How Regional Airlines Paid Their Way Out of a Pilot Shortage

A regional-airline captain's seat is a training slot for the major airlines.▸ When Delta, United, and the low-cost carriers need pilots, they hire experienced captains and first officers away from the regionals — that has always been the career ladder. What changed after the pandemic is the speed of it: network and low-cost airlines hired more than 15,000 pilots in 2021-2022 alone, pulling captains out of regional cockpits faster than the regionals could replace them. One network airline told the Government Accountability Office that at the height of the shortage, in 2022, it had to withdraw its own regional service from 29 airports — many of them small communities with no other scheduled airline. The regionals' answer was the one lever they had left: pay.

At the 12 largest regional airlines, hourly pay for a first-year first officer averaged $45 in 2017, in constant 2024 dollars.▸ It was still only $52 in 2021, the year the post-pandemic hiring wave began. By 2024 it had reached $93 — a 76% jump in the three years the shortage was most acute, according to a GAO analysis of Air Line Pilots Association data published April 30, 2026.

Pay wasn't the only lever.▸ One regional carrier told GAO it offered new pilots a $15,000 signing bonus and up to $150,000 in retention bonuses through a dedicated Pilot Retention and Bonus Program launched in 2022 — an attempt to hold onto experienced first officers before the network airlines could hire them away. By 2025, as hiring at the majors slowed (partly on aircraft-delivery delays), GAO reported that several of these regional bonus programs had already been wound down: the immediate crisis had passed. Nationally, FAA-issued Airline Transport Pilot certificates grew about 10% from 2017 to 2024, most of that growth concentrated after 2021 — evidence the higher pay and bonuses pulled more people into the pipeline, not just poached them from each other.

Higher pay treats the shortage's immediate symptom — regionals bidding for the same shrinking pool of captains — not its underlying cause: pilots retire on a fixed federal clock, and a lot of today's workforce is close to it.▸ Every U.S. airline pilot must stop flying for a scheduled carrier at 65. Of the 158,311 people who held an active Airline Transport Pilot certificate as of December 2024, 90,780 — 57% — will hit that age within the next 20 years, per FAA data cited in the GAO report. Narrower, more current data from the Air Line Pilots Association (as of February 2026) puts the near-term pace at about 3,000 currently employed pilots turning 65 every year from 2025 through 2029.

The Regional Airline Association's 2025 Annual Report puts the stakes in place terms: about two-thirds of today's commercially served U.S. airports depend on regional carriers for their only scheduled air service, and nearly half of the current Part 121 pilot workforce faces mandatory retirement within 15 years.▸ Congress tried to widen the pipeline in the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 (P.L. 118-63), ordering the FAA to stand up a standardized enhanced-training pathway and a national oversight office for the flight examiners who test new pilots — both due by mid-November 2024. As of GAO's review, the FAA had not yet published a public timeline for either one, which is why GAO's April 2026 report exists in the first place: not to say the shortage is solved, but to say the agency still hasn't shown its work on the pipeline meant to keep it solved.

Pay figures cover 12 selected regional airlines that ALPA tracks as the largest by block hours, seat miles, and aircraft hulls — not the industry as a whole. Retirement figures describe everyone holding an active ATP certificate, including people not currently employed as airline pilots; the narrower "~3,000 a year" estimate covers only pilots currently employed by passenger and cargo carriers.