Of course, there will be a pilot somewhere in the world who is paid the highest, but we will never know who this is. Instead, we can only look at how much pilots are paid by company or by area in order to figure out where those who are the highest paid are.
Being a pilot is definitely a well-paid job, however there are some common misconceptions about how much they make a year. A lot of people believe that pilots make more than $300,000 a year, but generally they do not. There are some cases where pilots do earn this amount of money, but these are only really pilots who fly private jets for the mega-rich, so they are generally few and far between.
From an area perspective, in the USA, the highest paid pilots can be found in California where the average pilot’s salary is $208,000. These are followed by Illinois pilots who are paid $194,000 on average. Then in terms of airlines, Delta is one of the best companies to work for as they pay their captains roughly $205,000 per annum. So it is likely that the highest paid pilot in the world is operating in one of these areas.