I Read All 425 Pages Of Uniteds Flight Attendant Deal — Bigger Pay, But Profit Sharing Lags And United Can Own A Regional Airline

The new United Airlines flight attendant contract will finally pay cabin crew significantly more. The union’s promotional site does a good job of breaking it down, but I read the actual 425-page agreement to find out everything that’s in it, and everything that they do not highlight.

Directly comparing contracts across airlines is difficult in a way that reduces to simple terms and is meaningful to flight attendants in different situations. This is a 425-page document, and goes well beyond pay rates into specifying how layover hotels are selected, the terms under which they’ll be paid for time spent boarding (something non-union Delta created four years ago), and how long they must be given rest after a redeye flight.

Nonetheless in simple terms, United’s base wage rate will be the highest in the industry under this new agreement. This certainly represents all the money that was possibly on the table – the union told flight attendants that was true with the first contract that was voted down last July, they’d misjudged the priorities of their members, 71% of whom voted against it over disappointing language in areas like hotel stays.

But it’s not more generous in every area. The United profit sharing formula will be lower than Delta’s and American’s. And they had to give up ‘scope’ to get it, allowing United to own a regional airline without staffing it with mainline flight attendants.

It was an intentional strategy on the part of United’s flight attendant union to wait until American’s negotiation was complete before pushing in earnest to get a deal done initially, even lending their lead negotiator to American’s rival union for its effort. Whether it was worth delaying so long, with flight attendants waiting nearly six years without a new contract or a raise, to get this deal is an open question.

Assuming this contract passes it will mean significantly more money, making up for all of the erosion in the value of their pay due to inflation and then a bit more. It’s a huge standard of living increase overnight for work starting in June if this passes.

What Will Flight Attendants Be Paid?

Under this agreement, base pay goes up about 30%. And on top of that there’s boarding pay – half pay for time spent boarding the aircraft, so no longer just block time – and $740 million as a signing bonus (which amounts to retro pay for the long period in which flight attendants went without any raise).

Delta began offering boarding pay in 2022 and that pressed the issue at airlines with union flight attendants. Unions had traded boarding pay for higher wage rates, which benefited more senior flight attendants (who tend to work fewer, longer flihgts) at the expense of junior ones (who spend more time overall boarding, with more short flights).

United’s flight attendants union promotes a ‘$145 million dollar increase’ in retro pay but that’s not really a contractual improvement, cabin crew are going nearly an extra year without a contract so this is just United not pocketing this as savings. But it’s not ‘full retro pay’.

The retro pay formula doesn’t actually treat this new deal retroactive to the last one’s amendable date. And it doesn’t cover inflation erosion of wages during the pandemic. Instead it pays out a flat 4% from September 2021 through 2024 (not 4% increases per year) followed by 22% for 2025 and 2025 for the first 5 months of 2026.

Here are the new pay rates. They’re about 1% higher than American’s.

Flight Attendants Will Get Less Profit Sharing Than Delta

Profit sharing is less generous than at American and Delta. This is actually going to be key for Delta, which still makes more money than United. United’s flight attendant union, AFA-CWA, is trying to organize at Delta, but they won’t be able to say that the crew they represent earn more than Delta’s non-union crew do.

• It took 5.5 years to get a raise, while Delta’s flight attendants get one every year
  
• Delta earns more, and will pay out profit sharing more generously. In 2026 Delta’s flight attendants earned about an extra month’s pay.

American Airlines flight attendants won the Delta formula for profit-sharing in their 2024 contract. The profit sharing pool gets 10% of the first $2.5 billion in profit and 20% after that.

United’s formula will use 10% and 20% also, but it’s 10% of the previous year’s proft and 20% above that. So by earning over $2.5 billion, United’s formula is less generous. Delta paid out a whopping $1.3 billion in profit-sharing which is nearly twice as much as United’s profit sharing pool.

You’ll see that flight attendants did not get an improvement here compared to the last agreement from 10 years ago:

No Algorithm Scheduling

There’s no PBS algorithm scheduling (‘Preferential Bidding System’) in this contract, though United had been publicly pushing for it, and it’s industry standard. United’s pilots have been using it for 20 years and it’s used for flight attendants at competitors.

With PBS, flight attendants bid ‘what they want’ (pairings, days off, layovers, start times, aircraft, etc.) and the system awards trips to match preferences as much as possible. It does not create pairings – pairing construction stays the same. It does not eliminate trading, pickup, and drops. Instead, it replaces the line build process.

• Current scheduling: Management builds pre-packaged monthly lines (complete schedules). Flight attendants bid on those lines by seniority. If you win a line, you basically know what your month looks like, then you trade, pick up, and drop around it.

• PBS scheduling: Instead of bidding on a prebuilt line, you bid your preferences (e.g., “avoid early reports,” “want 3–4 day trips,” “prefer Europe layovers,” “want weekends off”). The algorithm awards pairings and days off in a way that tries to satisfy as many preferences as possible subject to rules, staffing needs, and seniority.

Airlines like it because they can match staffing to demand better; refine schedules more before bid close; reduce last-minute manual schedule changes; and eliminate the need for a vacation relief bids – giving them a more predictable operation and fewer disruptions and re-assignments.

Some flight attendants prefer it because they get more influence when preferences don’t fit neatly into pre-built lines and they can bid what matters instead of accepting a line with tradeoffs they don’t like. However many flight attendants strongly dislike it:

• It feels complex and can be intimidating
  
• It can feel less predictable than line bidding because crew aren’t choosing a fixed package of flights, and because results can vary month to month
  
• When flight attendants don’t get what they wanted, it feels like the system “chose against them” even if it’s just rules and seniority, versus getting a known specific bundle of flights. PBS can feel like bidding into a fog, especially for mid-seniority flight attendants who get different mixes of trips each month.
  
• optimal bidding can become a game, with more time in the system, more strategy, and more tinkering.
  
• people who’ve built childcare and commuting routines around a stable line can see reduced predictability.

My own view, articulated here several times, was that United’s repeated messaging to flight attendants about PBS scheduling was something of a head fake. They wanted it, sure, but the union couldn’t actually agree to it, it was too toxic.

So by putting it on the table, they could take it off the table and hand the union a win without actually giving anything up compared to the previous tentative agreement, smoothing the way to passage.

United Can Finally Own A Regional Airline

In order to get higher pay, the union gave up scope. United Airlines can finally own a regional airline, without having to staff it with mainline flight attendants. Flight attendants now revert to the more standard industry practice of relying on pilot scope restrictions – if the airline has to staff with mainline pilots, they need to staff with mainline flight attendants.

This makes sense from a job protection standpoint. I don’t think they really needed the rule that hamstrung the business in terms of owning a regional carrier, and it’s fairly industry standard (Delta owns Endeavor, Alaska owns Horizon, American owns Envoy, PSA, Piedmont).

SkyWest-operated United Express

Nonetheless, it’s always a union concern that an airline might shift flying away from mainline to lower-cost regionals, meaning fewer of the union’s jobs. But how much regional flying they can do gets contractually limited – actually owning the regional usually does not.

This Is A Good Deal, Regardless Of The Hype

This contract puts real money on the table. There are tradeoffs, like a 480-hour threshold for employer-subsidized health coverage. They didn’t get union-promised full ground pay. And the union relaxed scope restrictions on the airline owning a regional carrier.

But top base pay goes to ~ $85 an hour on May 31 and to more than $100 in the last year. Flight attendants get 50% boarding pay, and sit pay of one minute for every two minutes scheduled above 2.5 hours. Their 401(k) match rises to 4%. And the layover agreement specifies safe, clean, quiet and secure and not just habitable hotels and hotels on longer layovers need to be downtown and not merely downtown-like.

United’s tentative flight attendant agreement is a huge improvement over their current contract, and seems to do a better job aligning with flight attendant priorities than the one cabin crew rejected last summer. It should pass. And flight attendants who voted no because they were going to vote no on the first agreement no matter what got a second bite at the apple.

Ultimately it took too long to get them a raise, and it wasn’t more overall money than they probably could have gotten two years ago. So it’s great to see this finally happening.