Senior United Flight Attendants To Earn Over $101 An Hour — New Pay Rates Leak Before Contract Release

Last week, United Airlines and flight attendant union negotiators came to an agreement on a new contract. Today, the union’s leadership unanimously voted to send the contract out to its members.

Flight attendants will receive copies of the contract tomorrow afternoon, and voting will run April 23 – May 12. If it’s approved, new pay rates will go into effect for June. Aviation watchdog JonNYC has shared the new pay rates early:

UA TA2 pay chart pic.twitter.com/vmrkEdVu2z

— JonNYC (@xJonNYC) April 2, 2026

This is about 2% more than comparable American Airlines starting pay rates. It’s also a higher rate than is paid at Delta. Delta has historically made up any difference with larger profit sharing payouts. And without a union contract, Delta increases pay each year so they’ll certainly respond to the United contract (since the same union that represents United is trying to organize at Delta).

By contrast, here’s the pay that was rejected last summer. We’re closer to ‘date of signing +1 year’ so that’s the more relevant comparison. The new contract numbers are about 2% higher than what was negotiated last time. They look like an even larger increase because of the passage of time that would have put United flight attendants into an even higher wage category had last summer’s deal been accepted.

We know that the contract includes pay for ground time on long layovers, boarding pay, and higher retro pay (signing bonus) that accounts for the long period of time since crew got their last raise in 2020 (worth $740 million). And we know there’s stronger language protecting the quality of hotels that flight attendants get on layovers.

However, we do not know what the union had to give up to get these improvements. In an internal communication, United described the agreement as ‘balanced and competitive’ – consistent with their message all along that they would increase pay and other costs if they also got efficiencies in the agreement. Some of the specifics that were floated included:

• PBS (algorithm) scheduling
  
• The right to own a regional airline, which the current agreement precluded.

That won’t be known until the full agreement is released. But we know that a flight attendant with 13 or more years of seniority willl be earning $101.41 per hour in 2030.