What do pilots earn? Pay scales and salary progression in Germany

Many spotters know the scene: a captain waves from the cockpit window as the aircraft taxis past the fence – and at some point you wonder what the job actually pays. The answer is more complicated than headlines suggest. A pilot salary in Germany depends less on the license than on the employer, the collective agreement and years of service. This article shows you how income is made up, which pay structures exist and how pay has developed in recent years.

What do pilots earn? The short answer

Pilots at large German network airlines are among the top earners among employees. For Lufthansa, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung reported in October 2025 that a pilot earns on average around €235,000 gross a year – including extra flights and profit sharing. That figure, however, is an average across young first officers and captains shortly before retirement and applies only to the core brand’s group pay scale.

If you start at a subsidiary, a leisure airline, a regional airline or a low-cost base, you usually start considerably lower. And at the very beginning there is no salary anyway, but a bill: the training.

Who negotiates the salaries: the Vereinigung Cockpit

In Germany, pilot salaries are mostly regulated in collective agreements. On the employee side, the Vereinigung Cockpit (VC) is almost always at the table. The association was founded in 1969, has more than 10,000 members by its own account and is recognized by almost all German airlines as the bargaining partner for cockpit staff. Until 2000, the VC negotiated together with the white-collar union DAG; since then it has acted as an independent union. Since June 2022, it has belonged to the dbb beamtenbund und tarifunion.

Important for understanding: negotiations are not industry-wide but per airline operation. Every airline – and often even every subsidiary within a group – has its own pay agreement. That explains why two first officers on the same Airbus A320neo can earn very different amounts, depending on whose employment contract carries their name.

What a pilot salary consists of

The monthly salary in your account is only one part of the package. It is typically made up of several building blocks:

Building block	What is behind it
Base pay	fixed salary by role (first officer, senior first officer, captain) and seniority step
Extra flight hours	supplement when you fly beyond a number of flight hours set in the collective agreement
Per diems and allowances	meal and overnight allowances on rotations, in some cases allowances for certain roles such as instructor
Profit sharing	at some airlines a performance-based payment whose amount depends on the company’s results
Pension	company pension, which has considerable value at large airlines
Transitional benefits	arrangements for pilots who leave the cockpit before the statutory retirement age

The last two items in particular are invisible to outsiders but central for pilots. According to the same FAS report, a Lufthansa pilot after 35 years of service reached a combined company and statutory pension of around €5,400 a month. No wonder pension issues played a role in almost every major pay dispute.

The career path: from first officer to captain

The biggest pay jump in a pilot’s life is the one from first officer (co-pilot) to captain. In between, many airlines have an intermediate step: the senior first officer. On long routes, most scheduled airlines deploy one in addition to the captain and first officer so that the crew can take turns during cruise – more on this in the article on ultra-long-haul flights.

Within each role, pay rises with years of service in fixed steps. When you move up to captain is governed at many airlines by the seniority list: whoever has been there longer gets first pick when positions open up. The same often applies to the move to long-haul, for example to the Airbus A350-900 or the Boeing 787-9. That has a consequence many underestimate: changing employer usually means starting at the bottom of the new list again.

Pay structures: why the employer counts so much

If you want to understand why pilot salaries are so far apart, you have to look at the structure of the industry. Roughly, four groups can be distinguished:

• Group pay scale of the network airline. At the Lufthansa Group, the core brand Lufthansa has its own pay agreement, which traditionally sits at the top of German pilot pay. The long-haul fleets in Frankfurt and Munich are also based here.
• Subsidiaries and new operations. Within the group, Eurowings, Discover Airlines, Lufthansa City Airlines and Lufthansa CityLine fly under their own pay structures. Already in the big dispute of 2014 and 2015, the expansion of Eurowings as a cheaper operation alongside the group pay scale played a role.
• Leisure and charter airlines. Airlines such as Condor or TUIfly each have their own collective agreements, which are oriented to their business model.
• Foreign airlines with German bases. Low-cost carriers such as Ryanair or easyJet employ pilots at German stations. Which rules apply there depends on the respective employment contract and on whether a collective agreement exists for the base.

In addition there are cargo airlines such as Lufthansa Cargo, business aviation, rescue and helicopter operators and the military route. For armed forces pilots, no airline pay scales apply but the pay scale for soldiers – more on this in the article Pilot in the Bundeswehr. And if you would rather fly rotors than wings, the article Becoming a helicopter pilot has an overview of its own.

Salary progression: the pay disputes of recent years

The history of pilot pay in Germany is also a history of strikes. Spotters have often experienced this directly: parked jets on the apron, empty approach paths, suddenly unusual diversion traffic. A few milestones at Lufthansa:

Period	What happened
2014–2015	toughest industrial action in the company’s history, core issues company pension and transitional benefits for pilots and cabin crew, plus the dispute over the expansion of cheaper operations
March 2017	agreement in principle with the VC: one-off payment of 1.8 monthly salaries and a total pay increase of 11.4 percent for the period from May 2012 to June 2022
September 2, 2022	all-day pilot strike that brought Lufthansa’s flight operations almost to a standstill; around 800 flights in Frankfurt and Munich were canceled, about 130,000 passengers affected. The VC demanded automatic inflation compensation from 2023 and 5.5 percent more pay
2025	renewed media reports about looming pilot strikes at Lufthansa

The line behind this is easy to see: after the crisis years of the pandemic and in times of high inflation, pay demands moved back to the foreground, as the demand for inflation compensation in 2022 shows. Pensions remain the perennial issue: employers want predictable, capped contributions, while the union wants to secure the benefit level.

Pay also continues to evolve through the courts, beyond strikes. A current example is extra flight hour pay for part-time staff: in 2025, the Munich Regional Labor Court (Landesarbeitsgericht München) ruled in the case of a Lufthansa CityLine pilot that an identical trigger threshold for extra flight hours for full- and part-time staff disadvantages part-timers. According to the VC, the ruling is final. CityLine has nevertheless filed a constitutional complaint and has so far not extended the decision to other part-time staff, which is why the union supports further individual lawsuits.

Invest first, earn later: training costs

Before the first salary comes, you pay. The European Flight Academy, the flight school of the Lufthansa Group, names a price of €130,000 for training in Germany and 150,000 Swiss francs in Switzerland before government subsidies. On top come incidental costs such as the DLR certificate, the medical examination and a visa for the training phase in the USA.

Financing is possible, among other ways, through an income-contingent model with the partner Brain Capital: according to the school, repayments begin only at a gross annual income of €30,000, the share is at most 12 percent of gross income, and the total amount is capped. If you receive no cockpit offer from the group within 24 months of graduating despite serious efforts, you get half of the training costs refunded, according to the school. The conditions change – always check them directly in the current contract.

How the individual training routes work and what they cost, you can read in How to become a pilot: the routes to the cockpit and in the article on ATPL training and its costs. What to expect in the selection process is explained in DLR test and pilot selection.

Salary isn’t everything: what else pilots weigh up

If you look only at the money, you overlook what makes up the profession. Pilots work shifts, with early briefings, nights in hotels and rotations over weekends and holidays. Regular simulator checks are part of it, and the medical has to be renewed at fixed intervals. If it is lost, in the worst case the career is at stake – a risk that no collective agreement fully covers.

On top come factors that are hard to express in euros: the choice between short-haul with many landings and long-haul with long absences, the base where you are stationed and the question of how well part-time can be realized. Part-time models are common in the cockpit – the dispute over extra flight hours mentioned above shows that they also raise questions about pay.

For comparison, it is worth looking at other jobs at the airport: becoming an air traffic controller, becoming a flight attendant or a job in apron control have their own pay worlds and requirements.

Reading salary figures correctly: what to watch for

• Check the source. Salary portals and forums mix starting figures, averages and top salaries. More reliable are the airline’s pay information, information from the Vereinigung Cockpit to its members and reputable media reports with a clear reference basis.
• Name the operation precisely. “Lufthansa” can mean the core brand, a subsidiary or a new operation. In the application process, ask which employer and which collective agreement specifically apply.
• Look at the overall package. Pension, transitional benefits, per diems and profit sharing can make the difference between two offers larger than base pay.
• Mind the timing. Salaries change with every bargaining round. A figure from five years ago says little about today.
• Factor in seniority consequences. Moving to a better-paying airline can mean starting over when moving up to captain.
• Offset the financing. Subtract the repayment of your training from your expected income – realistically, not optimistically.

What spotters get out of it

For plane spotters, this topic is more than curiosity. If you know how pay disputes unfold, you understand why on some days half of the Lufthansa fleet is suddenly on the ground – and why on such days very different subjects await at the Zeppelinheim viewing platform or the Munich Airport visitors’ hill: long rows of parked jets instead of dense approach waves. What makes up the hub waves in Frankfurt and Munich on normal days becomes especially clear when they are missing.

And perhaps this article is also a building block for your own career decision. Then it is worth a look at the plane spotting guides for Frankfurt and Munich – there you see the cockpits this is all about from close up.

Conclusion

What pilots earn can’t be answered in a single number. The range runs from the newcomer with a training loan to the experienced long-haul captain on the group pay scale, and in between lie many pay agreements with their own rules. What is decisive is the employer, role, years of service and the overall package of allowances and pension. The pay disputes of recent years show that these packages are regularly renegotiated – and that pension and benefits are at least as hotly contested as base pay.