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Flight attendants

Also called Cabin crew, Cabin crew member, In-flight service attendant, Airline steward, Airline stewardess

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 131,650 US flight attendants, with median pay of $63,580 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2021, the May 2025 count is the highest. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 200 from 1935, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for flight attendants: Automated emergency equipment + onboard defibrillators, 1990 to 2010.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 8.8% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

  • 14.6% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
  • 0.35 estimated probability that the whole occupation could be computerised, over an unspecified number of years. Not a forecast of job losses. Frey and Osborne, 2013

Since the 2013 prediction

In 2013, Frey and Osborne put this job's probability of computerisation at 0.35. BLS counted 93,550 of these jobs in May 2013 and 131,650 in May 2025. The count moved sharply in one step, May 2020 to May 2021, when BLS changed how it estimates these counts, so no change is derived here.

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Flight attendants: jobs and pay since 1935 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-2031

Chicago

Future History. "Flight attendants: jobs and pay since 1935." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-2031.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_53_2031, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Flight attendants: jobs and pay since 1935}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-2031}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time
195019752000now
Country
2026
Known then as Stewardess / Sky Girl (registered-nurse cabin attendant era)
Known then as Stewardess / Air Hostess / Steward (postwar glamour era)
Known then as Stewardess / Steward (desegregation and de-gendering era)
Known then as Flight Attendant (BLS SOC 53-2031)
Known today as Flight Attendant (BLS SOC 53-2031)
Projected to still be called Flight Attendant (BLS SOC 53-2031)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
132K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$63,580
Est.

≈ $61,950 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1930

May 15, 1930: Ellen Church, a registered nurse and licensed pilot, becomes the first female flight attendant on a Boeing Air Transport flight from Oakland to Chicago after the airline declines to hire her as a pilot. She recruits and trains seven more nurses, the original Sky Girls. Requirements: registered nurse, single, under 25, no taller than 5 feet 4 inches, no heavier than 115 pounds.

Beat · 1958

February 11, 1958: Ruth Carol Taylor, hired by Mohawk Airlines in December 1957, works her first flight as the first African-American flight attendant in the United States, breaking a color line that most carriers had enforced for nearly three decades. Within months she was forced out by the marriage ban, a reminder that several layers of discrimination operated at once in the era.

Beat · 1968

The EEOC rules that airline age restrictions on flight attendants are illegal sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, and that being female is not a bona fide occupational qualification for the job. These rulings, alongside organized activism by groups such as Stewardesses for Women's Rights, begin the legal dismantling of the women-only, under-a-certain-age employment model that had defined the occupation since 1930.

Beat · 1971

Diaz v. Pan American World Airways: after Celio Diaz was rejected in 1967 because Pan Am claimed femininity was a bona fide occupational qualification, a US Court of Appeals ruled that the essence of a flight attendant's job is passenger safety, not gender, and that men could not be excluded. The decision reopened the occupation to men across the industry and reframed the role, in law, as a safety profession. Men, who had largely been pushed out of the role by the late 1930s, returned in growing numbers through the 1970s and 1980s, prompting the gender-neutral title flight attendant.

Beat · 1978

The Airline Deregulation Act removes federal control over fares and routes, triggering rapid expansion of air travel, new entrant carriers, and intense competition. Passenger volumes and route networks grew, expanding cabin-crew employment, while competitive cost pressure later weighed on pay and working conditions. The no-marriage rule was eliminated across the US industry through the 1980s, and weight restrictions were relaxed in the 1990s through litigation and bargaining, completing the removal of the categorical hiring rules that had governed the job for half a century.

Beat · 2001

The September 11, 2001 attacks permanently elevate the safety-and-security dimension of the role. New self-defense and threat-recognition training, hardened cockpit-door protocols, and revised flight-deck communication procedures follow. The role is reframed, in training and in public understanding, as the cabin's first line of defense rather than a hospitality position. Air-travel demand fell sharply in the aftermath, pressuring airline employment, but the per-flight crew requirement held.

Beat · 2022

A wave of contract changes, beginning with Delta, starts paying flight attendants for boarding time, long a flashpoint because traditional flight pay began only when the cabin door closed, leaving boarding, deplaning, and ground delays unpaid. The shift, spreading to other major carriers, marks a structural change in how the job is compensated and reflects the bargaining leverage attendants regained in the tight post-pandemic labor market for air travel.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace flight attendants? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
+8.8%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 53-2031 (Flight attendants): 133.7 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 145.5 thousand in 2035, a change of +11.8 thousand (+8.8%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (0.4% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Frey & Osborne (2013), "The Future of Employment"
2013 study · Probability of computerisation (2013 model)
35%
probability
What this measures

Published appendix value for SOC 2010 53-2031 Flight Attendants: probability of computerisation 0.35, rank 250 of 702 (rank 1 is least computerisable). Frey and Osborne estimated in 2013, with a Gaussian-process classifier on O*NET variables, how likely the whole occupation is to be technically automatable over "some unspecified number of years, perhaps a decade or two". It is a probability for the occupation, not a share of tasks and not a forecast of jobs lost.

Official statisticReport an error
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
14.6%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 53-2031.00 Flight Attendants. Shown: human-rated β = 0.146, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.042 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.25; GPT-4-rated β 0.167. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for flight attendants

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereProcess in-flight sales and ancillary transactions (meals, beverages, duty-free, seat upgrades) using a point-of-sale module on the crew device, reconciling inventory against pre-loaded catering data.

Process in-flight sales and ancillary transactions (meals, beverages, duty-free, seat upgrades) using a point-of-sale module on the crew device, reconciling inventory against pre-loaded catering data.[6],[7]

Where your edge is

Focus on upsell conversations and resolving exceptions (substitutions, allergy flags) that the automated inventory system surfaces; routine transaction throughput is increasingly handled digitally.

AI is sitting alongside you hereComplete post-flight cabin reports documenting equipment deficiencies, passenger incidents, catering discrepancies, and compliance items, submitting them digitally to the operations control center via the crew application.

Complete post-flight cabin reports documenting equipment deficiencies, passenger incidents, catering discrepancies, and compliance items, submitting them digitally to the operations control center via the crew application.[6],[1]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Shift time saved from paper elimination toward thorough incident narrative quality; accurate crew reports feed airline safety analytics and FAA audits, so precision remains entirely the crew member's responsibility.

AI is sitting alongside you hereRespond to passenger questions about flight status, connections, weather, and services using real-time flight data from the crew application, escalating complex rebooking situations to ground staff through the tablet.

Respond to passenger questions about flight status, connections, weather, and services using real-time flight data from the crew application, escalating complex rebooking situations to ground staff through the tablet.[1],[8]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Handle emotional dimensions of disruption (missed connections, medical travel) with empathy; AI can surface the rebooking options but cannot deliver the reassurance passengers need during stressful delays.

Where flight attendants go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Emergency Management Directors

Emergency management directors draw on the same physical-crisis command, evacuation leadership, and multi-agency coordination skills that flight attendants practice in every recurrent training cycle. The path requires additional education (often a degree in emergency management or public safety) but the practical grounding in high-stakes, time-compressed decision-making is a genuine head start.

What you'd add
  • · FEMA Incident Command System (ICS) certifications (ICS-100, ICS-200, ICS-300)
  • · Bachelor's or master's degree in emergency management or homeland security
  • · Public-sector grant writing and multi-agency coordination experience
What it takesA real upskill, but a natural one
Tools of the era

How has the work of flight attendants changed since 1930?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • Nurse's kit + manual cabin service (propeller-era cabin)

    The first cabin attendants worked propeller aircraft with unpressurized or low-altitude cabins, noisy and prone to airsickness. Their toolkit was a nurse's training, a manual safety briefing, a first-aid kit, and the physical labor of hauling baggage, securing wicker seats, and serving cold food. The role was almost entirely embodied: calming nervous passengers, watching for medical distress, and managing a small cabin by hand. No automation touched the work; the technology was the airplane itself and the human capacity to make it feel survivable.

  • Jet-age galley + standardized service carts (Boeing 707 era)

    The jet age, opened by the Boeing 707 in 1958, transformed the cabin: larger pressurized aircraft, longer routes, and far more passengers per flight. Galleys with ovens, standardized rolling service carts, and choreographed meal-and-beverage service turned the job into a logistics operation conducted at altitude. Crew sizes grew, service became scripted and branded (airlines competed on the glamour of their stewardesses), and the safety briefing was standardized across fleets. The tools were physical and procedural, the cart and the galley and the demonstration kit, but the scale of the work multiplied.

    Effect on the work

    Jet aircraft and route expansion drove a large increase in cabin-crew headcount through the 1960s and 1970s, even as airlines kept individual tenures short through age and marriage rules.

  • Automated emergency equipment + onboard defibrillators (AEDs)

    Through the 1990s and 2000s the cabin filled with safety technology the attendant was trained to operate: automated external defibrillators (AEDs) became standard on US carriers, enhanced emergency medical kits expanded, and slide-rafts, smoke detectors, and standardized evacuation equipment were tied to recurrent FAA training. This era hardened the role's identity as a safety profession rather than a service one. The equipment did not reduce headcount; it raised the certification bar, because each new device added a task only a trained, present crew member can perform.

    Effect on the work

    Medical and safety equipment additions increased the training and certification burden per attendant without reducing the federally mandated minimum crew count, which is fixed to aircraft seating capacity.

  • Post-9/11 security protocols + reinforced procedures

    The September 11, 2001 attacks redefined the cabin-crew role around security. Hardened cockpit doors, new threat-recognition and self-defense training, revised communication protocols with the flight deck, and a sharpened expectation that attendants are the front line against onboard threats all followed. The service-with-a-smile framing of earlier decades was permanently subordinated to a security-and-safety mission backed by federal regulation. The tooling here was procedural and regulatory rather than digital, but it reshaped what the job is for.

    Effect on the work

    Air-travel demand fell sharply after 2001 and again in the 2008-09 recession, pressuring airline employment, but the per-flight crew requirement and the elevated security role were structurally entrenched, not reduced.

  • Crew tablets + AI cabin logistics (SITA CrewTab, aiOla speech, Airbus Smart Catering)

    From the late 2010s the binders and paper forms moved onto a tablet. Speech-driven tools such as aiOla let crews complete safety checks hands-free in a noisy cabin, and AI catering systems such as Airbus Smart Catering use camera recognition to track trolley stock and predict per-route demand, cutting cabin food waste. These tools augment the administrative and logistics layer of the job: they speed the paperwork and tighten inventory, freeing attention for the passenger-facing and safety-critical work that remains entirely human.

    Effect on the work

    Crew tablets and AI logistics target documentation and catering efficiency rather than headcount; the safety, evacuation, first-aid, and de-escalation core of the role is unaffected, and federal minimum-crew rules cap any displacement.

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Flight Attendants employment and pay by year

On record since1930
Latest US employment131,650 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$63,580 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+8.8% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

In other countries

The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.

  • Canada (NOC 64311)

    Employment, 2020
    11,840, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021: number of persons with employment income in NOC 64311 Pursers and flight attendants, Canada, reference year 2020. A recipients basis (anyone with employment income during the year), slightly broader than a point-in-time employed count. Statistics Canada Open Licence.
    Median pay, 2020
    C$57,200, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021 (Table 98-10-0586): median employment income for NOC 64311 Pursers and flight attendants, Canada, reference year 2020, full-year full-time workers (the basis comparable to the US OEWS full-time median). Statistics Canada Open Licence.
View all 20 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
1935200n/aEst., National Air and Space Museum… Researched contextReport
1968n/a$4,800Est., Smithsonian Researched contextReport
197040,000n/aEst., Smithsonian Researched contextReport
2000126,380n/aBLS OEWS 2000 Official statisticReport
201088,020$37,740BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
201187,190$38,020BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
201284,960$37,240BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
201393,550$40,520BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
201498,510$42,290BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
2015108,510$44,860BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
2016113,390$48,500BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
2017119,000$50,500BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
2018118,770$56,000BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
2019120,840$56,640BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
2020116,260$59,050BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
202196,900$61,640BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
2022108,480$63,760BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
2023126,020$68,370BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
2024130,110$67,130BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
2025131,650$63,580BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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