This has been a mighty long process, so let’s hope things go more smoothly this time than last time…
United & AFA reach tentative agreement on new contract
The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA) and United Airlines have announced that they’ve reached a tentative agreement on a new contract for 30,000 flight attendants. For some background, in recent years we’ve seen flight attendants at most major airlines in the United States negotiate new contracts, following the pandemic.
Delta flight attendants aren’t unionized, so they get proactive pay raises, but don’t negotiate new contracts in the same way, since they don’t have collective bargaining. Meanwhile the only major airline where flight attendants haven’t received a new contract is United.
Around the middle of 2025, a tentative agreement was reached for a new contract at United. However, flight attendants ended up rejecting the contract in a vote, with 71% of the membership base voting against the contract. This has been a really drawn out negotiation process, and it has certainly caused some bad blood between management and the union.
The full tentative agreement will be presented to union leadership on April 1, 2026, and full details are expected to be made public on April 3. Assuming leadership approves of the contract, voting among flight attendants will take place between April 23 and May 12, and then the new contract would go into effect as of May 31, 2026.
United has obviously been improving financially in recent years, and is increasingly moving out of American’s league and into Delta’s league. However, United has also had a major advantage when it comes to labor costs, given the number of employee work groups that don’t have new contracts.
It’ll be interesting to see what this new contract includes
Back in 2025 when flight attendants voted on the first contract, the agreement included the following (or so it was described):
- Industry leading compensation
- Industry leading retro pay
- Hotel, scheduling, reserve, and other quality of life improvements
- In the first year alone, flight attendants would gain 40% of total economic improvements
It was actually a very competitive contract, but flight attendants wanted an industry leading contract, and there were some specific provisions the membership base wasn’t happy about. It seems that with this updated contract, flight attendants can expect the following incremental improvements over the last contract:
- Improved base pay rates
- Restrictions on redeye flying
- Sit pay for scheduled and rescheduled sits of over 2.5 hours
- Increased retro pay
- Improved language in hotels and electronic notifications
United’s management notes how top wage rates for flight attendants will reach $100 per hour by the end of the agreement, making United flight attendants the best paid in the industry.
We don’t yet know the details of the new contract, but for context, below was the new pay scale that was proposed during the 2025 contract negotiations, and it’s noted that rates have gone up since then.
Bottom line
United flight attendants and management have reached a new tentative agreement on a contract, after the membership overwhelming rejected the 2025 contract proposal. We don’t yet know the full details of the new contract, but it sounds like there are some incremental improvements over the previous version.
I hope that flight attendants are happy with this and that it gets ratified, so that this tension between management and employees goes away. For that matter, it’ll be very interesting to see how this impacts United’s financial performance as well…
What do you make of United flight attendants once again having a tentative agreement?
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