Air Canada Pilot Salary: How Much Air Canada Pilots Make in 2026

How much money does an Air Canada pilot make? Well, that’s a very loaded question. So much so that even my banker gets confused when I’m applying for a loan. The Air Canada pilot salary depends on what airplane you fly, which seat you sit in, how many years you’ve been at the company, how many hours you fly in a month, and whether any of that flying leaves the continent.

The short version: a brand new first officer earns $94.62 an hour and is guaranteed 900 hours a year, so about $85,000 in year one. A twelfth year 777 captain earns $459.25 an hour before overseas pay, which works out to roughly $429,000 a year on the guarantee alone, before touching any overtime. Everyone else is somewhere in between, and the rest of this article is about where.

Here is where the Air Canada pilot salary sits at three points in a career:

What happened with the 2024 strike?

In September 2024 the pilots came within days of walking off the job. The deal that stopped it was ratified in October 2024 with 67% of pilots voting in favour, and it rewrote the Air Canada pilot salary tables completely. The four year flat pay I complained about in the original version of this article is gone, replaced by a two year fixed rate, and every rate in the tables goes up 4% on September 30 of 2024, 2025 and 2026. The rates below are the ones that take effect September 30, 2026, which is the last raise before the contract expires. If you’re reading this before then, knock 4% off.

ALPA’s Air Canada pilot group posts its own updates at aircanadapilots.ca if you want to follow what happens when this contract comes up for renewal in 2027.

How Air Canada pilot pay works

Like most flying jobs, Air Canada pilots are paid by the block hour, which is brake release to brake set. You’re paid the greater of the scheduled time or the actual time, so a fast tailwind doesn’t cost you money.

Each month the company sets a Designated Block Maximum for every position, somewhere between 70 and 85 hours, and builds the schedules to that number. Your minimum block guarantee moves with it, but the contract guarantees the year adds up to at least 900 hours whether you flew them or not. That’s 75 hours a month on average, and it’s why every annual figure in this article uses 900 hours. It’s the floor. Most pilots fly more, and I’ll get to what that pays.

Then there’s the seat. Captain, First Officer or Relief Pilot. Relief pilots only exist on the wide bodies (777, 787 and A330). They fly the cruise portion of long haul flights so the operating crew can rest, and they’re paid less because of it. And finally there’s the airplane. Generally speaking, the heavier and faster the airplane, the higher the rate.

Air Canada pilot pay scale: hourly rates effective September 30, 2026

First Officer

Captain

Relief Pilot

A few things jump out. The A320 family and the 737 MAX pay exactly the same. Years one and two pay the same no matter what you fly. The 767 column is still in the contract because of the cargo freighters. And the step from year 4 to year 5 is enormous, which I’ll come back to.

Air Canada pilot salary by year: how much do Air Canada pilots make?

To turn an hourly rate into an Air Canada pilot salary I took 900 hours a year and added overseas pay and Nav pay using the contract’s own assumptions for each fleet (71 hours a month of overseas flying on the wide bodies, 10 on the 737, 3 on the A320, 1 on the A220). No overtime, no premiums, no per diems. This is what you’d make in a year where you did nothing but hold your line.

First Officer salary by year of service

Captain salary by year of service

Relief Pilot salary by year of service

I left captain years 1 and 2 out because nobody upgrades in their first two years. The rates exist in the contract, but you’ll never meet anyone earning them.

For comparison, when I first wrote this article in 2022 I listed a sixth year A320 first officer at $113,088 and a sixth year 777 captain at $286,296. Those same two pilots are now at $165,035 and $405,169. That’s 46% and 42%. First year pay went from $57,375 to $85,158.

What is the starting salary for an Air Canada first officer?

For your first two years of service you’re on what the contract calls Fixed Rate: $94.62 an hour in year one and $102.54 in year two, regardless of what airplane you’re assigned. You don’t get overseas pay or Nav pay on Fixed Rate either. With the 900 hour guarantee that’s $85,158 in year one and $92,286 in year two. Your monthly pay advance on the 1st is also smaller, $3,250 instead of the $5,000 every other first officer gets.

For a lot of new hires the starting Air Canada pilot salary is still a step down. Plenty of people arrive from other carriers where they were captains making well over $100,000, and it’s not uncommon for pilots to turn down the offer because of it. But the hole is a lot shallower than it used to be, and it’s two years deep instead of four.

Years three and four are where your airplane starts to matter, but you’re still paid a small fraction of the captain rate: 37% to 44.5% depending on the fleet. Then year five hits. An A320 first officer goes from $138.53 to $176.08 overnight, a 27% raise. A 787 first officer goes from $153.86 to $214.42, which is 39%. Realistically, it takes four years at Air Canada before you’re making what most people would call airline pilot money.

What are overseas pay and Nav pay?

Overseas pay (OVS in the contract) is an extra hourly amount for every hour flown on an overseas operation, which the agreement defines as any flight that departs or arrives outside Canada, the continental United States, Mexico, the Bahamas or Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon. Hawaii counts as overseas. Cancun doesn’t.

Effective September 30, 2026 the rates are $18.80 an hour for captains, $10.25 for first officers and $6.84 for relief pilots.

Nav pay is a second layer on top of overseas pay, and it only applies to pilots on the narrow body fleets (A220, A320 and 737). It’s $17.09 an hour for captains, $8.55 for first officers and $5.13 for relief pilots. Wide body pilots don’t get Nav pay, but since nearly all of their flying is overseas they collect OVS on most of their hours. A narrow body pilot flying Toronto to Lisbon gets both.

Neither one applies during your first two years on Fixed Rate.

How is the Air Canada pilot hourly rate actually calculated?

This is the part the contract calls the Composite Hourly Rate, and it tends to stump even the smartest Air Canada pilots. Here’s how it goes.

The contract sets a rate for a twelfth year captain on each fleet by adding four pieces together:

Hourly base pay, which is $65.01 for everyone.

Hourly flight pay, which depends on the airplane: $155.82 on the narrow bodies, $168.07 on the 767 and $176.39 on the 787, A330 and 777.

Hourly mileage pay, which is based on how fast the airplane cruises. Mach .82 airplanes (A220, A320, 737) get $82.38. Mach .86 (767, A330) get $86.40. Mach .89 (787, 777) get $89.41.

Hourly weight pay, which is about 36.5 cents per tonne of maximum takeoff weight: $27.58 on the A220, $34.12 on the A320 and 737, $68.44 on the 767, $86.19 on the A330, $91.28 on the 787 (blended across the -8 and -9) and $128.43 on the 777.

Every other number in the pay tables is a percentage of that. A captain in year one earns 89.55% of the twelfth year rate on the same airplane, climbing about one point a year to 99% in year eleven. A first officer earns a percentage of the captain rate for the same year and same airplane: wide body first officers start at 37% in year three and reach 65% by year twelve, narrow body first officers run from 42% to 66.5%, and relief pilots from 28.5% to 43%. So a twelfth year 777 first officer at $298.51 is exactly 65% of the captain sitting next to him.

If you ever wondered why Air Canada pilots fight so hard over which airplane they’re posted to, this table is why. For a twelfth year captain, the gap between the A220 and the 777 is over $130,000 a year in Air Canada pilot salary. Weight and speed are literally on the paycheque.

How do Air Canada pilots make more than the tables say?

The 900 hour figure is the floor. In practice most people fly more, and the contract pays well for it.

Anything above 85 credit hours in a month is paid at double the hourly rate. Voluntary overtime picked up above your awarded block also pays a 100% premium. If you get drafted onto a flight you weren’t scheduled for, that’s another 100% premium. These premiums don’t stack with each other (the contract literally says “no double dipping”), but any one of them doubles your rate for those hours.

There are also credit guarantees that pay you for time even when you aren’t flying much. Every duty day is worth a minimum of 4 hours 25 minutes, and any trip with a layover pays at least one hour of credit for every four hours you’re away from base. Training pays too: 2 hours 40 minutes for every day of a type course, and 4 hours a day for recurrent simulator or classroom. Check pilots and instructors get a 12% override on top of everything.

Air Canada pilot salary per month: what a real month looks like

Take a sixth year first officer on the A320. Holding a 75 hour line, that’s 75 hours at $182.62, or $13,696.50, plus 3 hours of overseas pay ($30.76) and 3 hours of Nav pay ($25.64). Call it $13,753 for the month before tax, or $165,035 for the year.

The same first officer on the 787, where nearly everything is overseas: 75 hours at $222.54 is $16,690.50, plus 71 hours of overseas pay at $10.25, which is $728. Total $17,419, or $209,022 a year. Now say that pilot picks up flying and finishes the month at 90 hours. Hours 76 through 85 pay the straight $222.54 and hours 86 through 90 pay $445.08. The month comes to about $21,869. Fifteen extra hours added $4,450, and a pilot who does that every month adds $53,000 a year.

At the top end, a twelfth year 777 captain holding 75 hours makes $34,443.75 in flying pay plus $1,335 in overseas pay, so $35,779 a month or $429,343 a year. Add 10 hours of voluntary overtime at the double rate and the month is closer to $45,000. Do that all year and you’ve cleared $500,000.

What else comes with the job?

Per diems are paid on top of everything above and aren’t in any of the tables. You get an hourly meal allowance from check-in at the start of a pairing to check-out at the end, based on the federal National Joint Council travel directive rates, with higher hourly rates for pairings that lay over in Europe, Asia or South America.

Pilots hired on or after January 1, 2018 join the Canada-Wide Industrial Pension Plan, a multi-employer plan, rather than the old Air Canada defined benefit plan.

Vacation is 14 calendar days a year until you have five years in, then 21 days until ten years, 28 days until 25 years and 35 after that. On top of that you get at least 10 days a year in lieu of statutory holidays, since you’ll be working most of them.

You also get a pay advance on the first banking day of every month: $6,500 for captains, $5,000 for first officers and $4,000 for relief pilots, which comes off the cheque on the 17th.

What is the highest salary of a pilot in Canada?

The top Air Canada pilot salary belongs to a senior 777 captain, who makes $429,343 a year on the minimum guarantee alone. With a modest amount of overtime, $500,000 is realistic. When I wrote the first version of this article I said $400,000 was possible toward the end of a career for a captain who was motivated by income and did a lot of overtime. It’s now the baseline for a senior wide body captain who does nothing extra.

Are Air Canada pilots well paid?

Within Canada, yes. Air Canada’s top rates are the highest in the country and the 2024 contract widened that lead. The gap to the American majors was the whole argument in the 2024 negotiations and it closed considerably, although the exchange rate still does most of the remaining damage. The place Air Canada continues to lag is the first two years, where an experienced captain from another carrier takes a real pay cut to get in the door.

To see how WestJet, Porter, Air Transat and the regionals compare, have a look at our article on how much pilots make in Canada. And when you’re ready to apply, read our guide to writing a pilot resume before you send anything to Air Canada.