A slight uptick in most of the major pilot certificate issuances was experienced in 2025 compared with the previous year, with ATP certificate issuance being the only real certificate or rating that saw a measurable decrease (18%) after a drop from the peak years of 2023 and 2024 (now a drop from those years of around 31% per year).
It is not surprising to me that ATP certificate issuances over the past 2 years have slowed as airline hiring cooled. It will be interesting to see if this does turn around, as forecasts for 2026 and 2027 airline hiring are more robust than last year.
When it comes to overall pilot certificate issuance, we see a slight dip if we take out of the numbers the remote pilot certificates (UAS). To compare manned aircraft certification events, I am presenting this data in the graph form as overall pilot certificate issuances without those UAS pilot certificate issuances in there (you can see in the tabular data below what the total numbers would be with them included and as excluded).
Here is what we see when it comes to total pilot certificates issued over the past 35 years.
Looking at specific certificates and ratings, we see that the primary certificates of private pilot and commercial pilot, and the instrument rating, did see increases in certification in 2025 again. The increases were minimal, but again, keep the number of certifications growing to fill our next generations of commercial pilots.
This data does show a continued robust passthrough of of pilots in training through our aviation training system.
And when I say robust, I mean continued record levels when compared with couple of decades. The training industry has been jamming hard for many years now and pushing through as many certifications as it can. Is this a sustainable level? Well, that is a question that remains to be answered, and one that I will continue to track for all of us in the upcoming years.
Student Pilot Certificate Issuances Drop Again
The original issuance of student pilot certificates again dropped, less than the previous year (4%) compared to last year than last year to 2023 (12%).
This may be an indicator of fewer people entering the pipeline for pilot training and potentially of a decrease in certification numbers at upper-level certificates in upcoming years.
If airline hiring increases over the next two years, we may see this interest increase again in the upcoming years. It will certainly be something to watch and see how these numbers play out as hiring increases or decreases affect the intake of new student pilot certificate issuance.
Our base certification processes are critical data points that help us evaluate the flow of pilots we will see moving through the pilot trainnig pipeline that will eventually become candidates to be ATP pilots.
Overall tabular pilot certificate issuance data:
