RCAF Pilot Pay Tops Out at $15,684 a Month — But Promotion to Major Can Cost Pilots Money

Government Files is The Canada Report's public-records analysis series examining government documents obtained through Canada's Access to Information (ATI) and provincial Freedom of Information (FOI) laws. These transparency laws allow members of the public to request internal government records from federal and provincial institutions. This article reviews documents released through those processes and summarizes what the records contain and what they show. While we strive for accuracy, this article represents an analysis and interpretation of the source material. For complete accuracy and full context, readers should review the original documents, which are available in full below.

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Internal Royal Canadian Air Force records show that under a new skills-based pay scale, a captain pilot can now earn as much as $15,684 a month — more than a colonel with two years in that rank — yet the same records reveal that pilots promoted to major can lose hundreds of dollars a month in potential earnings because the major pay scale rises more slowly than the captain one. The documents detail how senior RCAF and military-pay leaders quietly closed out the pilot pay project at the end of 2024 while acknowledging that several of its problems would persist for years.

The records were released under Access to Information request A-2025-00485 and cover correspondence, decision briefs, and meeting minutes from the Directorate of Air Personnel Strategy, the Pilot Compensation Steering Committee, the Chief of Military Personnel, and the Commander of the RCAF between 1 June 2024 and 17 March 2025. Together they document the final months of a multi-year effort the Air Force ran under the banner of OP EXPERIENCE.

What the Documents Show

The new pilot pay scale took effect on 1 April 2021 and was formally implemented in September 2022, giving every pilot an immediate raise and the chance to keep earning more at every rank. The central design change was structural: under the old system, pilots received a non-pensionable Aircrew Allowance only while holding a designated flying position. The new scale folds the value of that allowance into a higher, fully pensionable base pay that pilots keep whether or not they are flying. The scale also expanded the number of pay increments a captain can climb through — up to 20 levels, where the old scale froze captains' pay at increment 10.

The published captain pay table in the records lays the numbers out plainly. A captain pilot starts at $7,841 a month at the basic increment — the same as a general service officer — and the two scales track together up to increment 7. From there the pilot scale keeps climbing while the general service officer scale stops, reaching $10,242 at increment 9 and topping out at $15,684 at increment 20. The documents note that a captain pilot's pay begins to exceed a general service officer's combined pay-plus-allowance at increment 9, and that at the top increment a captain pilot earns more than a colonel with two years in rank.

The Air Force frames the program as a success against its retention goals. The records state that the trained-effective strength of the pilot occupation has increased or stabilised against an overall RCAF occupational decline of roughly 10 percent since 2019, that the experience of more than 40 pilots was retained through Reserve service, and that 53 skilled pilots had enrolled since 2019. Retaining trained pilots is a recurring pressure for the Air Force, which is simultaneously trying to overhaul its fleets through a decade-long modernization plan amid wider personnel shortages.

The Promotion Penalty Built Into the Scale

The most counter-intuitive finding in the records is what the Air Force calls the "Maj Pay vs Senior Capt" problem. Because the captain scale increases at about 4 percent per increment while the major scale increases at only 2 to 2.5 percent, a senior captain promoted to major can end up worse off than if they had stayed put. A comparison table in one decision brief shows a captain at increment 18 earning $15,159 a month; the equivalent major position pays $14,308 — a gap of $851 a month. The records are careful to note this is not a pay cut on promotion but a loss of potential future earnings, and that it affects more pilots now than it will later because so many were slotted into increments far higher than their time in rank.

RCAF analysts described this as "an extraordinarily complex problem to fix," noting that each affected pilot is impacted differently and that the only potential solution they identified was high cost and would likely require a financial penalty to the pilot occupation or cuts elsewhere in the scale. They expect the issue to persist for five to seven years as pilots in the key promotion window move through the affected increments. In the meantime, the documents say the problem can be managed by promoting pilots before they reach 10 years in rank, or by using "acting" arrangements that keep an officer on the captain scale while filling a major's position.

Closing Out OP EXPERIENCE

The driving deadline through these records is a direction from the Chief of the Defence Staff to close out OP EXPERIENCE no later than December 2024. A 12 November 2024 meeting between the deputy commanders of the RCAF and the Chief of Military Personnel group settled the outstanding issues, and a final Pilot Compensation Steering Committee meeting on 10 December 2024 formally agreed that implementation could be declared complete. That committee was stood down at the same meeting, with its remaining monitoring duties folded into existing Air Force governance.

On the captain–general-service-officer gap, the military pay authority agreed to an interim fix: pilots earning their wings on or after 1 April 2024 would be moved from the basic increment to increment 1 the day after their promotion to captain, a change the records value at entering the scale at $8,138 — just $30 short of a general service officer's basic pay plus aircrew allowance. The two sides agreed not to act further on the major-pay issue at this time, on the condition that it be examined as part of an Assistant Deputy Minister (Review Services) retention study and revisited two to three years after implementation, around 2027 or 2028, if the impact on the occupation proves unmanageable.

The records also lay out the wind-down logistics: a one-time gating-waiver review board scheduled for February 2025, final pay audits to conclude by 31 March 2025, a CANFORGEN message and an Air Force Order to formalise the pay and gating rules by the end of January 2025, and roughly six months of staff effort redirected from implementation to managing the grievances expected to follow.

The Tension Beneath the Closure

For an internal record, the documents are unusually candid about friction. A set of leadership "key messages" prepared for the closeout instructs commanders not to answer specific technical questions and to "remain neutral on issues raised by pilots," referring them instead to the pilot pay team. The same messaging points out that pilots are one of only two RCAF-managed occupations to receive a modernised pay scale, while the other 26 managed occupations — some with worse occupational health — have not had their pay reviewed in the same way. It even notes that the team delivering the pilots' new benefits is made up of non-pilots who have not received the same treatment, and urges members to "remain professional and polite when working with the team."

A July 2024 email from a brigadier-general in the military pay group to an RCAF counterpart spells out why the fixes the Air Force wanted were slow to land. Adding aircrew allowance on top of the captain pay scale, the email explains, would require amending the relevant compensation instruction — which specifically excludes pilots from that allowance — plus a new source of funding and Treasury Board approval, none of which could be arranged before 2026. The author also questioned why completing officer professional military education was tied to pilot pay at all, since "we do not give other officers a monetary incentive to complete their OPMEs."

What's Missing From the Records

The release is heavily annotated with exemptions. Multiple pages carry severances under sections 21(1)(b), (c), and (d) of the Access to Information Act — the provisions covering advice, recommendations, and accounts of internal consultations — as well as sections 19(1) for personal information and 69(1)(g) for Cabinet confidences. This kind of heavy redaction is common in Department of National Defence releases, including the records behind our reporting on a classified military operation to recover the February 2023 UFOs. As a result, the dollar cost of the program is not stated anywhere in the released material; the records repeatedly describe potential fixes as "high cost" or note that funding would have to come from a future compensation envelope, but no total appears. The documents also do not quantify how many pilots fall into the disadvantaged major cohort beyond noting it is larger now than it will be, nor do they include the formal letter from the Chief of Military Personnel to the Commander of the RCAF that several records anticipate as the final step sealing the agreement.

All figures and decisions referenced are from Department of National Defence records, Access to Information request A-2025-00485, covering correspondence and meeting minutes from the Directorate of Air Personnel Strategy, the Pilot Compensation Steering Committee, the Chief of Military Personnel, and the Commander RCAF between 1 June 2024 and 17 March 2025. The records document the closeout of the RCAF pilot pay implementation under OP EXPERIENCE.