The Government Priced a Great Lakes Pilot at $481,642 a Year

No foreign-flagged ship, and no U.S. ship in foreign trade, may cross the Great Lakes without a licensed pilot aboard.▸ That isn't custom — it's 46 U.S.C. Chapter 93, and the pool of people legally allowed to do the job is fixed by the U.S. Coast Guard, one district at a time. For the 2026 shipping season that pool is 57 Pilots and 7 Apprentice Pilots — 64 people, split across three districts, for a system that moves an average of 258 oceangoing vessels a year. The Coast Guard doesn't just license them. Every year it runs a formula that sets what they're paid, and shippers pay whatever the formula produces: $40,451,209 in 2026, after a run of increases that made 2025 the most expensive year on record.

The Coast Guard doesn't negotiate Great Lakes pilotage rates with anyone.▸ It calculates them, through a nine-step ratemaking formula run separately for each of the system's three districts: recognize the pilot associations' operating expenses, project them forward for inflation, count how many Pilots and Apprentice Pilots the district needs, set a "target compensation benchmark" for each, add it all up into a "revenue needed" figure, and divide that by projected hours of traffic to get an hourly rate. Shippers don't choose their pilot and can't shop a competitor — in each district one pilotage association holds the entire franchise, so the formula's output is, in practice, the price.

That output has climbed almost every year this decade.▸ System-wide revenue — what shippers actually pay the three pilotage associations — rose from $25.2 million in 2018 to a record $43.16 million in 2025, before the 2026 rule cut it back to $40.45 million, a 6.3% pullback the Coast Guard attributes mainly to four fewer working Pilots in one district. The American Great Lakes Ports Association, which represents the shippers footing the bill, puts the longer trend more starkly: pilotage costs "more than tripled" between 2014 and 2025, from $12.8 million to $43.2 million — a figure that lines up almost exactly with the Coast Guard's own $43,159,694 for 2025. AGLPA's executive director, Steven Fisher, told Professional Mariner in 2022 that "there have been double digit percentage increases every year for most of the last eight years." The pilots' associations counter that the increases track cost-of-living adjustments and the cost of training enough new Pilots to replace an aging corps — an argument the Coast Guard's own formula effectively pre-accepts, since inflation and staffing levels are two of its nine steps.

The formula doesn't just set pay — it sets headcount.▸ For 2025 the Coast Guard authorized 61 working Pilots and 3 Apprentice Pilots. For 2026 it authorized 57 working Pilots and 7 Apprentice Pilots — four fewer people doing the job, four more people training for it. Add them up and the system fielded exactly 64 licensed positions both years. The corps didn't grow. It just moved four seats from the working roster to the training pipeline, mostly in District Three, where the Coast Guard cited retirements among "senior" Pilots as the reason.

Pay for both tiers rises together.▸ An Apprentice Pilot's wage benchmark is fixed at 36% of the working Pilot's target compensation — $173,391 in 2026, against the $481,642 set for a full Pilot. Both numbers have climbed in step: the Pilot benchmark is up 31% since 2020, an increase the Coast Guard attributes to projected inflation, a shrinking pool of registered Pilots in some districts, and the compensation levels the formula is built to track.

The $40.45 million isn't one bill — it's three, one per district, each paid to a separate pilotage pool with its own headcount and its own hourly rate.▸ In 2026 those rates ran from $382 to $978 per pilot hour depending on district and whether a vessel is in "designated" water, where a Pilot must direct navigation at all times, or "undesignated" water, where a Pilot only has to be aboard and available. District Three — the St. Marys River and Lakes Huron, Michigan, and Superior — collects the largest share, $15.01 million for 20 Pilots. District One, the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario, collects $14.47 million for the same number of Pilots. District Two, Lake Erie and the Detroit/St. Clair corridor, collects $10.97 million for 17.

Multiply the 2026 compensation benchmarks by the district headcounts and the Pilot and Apprentice corps itself accounts for roughly $28.67 million of the $40.45 million total — about 71 cents of every dollar a shipper pays.▸ The remaining 29 cents cover the pilotage associations' boats, dispatch operations, insurance, and administrative overhead. Sixty-four people, licensed by an act of Congress and paid by a federal formula, sit at the center of nearly three-quarters of what it costs to move a ship across the Great Lakes.

Dollar figures are nominal (not inflation-adjusted) and drawn from the Coast Guard's own annual ratemaking rules; "revenue needed" is the Coast Guard's own projection of what pilotage associations will collect from shippers, not audited actual receipts. The 2022 compensation figure is derived from the 2023 rule's stated dollar increase over 2022, not quoted directly from a 2022 rule. AGLPA's 2014 pilotage-cost figure is the shippers' trade association's own characterization and could not be independently verified against a primary Coast Guard document from that year.