Industry information
What these certificates are worth, from the agencies that actually measure it.
This page sells nothing. It exists because most of what is published about aviation pay is either a job-board self-report or a training company’s marketing, and a person deciding whether to spend two years and a lot of money deserves better than that. Every figure below names its source, its occupation and the date it was measured, so you can check it yourself in about ten seconds.
The question people ask first
Do you need a degree? For the certificate itself, no.
The regulations
No FAA certificate requires an academic degree. Not the airline transport pilot certificate (14 CFR 61.153), not the mechanic certificate (14 CFR 65.71), not the remote pilot certificate (14 CFR 107.61). What they require is age, English, experience and passing the tests.
For mechanics there is one education-adjacent route, and it is not a degree: 14 CFR 65.77 takes either a graduation certificate from a Part 147 school or 18 months of documented practical experience for one rating, or 30 months for both.
The one real exception
14 CFR 61.160 is the only place a degree has concrete regulatory effect. It reduces the 1,500-hour airline transport pilot minimum:
Hours required before an airline transport pilot certificate. Bars are drawn to the 1,500 hour baseline, so a shorter bar is a shorter road.
The 1,000 and 1,250 hour routes require an aviation major at an institution the FAA has authorized for this purpose. Source: 14 CFR 61.160.
It also cuts required cross-country time from 500 hours to 200, which is frequently left out and is arguably worth more than the headline reduction, and it lowers the minimum age from 23 to 21.
A correction worth having: the FAA’s list of authorized institutions does not assign schools to the 1,000-hour or 1,250-hour level. Which threshold you qualify for depends on your degree and credit hours, not on which school you attended. Pages that label institutions “1,000-hour schools” are wrong.
The question people ask second: what if you have a record?
A conviction does not change what any of these occupations pay, and the medical standards in 14 CFR Part 67 name no crime at all. Where a record does come up is the medical application, and separately airport access, which belongs to the TSA and not the FAA.
We publish what the medical form actually asks, word for word, including the DUI, the drug and alcohol items and the nontraffic conviction question, with the regulation quoted so you can check it against the source rather than take our word for it. Items 18.v and 18.w carry no lookback period at all.
Read what the medical application asks about your record · How the TSA gate works
Federal wage data
What these occupations pay.
United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, wage data for May 2025, page last modified 27 August 2026. Ranges run from the 10th percentile to the 90th.
Airline pilots, copilots and flight engineers
53-2011$106,710 Median
$232,140 90th
$463,830
Projected to grow 8 percent, 2025 to 2035
BLS publishes no hourly wage for this occupation. Airline pilots are paid per flight hour, not per clock hour.
Commercial pilots
53-2012$58,850 Median
$123,220 90th
$266,620
Projected to grow 5 percent, 2025 to 2035
This code covers charter, air ambulance and air tour pilots. It excludes regional, national and international airline pilots. BLS counts openings for airline and commercial pilots together: about 16,400 a year.
Aircraft mechanics and service technicians
49-3011$48,780 Median
$79,870 90th
$128,890
Projected to grow 5 percent, 2025 to 2035
Typical entry-level education is a postsecondary nondegree award. No academic degree is required by regulation.
Avionics technicians
49-2091$49,410 Median
$82,280 90th
$113,680
Projected to grow 9 percent, 2025 to 2035
Avionics technicians out-earn airframe and powerplant mechanics at the median, and earn less at the top.
Claims adjusters, examiners and investigators
13-1031$48,850 Median
$78,000 90th
$117,040
Projected to DECLINE 6 percent, 2025 to 2035
Typical entry-level education is a high school diploma or equivalent.
Two notes on how to read these. The openings figure for pilots counts four occupations, adding appraisers, while the wage figures count three; the Bureau publishes them that way and we have not reconciled them. And the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey excludes the self-employed, which matters more than it sounds: photographers, the nearest measured trade to freelance drone work, are 67 percent self-employed, and the wage survey counts 51,760 of them against an actual 145,000.
The one everybody gets wrong
There is no federal wage statistic for drone pilots. None.
Why not
The Standard Occupational Classification contains no occupation for drone or remote pilots. Drone job titles are filed as alternate titles under Commercial Pilots, alongside charter and air ambulance work. The 2028 revision of the classification does not propose adding one.
So the Bureau of Labor Statistics has never surveyed drone pilot wages. Not once. Every “average drone pilot salary” in circulation is a job-board self-report, a training company’s marketing, or a figure for a different occupation.
What that looks like in practice
Two widely-read drone training sites currently publish, for the same job title, figures of roughly $131,000 and $58,000, and one of them prints both numbers on the same page without reconciling them. A third publishes about $52,000. The spread across the industry is more than two and a half times. No buyer can act on that.
The FAA does publish a real, checkable number: 481,760 certificated remote pilots as of November 2025 (FAA, Drones by the Numbers). That is a count of certificates, not of jobs, and it should not be read as one.
An adjacent trade
Insurance adjusting, where a drone is a tool rather than a career.
A replacement market, not a growth market
Claims adjusting is the trade where a Part 107 certificate most clearly earns its keep: climbing a hail-damaged roof is the most dangerous routine task in the job, and a drone removes it.
But read the Bureau’s own figure honestly. Employment is projected to decline 6 percent between 2025 and 2035, while about 21,600 openings are still expected each year. Both are true: this is a trade people retire out of and get replaced in, not one that is expanding. That is a real opportunity and a smaller one than growth language would suggest.
The entry requirement is a high school diploma or equivalent. A drone certificate is a tool you bring to the work, not a substitute for the state adjuster license the work requires.
Three jobs people confuse
| Independent adjuster | Works for the insurer or an adjusting firm. Usually paid on a fee schedule per claim, not a salary. |
| Public adjuster | Works for the policyholder. Paid a percentage of the settlement, capped by state law. |
| Drone contractor | Photographs and documents. Not licensed to adjust or negotiate a claim. |
On the public adjuster side, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ model act (MO-228, Spring 2025, Section 14.D) sets caps of 10 percent for a catastrophic claim settlement and 15 percent for any other, and bars taking any fee before a claim settles. A model act is not automatically the law in any state; the state’s own statute governs.
Gross is not net. Catastrophe deployment figures quoted online are almost always gross fee-schedule revenue, before the split with the adjusting firm, before travel, lodging, vehicle, software, errors-and-omissions insurance and multi-state licensing fees, and before the deployments you do not get. Being on a roster is not the same as being deployed.
How to read this page
These are wage statistics for occupations, published by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics and the agencies named beside each figure. They are not a prediction of what you will earn. Earnings depend on experience, location, employer, hours flown or worked, and conditions outside anyone’s control.
Passing an FAA knowledge test is one requirement among several: medical certification, flight training, documented experience and a practical test stand between a knowledge test and most of these certificates. Passing a knowledge test does not produce a certificate, a job, or an income. Aneroid Press publishes study guides for the knowledge tests. We do not place anyone in work.
Sources, all retrieved 28 October 2026: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, wage data May 2025, pages last modified 27 August 2026 · 14 CFR 61.153, 61.159, 61.160, 65.71, 65.77 and 107.61 · FAA, Drones by the Numbers, as of November 2025 · National Association of Insurance Commissioners, Public Adjuster Licensing Model Act MO-228, Spring 2025. Bureau of Labor Statistics material is in the public domain.
The other half of the search
Knowing what the work pays is the easy half.
The hard half is being read. A hiring file gets a first pass measured in seconds, and a resume written for aviation in general hands the reader an easy reason to move to the next one. Every application we write is built against one posting, for one role, in the language that posting uses.
- 36 roles across 6 families, from flight deck to maintenance and engineering to airport and ground.
- Never the same resume twice. Each one is written against a single posting, even when two postings look alike.
- Writing only. We write the documents. We do not find work.