Whether the bonus is worth it or not will vary wildly depending on your personal situation. If you're 22 and have no savings and no other source of income, maybe that quick infusion of cash is the difference between living in a studio apartment and living in your car. If your kids are grown then your and your wife's financial needs are probably a lot less than they were a few years ago. Do you have a decent emergency fund? Your personal financial situation will have a huge impact on that decision.


This shouldn't come as a surprise, but there's a reason that SkyWest is able to hire as many as they do every month without offering a huge bonus. To an extent, you can look at new hire bonuses as inversely proportional to how much pilots want to work at that airline.


We have a potential Coronavirus outbreak on the horizon. The stock market has started to fluctuate a bit. Maybe neither of those things end up significantly affecting the pilot supply/demand situation at the majors, but the airline business has always moved in waves, and eventually this one is going to come crashing down. When it does, you want to make sure you're somewhere you can be happy for the long term. Plus, even with things going well, getting hired at a major is a big crap shoot, especially if you don't have military fighter experience. Often there just seems to be no rime or reason to who they decide to hire. If your personal financial situation can absorb moving to a regional pilot's salary, I'd be very careful putting a lot of weight into a new hire bonus check.


I'll echo the sentiments above...find a solid regional with a reasonably junior base in a city either where you live now, or a city to which you'd like to move. I'm comfortable saying that regardless of your situation, the cost of commuting long term will far outweigh any new hire bonus.