AV & Drone Operators: Hiring and Pay Market Report

How it was measured

Every day this site reads the public job boards of the robot training employers and programs it follows. Apply clicks come from visitors on RobotTraining.jobs, and full descriptions only from employers whose boards post them. A single database query produces each figure for the window shown, and the live page and every monthly edition run that identical query. The note under each figure gives its base.

Kind of work

Every role is sorted, using its title and description, into one of the seven kinds of robot training work followed here. This report covers the roles sorted into AV & Drone Operators.

Fixed panel

Only employers this site already followed when the weekly series starts. Tracking just their roles keeps a later addition from looking like growth.

Index

Average open roles across the panel in a given week, over the base week's average, multiplied by 100. It is plotted next to the same index for all robot training work at those employers.

Open role

On a given day, a role that has been posted and still shows in the employer's feed.

New listing

A role seen for the first time during the window, at an employer this site was already following the week before. Whatever an employer has up in its first tracked week is back catalogue and does not count as new.

Removed listing

A role that dropped out of its employer's feed within the window.

Days listed

For a role that came down: the span from its listing date to the final day its feed showed it. A median needs 3 or more such roles.

HHI

Herfindahl-Hirschman Index: square each employer's percentage share of open roles and add them up, giving 0 to 10,000. Below 1,500 is unconcentrated, 1,500 to 2,500 moderately concentrated, over 2,500 highly concentrated.

Advertised pay

The hourly rate a listing gives, using the midpoint when it gives a range. A median appears only when 3 or more roles state a rate, and the middle half spans the 25th to the 75th percentile.

Weekly clicks per open role

Apply clicks made on RobotTraining.jobs for a particular role, over the total days the roles stayed open, multiplied by 7.

Demand index

Weekly clicks per open role over the same rate for every role on the site. Above 1, these roles attract more applicants than a typical role.

Listing age

How long before the window's first day a role went up: inside the window, up to 4 weeks earlier, 4 to 12 weeks earlier, or longer ago. The listing date is the board's posting date, or failing that the role's first day in the feed.

Location rule

Taken from the location text of each listing or, when that text names no country, from what the listing's own description says: worldwide, worldwide with named exceptions, named countries only, or no rule given.

Open to a country

Residents of a country can apply when the role is worldwide, when it gives no rule at all (the job board treats such a role as open to everyone), when its country list includes them, or when its exclusion list leaves them out. Every report in this series compares the same 20 countries.

Window

Live page: the 28 most recent full days (UTC), plus the twelve most recent full ISO weeks for the weekly series, starting no earlier than the week of 14 Sep 2026. Edition: a single calendar month (UTC) and the weeks in it.

Limits of this data

• Hiring that happens off public job boards is invisible here, and some data-collection programs sign people up inside an app instead of posting a job.
• A posting does not equal a hire. Certain employers leave evergreen roles up for months, and others post the same role once per city or country.
• Apply clicks show what RobotTraining.jobs visitors want, and roles placed higher get more of them. Click counts are never broken out by employer.
• Requirements are shown only when this kind's described roles are numerous enough to stand on their own next to the other kinds; a weight fitted on every kind's own counts pulls a small kind toward the shares of all described roles.
• When a kind of work has few open roles, a handful of listings can swing its figures, so rows resting on too little data carry a small-sample tag.

Collection and classification of listings are explained on the methodology page. Freshness, completeness and consistency are tested daily in the data quality report.

Monthly editions

The live page spans the 28 most recent full days and updates daily. Every finished month also gets its own edition, locked two days after month end, so a number quoted from it stays fixed.

• Live page28 most recent full days, rebuilt daily
• October 2026 edition (you are here)Will lock when the next daily refresh runs

Quoting this report

You may quote, chart or republish these figures under CC BY 4.0, provided you link back to this page. This edition is locked: its numbers will not change.

@misc{robottrainingjobs_av_and_drone_operator_market_2026_10,
  author = {{RobotTraining.jobs}},
  title = {AV & Drone Operators: Hiring and Pay Market Report, October 2026 edition},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://robottraining.jobs/research/av-and-drone-operator-market/2026-10}},
}

Keep reading

Compare with every other kind of work:

• Robot Teleoperation market
• Data & Demonstration Collection market
• Egocentric & Wearable Capture market
• Embodied-AI Data Annotation market
• Robot Task Evaluation & QA market
• Robot Fleet Operations market

• Open Robot Training Jobs, Counted WeeklyWeek over week, is demand for people to train robots rising or falling?Open report
• Robot Training Hiring: Openings, Turnover and EligibilityHow many robot training jobs are live, which employers post them, how quickly do listings come and go, and who is eligible to apply?Open report
• Robot Training Employer Health: Who Is Growing, Holding or ShrinkingWhich robot training employers are adding roles, holding steady or cutting back, and are the rates in their new listings rising or falling?Open report
• Where Robot Training Hiring Is Heading, Week by WeekWeek over week, which kinds of robot training work, professions and languages are employers hiring more of, and which are cooling?Open report
• Scorecard of Robot Training EmployersSide by side, how do robot training employers and programs stack up on openings, pay, who can apply and how fast roles turn over?Open report
• Who Dominates Each Kind of Robot Training WorkFor each kind of robot training work, how many employers are competing, and how big a slice does the largest one have?Open report
• Robot Training Pay Report 2026How much do robot training jobs pay, broken down by kind of work and employer?Open report

Browse all 91 reports