It’s the time of the year again where I start looking at pilot certification data from the previous year, this year looking back at 2025. One of those interesting points I always find intriguing is the data related to how many CFIs signed applicants off for practical tests.
Let’s start by looking at how many CFIs signed off even one applicant for a test in 2025.
The chart below shows the trend of this data point since 2017.
For the first time in a few years, this number actually decreased. It didn’t go down by much, staying mostly flat, but it wasn’t showing that more CFIs were actively engaged in signing applicants off for practical tests.
We expect that this may continue to be an indicator that CFIs are actively engaged in the training sector, but “turn over” as hiring at airlines hire them from those positions to mostly regional airline jobs.
As hiring was down some in 2025, this may have had an effect on the number of CFIs who “turned over” in their job positions and moved on to other employment as professional pilots.
It can also be an indicator that CFIs are turning over in their jobs and that more CFIs are signing people off for tests as they work to gain experience and then transition into other professional pilot jobs for which they become qualified based on the hours they gain as a CFI along the way.
An indicator that CFIs may have been staying in the job positions slightly longer this year is the data point that shows that more CFIs in 2025 signed off more than 5 applicants for practical tests in the previous years.
This increase isn’t overly large, only around a couple of hundred, but it is an indicator of stability in the tenure of CFIs in 2025.
Like most years, we still see an overall small number of our CFI population conducting the majority of sign-offs for applicants when it comes to qualifying forpractical tests.
The data here shows that 23,649 CFIs were engaged with signing applicants off for practical tests.
While other CFIs may be engaged with other activities such as flight reviews, IPCs, transition or endorsement-related training, those types of training are a smaller part of the pilot pipeline production pathway. While we have (probably – more data will be out on the 2025 numbers in the next month) more than 120,000 CFI certificate holders, many are of ages where they are no longer actively providing training, or, more commonly, hold CFI certificates and are actively flying professionally doing other pilot jobs and simply keeping their CFI certificates active so they don’t need to re-certify if their rececnecy of experience expires.
I always also like to include the breakdown levels we get on sign-offs in each year for those CFIs out there who wonder how they compare to others if they were highly active in their sign-off activity level in 2025.
So here it is.
The chart below shows how many CFIs signed off applicants in ranges. Kudos to that CFI who was busy enough to sign off more than 200 applicants for practical tests in 2025, I have to think it was someone working in a place where add-on certificates, such as seaplane, might have been the main business.
Even if you signed off more than the 5 students, required to renew your CFI certificate (with an appropriate pass rate), and especially if you had that 80% pass rate with more than 10 sign-offs in the preceding 24 months, or even the year, you find yourself in a smaller community of very active CFIs to accomplish that number of sign-offs.
And one more fun data point…if you were wondering. The overwhelming majority of CFI certificates issued each year are issued to U.S. citizens. While the United States remains a place that many foreign nations send their students to train, they do so through their commercial pilotcertifications and then head back to their home countries.
We find the following over the past couple of years when it comes to the percentages of CFI certificates issued to U.S. pilots.