Primarily for general aviation discussion, but other aviation topics are also welcome.
By SimonM
#1875639
Without getting into personal details, what could a newly qualified SEP(A) instructor expect to earn/year working full time? Is this likely to go up with time/experience?

I'm aware that IR and CPL instructors can earn more.
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By lobstaboy
#1875646
If you have to ask the question you can't afford to do it.
I'm not joking. Bear in mind that you usually only earn when you're flying so it depends on how many hours a year you can do. And that depends on the weather and a host of other things out of your control.
It's not simply how much a year, but it can be very variable - some months you may earn nothing.
£15k would be very good.
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By gaznav
#1875650
Do the maths. Say £30/hr and you may get up to 5 flights of 1hr duration in if you are briefing/debriefing. So that is £150 per day. There are 260 working days a year on average and so let’s say you get in 180 days due to weather and holidays taking away the rest.

So that is £27k/year. But let’s now do a more likely 3 flights a day, which works out at £90. That is now down to £16.2k.

You aren’t going to get rich doing SEP!
By RobW
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1875652
My long term goal is to become an instructor once I retire, A nice little top up to my (non-existant) pension and some free flying, my instructor earns £25 for a 2 hour session with one hour flying. It works for him as he is clocking hours, but as a main income, it would leave a lot to be desired I think
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By Lefty
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1875653
The general rate for a newly qualified FI, is likely to be between £20-25 per flying hour - but in most schools you will be expected to do 30 minutes briefing before - and after the flight so the hourly rate equates to approx £10-12.50 per hour.
Even in the peak of summer you would struggle to get 4 x 2 hour sessions in a working day. In fact many schools limit the number of lessons one can do in a working day.

Then you have to consider shorter days and bad weather. We’ve just had four days when no flying was possible before about midday - with all lessons cancelled (no-one gets paid).
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By MattL
#1875655
About £15k in a good year. When you take out travel, medicals, renewals, self employment costs etc you are probably looking less than £10k take home.
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By TLRippon
#1875674
Don’t forget you will also be, in most cases, self employed so you have the start up and ongoing costs of managing that too.
It is common for the only employed member of the FI team to be the CFI.
Commercial training is the only way to make a liveable wage from instructing.
As a self employed FI you won’t get all the employment luxuries like paid leave, maternity benefits, pension etc and for three or four months of the year you sit in the clubhouse looking at the weather outside consuming food and cancelling lessons.
Some of us deliver groundschools and exams during the winter but that is limited by the number of winter students the club have and the club’s willingness to make you a ground examiner to invigilate exams.
The worst case scenario is when you are new and before you build up a student base, clubs generally give you lots of trial lessons to keep you active, which in its self if is great, however when you walk in on a Saturday and find yourself with 8 x 20min trial lessons on the hour every hour then you make a third of your hourly rate all day so if you’re on £25 an hour, that’s £8.33. Minimum wage is £8.91 but that doesn’t apply to the self employed.
I really like the work and I’m in the long and expensive process of doing commercial exams so I can teach the same things I teach to LAPL students to PPL’s but it’s not a job to make any kind of living from in the first few years at the base level.
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By Paul_Sengupta
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1875708
To make it feasible you have to do "man maths". You have to factor in the cost that it would cost you to carry on paying for your own flying, rather than getting a student to pay for the flying. This is what I tell MichaelP for flying in the UK on a CRI. He might not make anything but it should get him airborne without having to spend his pension.
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By lobstaboy
#1875715
Paul_Sengupta wrote:To make it feasible you have to do "man maths". You have to factor in the cost that it would cost you to carry on paying for your own flying, rather than getting a student to pay for the flying. This is what I tell MichaelP for flying in the UK on a CRI. He might not make anything but it should get him airborne without having to spend his pension.


Yeah, but...
The flying you do as an instructor is the flying that the student needs (if it isn't then you are not doing a good job). What about the flying you want to do for yourself?
I really enjoyed instructing, but I've stopped now because I'd rather do my own thing even though I have to pay for it.
Instructing is hard. After five days or so of continuous flying because the weather is good and youve got a backlog of student flights, you need a break!
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By MattL
#1875720
@Paul_Sengupta I get your logic, but honestly as @lobstaboy says, this is probably the worst reason anyone can become an instructor. Flying is actually a tiny part of the skill set and commitment required of instructing.
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By David Wood
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1875859
I think that the fact is that instructing at the PPL/LAPL end of the market is less of a job and more of a vocation. I think that it would be very hard to make a living as an FI working only in the recreational license market, although I appreciate that if you include instructing for commercial licenses then the potential income increases and the potential for weather disruption decreases.

But make no mistake, either way it's hard work. I get home knackered after a day's instructing. I once did 12 trips in one day (admittedly many of them were short ones, obviously) and I was wiped out. Yet when I get home I'm often told; "but you only did x hours actual flying today, and anyway you love it."

Yes I do, and yes the tally of hours flown is often rather small. But when you factor in the briefing and debriefing, and the amount of work that has to be done once in the air the load is considerable. The student may perhaps imagine that the FI is just sitting there twiddling his thumbs and enjoying the view, but that is seldom if ever the case.

So my advice would be: instruct for the love of it; but not in the expectation of earning a living by doing it.
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By StratoTramp
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1875934
If I ever did it it would be vocational. Admittedly premature as I don't even have a license. Im amazed at how hard my instructor works. It's his second job, he is a stone mason for the day job.

He then has to fill up a load of Jerry cans of fuel and lug them to the field. Deal with a bent plane occasionally (not because of me!). Lucky he didn't have to do it during the fuel 'crisis' I could imagine things getting lairy.

Then have nerves of steel with students having interesting landings (sometimes me - but never as bad as the above). :lol:

I bought him a T67 "topgun" experience to say thank you when he got me solo. Was going to get him the Harvard one but it came up in convo he had already done it. Lucky miss!
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By TLRippon
#1875964
I often wonder how much flying lessons would cost if the instructors were paid a basic living wage for the hours they attend the school rather than the hours they fly?