Aircraft Service Attendants
What the pay figures show
- Maryland pays aircraft service attendants the most, at $71,740. Unusually, it stays on top. Tax does not overturn it. Nor do local prices — it is still first at $54,110 once levelled out. That is rarer than it sounds. For most jobs the leader changes.
- Maryland leads for aircraft service attendants at $71,740 and retains the position through both adjustments, finishing first at $54,110 in price-deflated terms. That robustness is the minority case: across the largest occupations, state income tax reorders the leader roughly a third of the time and price level does so more often still. Where the nominal leader survives both, the wage premium is large enough to absorb the state's own tax and price levels.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$40,450
People doing it
31,300
Highest paid
$71,740
MD
Best off, really
$54,110
MD, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$33,830
Highest tenth
$57,610
Lowest, really
$29,192
WV
States with data
46
National average
$43,330
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
103.97%
MD, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Geography does a lot of the work in this job. Pay roughly doubles between the lowest state and the highest. Tax and prices narrow that gap. They come nowhere near closing it — the real range is still $29,192 up to $54,110.
- Only 31,300 people do this job in the whole country. It is a small field, so the pay figures rest on fewer reports.
- Not every state reports this one. The figures here cover 46 jurisdictions, and the middle wage across them is $40,450. A state you do not see is one with no published number, not one paying nothing. Of those published, Maryland pays most.
- The nominal spread for aircraft service attendants approaches a factor of two across states. Deflating for tax and price level compresses it substantially but leaves a real range of $29,192 to $54,110, indicating that most of the dispersion is real purchasing power rather than compensation for local costs.
- National employment in aircraft service attendants is 31,300. ⚠️ At this headcount the state-level medians rest on comparatively thin samples, and year-to-year movement in any one state reflects sampling as much as wages.
- BLS publishes an occupational median for aircraft service attendants in 46 jurisdictions, short of the full set. ⚠️ Absence reflects estimate suppression — small samples or disclosure rules — rather than absence of employment, so the state comparison above is over the published subset.
Pay band: Aircraft Service Attendants
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $33,830 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $40,450 |
| Top tenth earn over | $57,610 |
| This salary | $40,450 |
Positions between the published tenth, quarter, half, three-quarter and ninetieth points are estimated by straight line.
Where these numbers come from
| BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 estimates, time-series bulk download (oe.data.0.Current) | as of 2025-05-01 |
|---|
Steps in Aircraft Service Attendants
The national median for this job
$40,450around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $33,830 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $40,450 |
| Top tenth | $57,610 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Aircraft Service Attendants, state by state
The national median for this job
46states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | West Virginia · $30,840 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Maryland · $71,740 |
| Spread | $40,900 |
One dot per state that publishes this job. A missing state means suppressed data, not zero pay.
Best paid, and best off
The national median for this job
| Texas pays | $38,720 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $39,846 |
Median pay against the same pay once BEA price parities are applied.
Every state, three ways
Sorted by what the money is actually worth. "Kept" is take-home for a single filer after federal, FICA and state income tax. "Really worth" divides that by the state's own price level, so a dollar in each row buys the same thing. Tap a state to put your own salary into it. States BLS does not publish for this job are absent — that means no published figure, not no work.
| State | Median pay | Kept after tax | Really worth |
|---|---|---|---|
| MD | $71,740 | $56,255 | $54,110 |
| TN | $56,620 | $47,674 | $51,531 |
| ND | $44,320 | $37,791 | $42,667 |
| MT | $46,310 | $37,970 | $42,075 |
| NM | $45,280 | $37,583 | $41,580 |
| KS | $45,960 | $36,833 | $40,941 |
| LA | $42,930 | $35,773 | $40,492 |
| UT | $46,900 | $37,777 | $39,765 |
| OH | $43,310 | $36,505 | $39,761 |
| WA | $50,520 | $42,773 | $39,399 |
| HI | $53,770 | $42,741 | $39,353 |
| AK | $46,760 | $39,752 | $39,081 |
| AL | $43,090 | $34,963 | $38,861 |
| MN | $46,930 | $38,196 | $38,810 |
| WI | $42,000 | $34,710 | $37,284 |
| AR | $38,290 | $31,988 | $36,977 |
| NH | $45,610 | $38,828 | $36,858 |
| ID | $40,250 | $33,241 | $36,359 |
| AZ | $43,780 | $36,665 | $36,265 |
| CO | $44,500 | $36,686 | $36,186 |
| GA | $42,630 | $34,905 | $36,096 |
| MI | $41,360 | $33,906 | $35,999 |
| NV | $40,730 | $34,907 | $35,994 |
| KY | $38,850 | $32,154 | $35,542 |
| NJ | $46,210 | $38,304 | $35,179 |
| ME | $41,400 | $33,954 | $34,969 |
| MS | $36,710 | $30,300 | $34,711 |
| NE | $37,530 | $31,331 | $34,668 |
| WY | $36,360 | $31,395 | $34,558 |
| OK | $36,640 | $30,472 | $34,515 |
| CA | $46,800 | $38,776 | $34,443 |
| TX | $38,720 | $33,292 | $34,259 |
| IA | $35,560 | $30,013 | $33,811 |
| IN | $37,390 | $31,149 | $33,790 |
| NY | $44,600 | $36,205 | $33,639 |
| MO | $36,610 | $30,813 | $33,579 |
| MA | $44,190 | $35,797 | $33,073 |
| SC | $36,130 | $30,790 | $33,045 |
| PA | $38,830 | $32,188 | $33,013 |
| IL | $39,070 | $31,784 | $32,152 |
| VA | $39,210 | $32,191 | $31,952 |
| FL | $38,400 | $33,034 | $31,932 |
| DE | $37,920 | $31,111 | $31,345 |
| CT | $39,230 | $32,411 | $31,258 |
| OR | $39,820 | $31,241 | $29,833 |
| WV | $30,840 | $26,206 | $29,192 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of aircraft service attendants earn less than the figures here and half earn more, and experience, employer and city move an individual a long way from the middle. Nationally the middle earns $40,450.
- The take-home numbers here use the simplest possible household: one filer for aircraft service attendants, no children, no pension contributions, standard deduction. Real life usually reduces the tax bill below this. City and school-district income taxes are left out, and in Ohio or Pennsylvania that is a real omission. The best after-tax state here is Maryland, at $56,255.
- Levelling out prices for aircraft service attendants is done with one number per state, which is a simplification. Living costs inside a state vary a lot between its cities and its countryside. The comparison shows which way the ranking moves, not an exact figure for any address — West Virginia sits at the bottom on $29,192.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for aircraft service attendants, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $40,450, with half of workers below it; dispersion within a state routinely exceeds the dispersion between states, driven by tenure, employer size, sector and metropolitan area. An individual's position in the distribution is not predictable from geography alone.
- Retained-pay figures for aircraft service attendants model a single filer taking the standard deduction with no dependants and no pre-tax deferrals — deliberately the simplest household, so the comparison across states isolates geography rather than personal circumstances. Local income taxes are outside the model; Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland residents should expect a meaningfully lower figure than $56,255, which leads in Maryland.
- The price deflation applied to aircraft service attendants uses state-level parities. Within-state dispersion in price level, concentrated in housing, is large enough that a state figure describes no particular locality well; the bottom of this occupation's real range is West Virginia at $29,192. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — West Virginia anchors the bottom at $29,192 — and the two source series are dated independently.