Commercial Pilots
What the pay figures show
- For once the obvious answer is right. Connecticut pays commercial pilots best, at $232,160. It keeps that lead after tax. It keeps it after local prices too — $152,986 in comparable money. Most jobs are not this tidy.
- The nominal leader for commercial pilots is also the real leader: Connecticut at $232,160, holding through tax and through price deflation to $152,986. Both adjustments leave the ordering at the top intact, which indicates a wage premium large enough to dominate the state's tax burden and price level rather than merely offset them.
Compare this career across states
Choose your filing status and local taxes, compare pay, and keep a shortlist.Compare wage and personal-pay outcomes by state, with selected resident local taxes and saved career choices.
Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$123,220
People doing it
47,630
Highest paid
$232,160
CT
Best off, really
$152,986
CT, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$58,850
Highest tenth
$266,620
Lowest, really
$73,964
RI
States with data
48
National average
$146,080
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
103.69%
CT, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Pay for this job roughly doubles depending on the state. That is a lot. Some of it is prices, because dear places pay more to make up for costing more. Most of it is not. In real money the range is still $73,964 to $152,986.
- This is a small job: about 47,630 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- This job is not published everywhere — 48 jurisdictions have a figure, with $123,220 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. Connecticut tops the ones that are.
- Interstate variation in commercial pilots pay approaches twofold nominally. The standard explanation — that high-wage states are merely high-cost states — is only partly supported here: after tax and price adjustment the range remains $73,964 to $152,986, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 47,630 workers, commercial pilots is among the smaller occupations BLS publishes. Treat single-state figures as indicative rather than precise; suppression and sampling error both bite harder at this scale.
- 48 jurisdictions carry a published median for commercial pilots. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Commercial Pilots
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $58,850 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $123,220 |
| Top tenth earn over | $266,620 |
| This salary | $123,220 |
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 Commercial Pilots
The national median for this job
$123,220around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $58,850 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $123,220 |
| Top tenth | $266,620 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Commercial Pilots, state by state
The national median for this job
48states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | South Dakota · $83,710 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Connecticut · $232,160 |
| Spread | $148,450 |
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 | $137,960 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $141,971 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| CT | $232,160 | $158,630 | $152,986 |
| NJ | $226,710 | $155,641 | $142,943 |
| OH | $150,330 | $110,599 | $120,462 |
| DE | $163,600 | $113,520 | $114,374 |
| NY | $177,430 | $122,543 | $113,860 |
| ND | $133,010 | $100,844 | $113,855 |
| TX | $137,960 | $105,562 | $108,630 |
| GA | $145,100 | $103,800 | $107,344 |
| KY | $129,990 | $95,682 | $105,763 |
| OK | $126,180 | $92,332 | $104,583 |
| VT | $137,810 | $98,369 | $101,795 |
| PA | $134,030 | $98,761 | $101,293 |
| WI | $129,860 | $93,771 | $100,724 |
| CA | $165,590 | $113,139 | $100,496 |
| CO | $139,680 | $101,300 | $99,919 |
| NC | $127,310 | $93,711 | $99,546 |
| TN | $117,480 | $91,477 | $98,878 |
| MI | $126,670 | $92,712 | $98,437 |
| IL | $126,100 | $91,358 | $92,416 |
| FL | $121,890 | $94,578 | $91,422 |
| MD | $131,210 | $94,892 | $91,273 |
| WY | $102,990 | $81,283 | $89,472 |
| MS | $103,640 | $77,687 | $88,997 |
| ID | $109,620 | $80,991 | $88,587 |
| WV | $105,950 | $79,402 | $88,449 |
| ME | $117,560 | $84,770 | $87,305 |
| IA | $101,800 | $77,190 | $86,958 |
| NE | $104,780 | $78,479 | $86,836 |
| KS | $105,440 | $77,412 | $86,047 |
| IN | $104,160 | $79,063 | $85,767 |
| MT | $103,690 | $77,278 | $85,633 |
| NV | $105,340 | $82,937 | $85,519 |
| SC | $105,740 | $78,675 | $84,436 |
| WA | $117,730 | $91,653 | $84,425 |
| AL | $101,420 | $75,947 | $84,414 |
| MO | $102,990 | $77,380 | $84,327 |
| LA | $95,940 | $73,832 | $83,572 |
| AR | $94,410 | $72,213 | $83,475 |
| NM | $97,920 | $74,250 | $82,147 |
| OR | $120,760 | $83,768 | $79,992 |
| UT | $99,610 | $74,473 | $78,391 |
| AZ | $103,060 | $79,159 | $78,294 |
| AK | $100,120 | $79,264 | $77,928 |
| SD | $83,710 | $67,720 | $76,872 |
| VA | $104,890 | $77,350 | $76,775 |
| HI | $113,030 | $81,200 | $74,763 |
| MN | $98,630 | $73,033 | $74,207 |
| RI | $98,820 | $75,008 | $73,964 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for commercial pilots, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $123,220 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- The take-home numbers here use the simplest possible household: one filer for commercial pilots, 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 Connecticut, at $158,630.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for commercial pilots. Inside any state, a big city costs far more than a small town, so this is a fair way to compare states with each other and a poor way to price a specific move. The wage figures and the price figures are also from different years. At the bottom of the range sits Rhode Island, on $73,964.
- All wage figures for commercial pilots are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $123,220. Within-state dispersion typically exceeds between-state dispersion in this data, so an individual's expected wage is determined more by experience, sector and employer than by the state comparisons presented here.
- Retained-pay figures for commercial pilots 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 $158,630, which leads in Connecticut.
- Real-terms results for commercial pilots rest on statewide regional price parities, which average over intra-state variation that is itself larger than much of the interstate variation. They support comparison between states and not the pricing of an individual relocation; Rhode Island anchors the distribution at $73,964. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.