Being a flight attendant used to be the dream for some, pre-COVID. You used to be able to travel the world so freely, and there’s nothing wrong with being paid to travel. Nowadays, I feel like being a flight attendant poses significant career risks due to the instability of the travel industry. Sure, airlines and everything else will return to normal sooner or later – but can you really not have an income until COVID’s over and remain solvent? In this post, we’ll investigate how much do flight attendants make, is it actually good money? That is, we’ll compare what flight attendants make vs. their feasibility in terms of being able to survive the pandemic.

Do Flight Attendants Actually Make Good Money?

The numbers are kinda everywhere with this.

According to the US Department of Labor, the median income for US flight attendants is $59K/yr in 2020.

However, according to salary.com – stats as of November 2021 seem to indicate a median of $79K and with 90^th percentile pay of $115K.

This ain’t bad at all. If you’re a flight attendant, you should have a flexible choice on where you choose to make your permanent residence. So unlike me, where you have to either work in the SF Bay Area or NYC where cost of living is ludicrous, a flight attendant can just pay rent in Idaho or something if they’re traveling all across the world 300 out of 365 days out of the year anyway.

This $20K year-on-year jump in median pay (or +33.8%) is very interesting. I wonder if COVID is driving down the supply of flight attendants (i.e. via the Great Resignation) causing their salary to skyrocket, or if it’s just data inaccuracies between the DOL and salary.com? Or perhaps it’s a combination of both.

Cost Of Living vs. Flight Attendant Salary

According to this website, a single person’s cost of living in the USA is about $2,813/mo.

That’s based on a COL of 100 as a baseline. If I was a flight attendant, I’d probably pick one of the cheapest states to live, which according to this other website, it’s Mississippi. It’s got a COL of 81.1. This means if on average $100 in the US can buy you something – you can get that same something in Mississippi for $81.1.

In short, living in Mississippi as a single person would roughly incur $2281/mo in expenses, or $27.3K/yr.

At $59K/yr, after taxes in Mississippi (according to smartasset.com) yields about $46K take-home pay.

You’d be able to have around $20k/yr in savings as a flight attendant being paid the low-end of the median estimate.

Conversely, if you were paid $79K, you’d net about $59K-$27K, or save about $30K/yr if you go with salary.com’s median estimate.

And if you were a go-getter and want to be paid the 90^th percentile of flight-attendants, you’d net about $82K-$27K AKA you’d save about $55K/yr.

COVID Math vs. How Much Flight Attendants Make

So worst to best case, you’d save anywhere from 20K-55K/yr working as a flight attendant in the cheapest state in the US.

Let’s assume that, as a flight attendant, during the entire period of COVID, you make $0. Either you’re out of a job or you resigned due to COVID’s difficulties. Here’s how the numbers play out assuming no inflation and no investing of the money you saved up.

• In yellow is how long COVID lasts (i.e. how long you’re out of a job for).
• In green is how much money you save up each year, prior to COVID.
• In red is how many years you’d have to save up your money prior to COVID, in order to survive COVID without a single dime of income to your bank account. This is with the assumption that you live in Mississippi or some equivalently low cost-of-living state.

So for example, the above says:

• If you make $59k/yr and save up $20k/yr and live in Mississippi, you’d need to have 4 years of savings in order to weather the COVID storm if it lasts for 3 years. Likewise, you’d had to have 13.65 years of savings already in your bank account should COVID last 10 years.
• If you’re the 90^th percentile of flight attendants and save $50k/yr and live in Mississippi, you’d need to have 4.96 years of savings to weather the COVID storm should it last for 10 years. Likewise, you’d only need to save up your money for 2 years if COVID lasts 4 years.

Pros And Cons Of Being a Flight Attendant

Being a flight attendant won’t net you the most money in the world. That’s true. And don’t get me wrong – the pay for a flight attendant isn’t bad at all. It’s actually quite good. It’s just not, say, the salary of a doctor / lawyer / engineer / wall street quant. But the intangibles that being a flight attendant provides – freedom and the ability to soar across the world – more than makes up for the lower pay for some.

So it’s just a matter of preference. But money vs. freedom aside, let’s look at the pros/cons of being a flight attendant.

Pro #1: You get to travel! And get paid to travel! That’s awesome! Most of us who are working a 9-5 job is only yearning for one thing: freedom. But in a lot of ways, being a flight attendant has that freedom baked into the job.

Pro #2: If we don’t count COVID, the US department of labor used to estimate a 30% job growth over the next decade. So while COVID is here and is a real thing – once COVID is a thing of the past, I’d reckon the travel market will grow at the pace (if not faster) as what the DOL predicted.

Con #1: COVID means job instability. And job instability = your bank account’s instability. There is nice job growth in the travel sector, after COVID. But the question remains: can you remain solvent long enough for COVID to be over? The previous section attempts to give a high level answer to this question, but is a moot point if you don’t already have some cash saved up.

Con #2: Even if you had job stability throughout COVID, certain destinations and airlines will make your job a lot harder. For example, if you work at Cathay and need to service the route to/from Hong Kong your life is a living hell. For every trip you make, you have to quarantine for 3 weeks. That’s obviously absurd. Imagine doing a 2×14 hour shift, and then having to take 3 weeks off to quarantine. And then going back to work right after quarantine. For every week you work, you’d have to quarantine for 9 weeks! No wonder tons of people are quitting Cathay right now.

Should I be a flight attendant?

As a technologist, every problem looks like a tech problem to me. As such, I think if you’re looking for a balance of challenging work vs. high pay, you should consider being an engineer if you’ve no career direction.

But if you’ve got a huge heart and passion for travel, and you’re confident via first principles that you can easily navigate COVID’s challenges as presented above, by all means go be a flight attendant!