Methodology
Two FAA sources sit behind this site. They are not interchangeable, and the difference matters enough that it is worth stating plainly before anyone cites a number from here.
1. The annual statistics — official counts
Every headline figure on this site comes from the FAA's U.S. Civil Airmen Statistics, published annually. It counts active airmen as of 31 December and is compiled by the FAA from its own certification records. Totals by category, the eleven-year history, the state tables, average age, and monthly student certificate issuance all come from there, unchanged.
The FAA defines an active airman as one holding both a certificate and a valid medical, except where a medical is not required — glider pilots, for instance. Since April 2016 student certificates no longer expire, so student totals accumulate rather than turning over. Any chart crossing 2016 is measuring a slightly different thing on each side of that line.
Current edition: FAA U.S. Civil Airmen Statistics, 2025.
2. The monthly file — a sample, not a census
The FAA also publishes a releasable airmen file every month. It is the only frequently-updated source of airmen data that exists, and it carries a limitation that is easy to miss: in the FAA's words, it “does not include the records of those airmen who do not want their addresses released.”
The whole record is omitted, not just the address. That is not a small exclusion. The August 2026 file contains 419,167 people holding a pilot certificate, against 887,519 active pilots in the FAA's official 2025 count — coverage of 47.2%. More than half of American pilots are absent from it.
So no count on this site is taken from that file. It is used for two things only: relative geography below state level, where no official source exists, and month-to-month direction.
How the monthly change is calculated
Each month's file is compared against the previous month's. A certificate present now and absent then is counted as added; the reverse is counted as removed. For August 2026 that was 5,363 added and 4,947 removed.
An airman who changes their address-release preference enters or leaves the file exactly like someone who earned or lost a certificate. There is no way to tell the two apart from the outside. Treat added certificates as an upper bound on new issuance, and the trend across months as more meaningful than any single month's figure. Where the FAA publishes official issuance — student certificates by month, back to 2016 — that is the number to use, and it is the one shown on this site.
Why the archive exists
The FAA keeps only the current and previous month online; older files redirect away and cannot be recovered. Pilot Census stores a small aggregate of every month it processes, so the monthly series grows from here forward. It cannot be backfilled by us or by anyone else.
What this site does not publish
The releasable file contains names and home addresses. Nothing here is published at the level of an individual airman, and there is no lookup by name. Geography is aggregated to city and state, and cities with fewer than 25 pilots in the file are dropped. If you are looking for a specific person's certificate, the FAA's own airmen inquiry is the right tool.
Corrections
If a number here is wrong, say so and it will be fixed and noted. FAA data is a government work and free of copyright; this site is not affiliated with or endorsed by the FAA.