referencesource/pilot-licence-minimum-requirements-by-authority

Pilot licence minimum hours, age and prerequisites by civil aviation authority

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• —Last verified: 2026-08-10
• —Stale after: 2027-08-10 (past this date, prefer the canonical copy — it re-verifies on a cadence this snapshot does not)
• —Records: 203

The minimum flight hours, minimum age, solo and cross-country requirements and prerequisite licences for each pilot licence and rating, compared across the FAA (United States), EASA (European Union), the UK CAA (retained Part-FCL) and Transport Canada. One record is one stated requirement for one licence under one authority, with the provision citation. Answers 'how many hours do I need for a private pilot licence UK vs US', 'FAA PPL minimum flight hours 61.109', 'EASA PPL 45 hours', 'minimum age for a commercial pilot licence Canada', 'can simulator time count towards a PPL', and 'how many hours to convert an FAA PPL to a UK licence'. The UK kept the EU article numbering after Brexit and then changed the number inside it: FCL.210.A(a) reads 45 hours in EU law and 40 hours in UK retained law, amended with effect from 1 October 2025 by S.I. 2025/878. Same provision identifier, two different values, one of them recent.

Provenance — what every record carries

Every record carries source (the URL the value was read from) and source_quote (a verbatim quote from that page stating it). A value you cannot check against its page is indistinguishable from an invented one; these can all be checked. Each record is also individually addressable on the canonical site at its url.

Licence position

Facts extracted from freely published primary law: US federal regulations via Cornell LII, EU regulations via EUR-Lex, UK retained EU law via legislation.gov.uk, and Canadian Aviation Regulations standards via Transport Canada. All four are public legal texts, published free and without login, and legal text is not privately owned. ICAO Annex 1 is deliberately not used: it is a paid ICAO document and its product is the compilation.

Facts are not copyrightable; what this dataset takes from each source is a fact plus a short attributed quote linking back to the page that states it.

Sources

• —https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/61.109
• —https://tc.canada.ca/en/corporate-services/acts-regulations/list-regulations/canadian-aviation-regulations-sor-96-433/standards/standard-421-flight-crew-permits-licences-ratings-canadian-aviation-regulations-cars
• —https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32011R1178
• —https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2011/1178/annex/I/division/SUBPART+C/section/2/division/FCL.210.A
• —https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/61.103
• —https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2011/1178/contents

Fields

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