Free Accomodation, A Tax-Free Salary, And A Huge 22 Week Bonus – Inside The Life Of An Emirates Flight Attendant

Flight attendants at the Dubai-based mega airline Emirates are truly living the high life after the carrier reported its best financial results ever and decided to reward them with a massive bonus worth 22 weeks of basic pay – yes, nearly six months of pay in a single bonus.

And that’s on top of all the other benefits that tens of thousands of flight attendants at Emirates already enjoy, including free accommodation, free transport to and from work, free health insurance, and a lucrative tax-free salary.

And, of course, don’t forget the other benefits that come from working for one of the largest airlines in the world, such as deeply discounted flights and a free ticket to visit your home country each year. Flight attendants don’t even need to wash or iron their uniforms as free dry cleaning is provided.

On top of all of those benefits is a profit-sharing scheme that rewards employees when times are good. And boy, times are good at the moment.

Last week, the airline’s parent company reported a profit for 2024 of US $22.7 billion, making it the most profitable aviation group in the entire world, overtaking Delta Air Lines, which has historically held this title.

Having reported its most successful year ever, smashing previous financial results, Emirates decided that a very generous bonus was also in order. Around 120,000 Emirates employees around the world will get a massive boost in the form of a bonus worth 22 weeks of basic pay.

Flight attendants are paid both a basic wage and flying pay, and while the bonus only applies to their basic salary, it will still represent a very big boost – remember, this will be paid tax-free.

This is the third consecutive year that crew members at Emirates have been rewarded in this way, after receiving a bonus worth 20 weeks of pay in 2024 and a bonus worth 24 weeks worth of pay in 2023.

Of course, these kinds of bonuses can only be offered when the airline is doing financially well, and starting in 2019 and lasting all through the COVID-19 pandemic, Emirates employees didn’t see a single bonus as the airline simply couldn’t afford to offer these kinds of perks.

It’s hard to compare the kinds of bonuses that flight attendants at Emirates are getting paid with their peers in North America, who will typically see bonuses worth just 2% or 3% of their annual salary.

When you look on a broader scale, there’s not a single other airline that beats the bonuses paid out by Emirates, with the exception of Singapore Airlines, which went above and beyond by offering staffers a bonus equal to 32 weeks of pay last year.

Back when Emirates was establishing itself as an airline in the 1990s and early 2000s, the airline offered generous perks like free accommodation and industry-leading pay to lure young foreigners from Europe and further afield to pack up their lives and move to a strange new city in the desert with strict laws and very different cultural norms to what they were used to back at home.

Today, however, Dubai has become a cosmopolitan city that Europeans and Americans long to move to. Emirates probably wouldn’t struggle to recruit flight attendants even if it scaled back some of its perks.

That being said, the generous salary and benefits represent just how hard Emirates cabin crew work, especially in comparison to many of their European and North American peers.