The pay range you mention would be liveable in boise for a single person with little or no debt. Couldn’t buy a house though without saving at least 10% first. They’re building apts like crazy rifht now and can’t build them fast enough to satisfy the housing market at this time
Blimey. I’d have second thoughts about flying with an airline that cheapskate. We’re not talking bus drivers here.
I lived on less for most of my adult life, but it’s harder in the cities you mention. Although YMMV depending on where the airport is located and how close you need or want to live to it.
There are various international cost of living calculators out there but I haven’t vetted any of them.
The median household income in Des Plaines, IL, right by ORD airport is about $65k fwiw.
As a point of comparison, teachers in Boise start at $38K and teacher in Houston start at $48K. So less than what a teacher makes in the less expensive cities on your list. That seems low to me, considering the level of responsibility and specialized training needed to be a pilot.
If you’ve ever flown on a regional airline you’re already flying with cheapskate airlines. The business models are pretty much the same.
My electrician’s helper makes more than $20k/year. I wouldn’t get on an airplane piloted by someone making less than my electrician’s helper.
Would you fly on a plane that’s piloted by someone working their way up to $250,000 a year? Keep in mind that’s not the top wage in the field.
There’s a pilot’s shortage that’s only going to grow in the next few years. You don’t hire on for the starting salary because it’s done as a tiered system. You work your way up the ladder to the “A” scale tier and that’s a function of skill and the airline’s needs.
Your question is not how much they pay but how fast you expect to move up the ladder.
Well the issue is that we are already up the ladder. There are a number of things to consider including whether the entry wage is enough to live on and how long it would take to get back to where we are now. The top tier at Skywest is less for more work than we currently get so it’s probably a non-starter. Perhaps if we were 10 - 15 years younger. There are a number of options available to us including going straight in at the top of some large European carriers and of course we can stay put. We hadn’t considered the US until we saw this recent ad.
If you fly on a regional airplane you almost certainly have done just that.
That’s a dirty little secret of the industry - bottom of the ladder pilots are paid crap wages for what they do.
Yay, deregulation! It made airfares cheap! It also crashed the salaries of pilots, especially those just starting out. They could probably cure the “pilot shortage” by doubling salaries, but then would have to raise fares and the public would scream.
Yes, airplane pilots basically are glorified bus drivers at this point, and the industry is trying out automate them out of existence.
I’m trying to fill in between the lines. It sounds like you’re flying for a carrier in Australia and their pay scale isn’t matching the major carriers in other countries. You’ve been on this site for years so you must have logged a lot of hours. I would talk with pilots from all the major airlines to get an idea of the time involved in transitioning and go from there. Make sure to include the freight companies. There’s a lot of money there too.
Seems the better way for you to look at this is simply consider the conversion between overall purchasing power of USD and AUD in each country, then variations within if it’s close to 2:1. That would short circuit various IMO useless discussions like whether a ‘living wage’ should enable you to buy a house (in both US and Aussie financial parlance AFAIK, ‘buying a house’ includes with a mortgage, not the relatively few who can buy a house for cash).
In 2009, most recent Purchasing Power Parity conversion per OECD I could quickly find, it took A$1.44 to buy as much in Australia as $1 bought in the US, though the market exchange rate then was ~$1.28/1 (now it’s ~1.30/1 or .77 USD/AUD as it’s more commonly expressed in the market). IOW just converting at market understates the relatively lower cost of living in the US. That’s true between the US and most other developed countries, the other way around between US and most developing countries. However it’s not nearly a 2:1 variation from market.
From that we could proceed to variations in living cost within each country, but those aren’t likely to be far greater in one the other, in both it will be a function of going farther off the beaten path which has its own indirect costs. The pretty clear answer it if X airline in Australia offers $A68k, that’s more than $US34k in the US. The pilot would have to be looking at for example more room to advance in the US, or have an adventure in the US etc, not making more immediately in purchasing power.
The pay scale is fine here, we don’t want to move for better money. There is better money out there but it would mean flying long haul and/or working a lot harder than we do now, something neither of us has any interest in. We don’t even want to move soon, but there is a lot out there at the moment so we keep an eye on the job market.
No, the reason we will move, eventually, is for more job security, better equipment, and to get out of night freight. Ideally in about 10 years when my older two daughters are nearly grown up but sooner if necessary.
I’d personally like to fly a B737 so Ryanair in Europe is something I’m interested in. They’ve been taking direct entry Captains for a couple of years now.
For what it’s worth, the salary the OP quotes is about what we pay our nanny, albeit in a high-cost area of the country.
What is the Australian health care system like? I keep hearing horror stories of the cost of American health insurance. Some people will say their insurance cost $1,000 per month (for a family of 4, not a single person), which is horrible if you’re making $41,000 per year. I like to think there are cheaper plans on the exchanges, and that maybe a lot of people don’t know how to find them. Also plans are going to vary from state to state.
In Canada, the median working income is between $70,000 to $80,000 per year. The Canadian dollar is typically worth 70 to 80 cents US. This would put the typical Canadian working income “on par” with the typical US income. I honestly expected it to be less, since the US is somewhat richer than us.
You don’t have to have private health insurance here though you are encouraged to. If you earn over a certain amount then you pay an extra 2% in tax if you don’t have private insurance. Insurance for my family costs a touch over 500 AUD / month (~390 USD). I think the private system is a huge ripoff and would dearly love to put that money in to a personal account that I paid our medical bills from but the tax hit makes it not worth it.
a little off topic, but I’m wondering about about visas, work permits and citizenship.
The OP is I assume an Australian citizen, thinking of moving to either Europe or America.
Usually, getting permission to work in foreign countries requires jumping through a lot of hoops. Is that irrelevant in this case?
I was just thinking the same thing. If the company isn’t willing to file a petition for a work visa for you, and neither you nor your wife is a U.S. Citizen, the whole thing may be a non-starter. Even if they are, I have no idea what category would be appropriate- what are the education and experience requirements for the job?
Eva Luna, U.S. Immigration Paralegal
It can be EXTREMELY not-insignificant. We pay our nanny around $34,000 - $41,000 per year (just outside of NYC). And this isn’t some fancy Juilliard-trained magic nanny for rich people. I assume it’s similar in some of the other high-cost cities.
This doesn’t surprise me; because I don’t have children, and don’t have any direct experience with what childcare can cost (a nanny, as well as less-than-24-hour options like after-school daycare), I didn’t want to accidentally overstate the issue.