 32.6 percent, pilot listings 44 percent.
We think the silent half is making a mistake. In a market where the median captain listing prints $212,750, a listing with no number does not read as discreet. It reads as a lower offer.
The listings behind every number in this report are live and searchable on the board right now; the links below take you straight to the relevant slices.
The median pilot listing posts $155,000. Captains post $212,750, first officers $112,500, and the spread by aircraft runs from $100,000 on the King Air to $275,000 on Gulfstreams.
Senior captains on ultra-long-range business jets. A Gulfstream G700 lead captain role in California is posted at $385,000 to $435,000, and a G550 captain seat in the New York metro area is posted at $500,000.
Not on posted base pay. No mechanic listing among the 32,138 in this snapshot comes close; the top of the posted market is avionics, at a $127,500 median. The $300,000 stories you hear involve heavy overtime, contract per diem, and no weekends.
The median flight attendant listing posts $79,477, against $132,000 for aviation overall. The exception is the corporate cabin: private jet flight attendant roles routinely post six figures.
Among posted listings, Gulfstream captain, at a $275,000 median. The single highest posted salary in this snapshot is that $500,000 G550 captain seat.
This report is a snapshot of every job posted on WingmanPro on August 27, 2026: 32,138 open positions from 2,055 employers hiring in aviation.
Salary statistics use the 15,231 US-dollar listings that state a pay range, after excluding values that annualize below $20,000 or above $2,000,000 as data errors. We take the midpoint of each posted range, or the single bound where only one is given. Hourly rates are annualized at 2,080 hours, daily at 260 days, weekly at 52 weeks, and monthly at 12 months, the same conversions the board's own pay filter uses. Hourly-quoted flying jobs can overstate a year's real earnings, since few pilots log 2,080 paid hours.
All figures are medians, not averages, so a few outlier listings cannot drag a number. Seat, aircraft, and operation tags are derived from listing text. Every table shows the listing count behind each median; be more skeptical of the small ones. Spot an error? Write to support@wingmanpro.com.