Dive Industry Statistics | Scuba Instructor Jobs & Career
UPDATED: The Economics of Being a Recreational Scuba Diving Instructor: Survey Results
Is it possible to make a living as a recreational scuba diving instructor? What to expect financially. Hourly rates. How much to invest in dive gear & scuba training.
Darcy Kieran is the author of the handbook “Your Career and/or Life as a Scuba Diving Instructor: How to Make a Good Living Out of Your Passion for Scuba Diving” and a unique advanced logbook & checklists for scuba divers, divemasters & instructors.
InDepth magazine and Scubanomics joined hands to conduct a survey on the economics of being a dive instructor. In the first article, based on the survey results and published in InDepth magazine, we looked specifically at the economics of being a tech diving instructor.
In this article, we will be looking at recreational scuba diving instructors — those without tech diving instruction credentials–and comparing the results between rec and tec instructors.
The survey results will help us evaluate realistic salary expectations and how much an instructor needs to invest in dive gear and course training. Is diving instructor/instructor trainer a viable career decision, or is it best thought of as a part-time job — albeit a fun one? Is it a good investment of time and money? We will also look at dive instructors’ aspirations, how many dive training agencies they are affiliated with, and other related topics.
Who answered the survey?
Before jumping into the exciting parts of the study, let’s have a quick look at who answered the survey.
Our pool of respondents shows a bias toward instructor trainers with many years of experience as dive instructors. Presumably, this group of people is more committed to the dive industry and, therefore, more receptive to answering the survey.
In this final analysis, 741 dive instructors answered the survey, of which 628 were in active-teaching status while the other 113 were no longer teaching.
Among those in teaching status, 62% were instructors, while 38% were instructor trainers/course directors. For simplicity of the text, we will use the term ‘instructor trainers’ as inclusive of course directors.
This article defines ‘recreational dive instructors’ as dive instructors and instructor trainers who do not have credentials to teach cave, rebreather, or other forms of tech diving courses.
Who are the recreational scuba diving instructors who answered the survey?
Among the non-tech diving instructors who participated in the survey, 24% were instructor trainers.
Recreational dive instructor respondents were teaching in the following regions:
- USA: 50.0%
- Europe: 16.5%
- Mexico, Central America, Caribbean, Tropical Atlantic: 7.3%
- Canada: 9.6%
- South Pacific, Indo-Pacific, Other Tropical Asian Region: 6.4%
- Australia, New Zealand: 5.1%
- Middle-East: 2.3%
- Other: 2.8%
For the most part, they were experienced instructors. 42.0% of the dive instructor respondents have been teaching for ten years or more; and 21.0%, for 5 to 9 years.
Gender-wise, 76.6% of the recreational (non-tech) diving instructors who answered the survey were male. In comparison, it appears tech diving is even more heavily male-dominated as 92.2% of tech diving instructors who participated in the survey were male.
The following figure presents the age of the recreational dive instructor respondents.
We have 33.0% of recreational dive instructors aged 55+ but only 23.4% in that age group for tech diving instructors.
On average, recreational scuba diving instructors are older than tech diving ones.
Otherwise, the following graph provides the household income from all sources for recreational diving instructors.
Now… Let’s dive into the juicy stuff!
The rest of this article presents data for recreational diving instructors and instructor trainers who do not have instructor credentials for rebreathers, cave, and other tech diving courses unless otherwise specified for comparison purposes.
The following data is from recreational diving instructors currently in teaching status. All amounts are in U.S. dollars.
How much have scuba diving instructors invested in their dive careers?
Here’s how much dive instructors have invested, on average, to develop their careers:
Teaching tech diving clearly requires a more significant investment.
How much income do scuba diving instructors generate from teaching?
Here’s how much annual income instructors have earned, on average, from teaching, including tips and commissions:
Recreational dive instructors experienced a drop of 29.2% in annual income during the pandemic year of 2020. It was 32.0% for tech diving instructors.
Similarly, we see a drop of 34.8% in the number of students trained during the year by recreational dive instructors and 38.1% by tech diving instructors.
It appears tech diving instructors faced a more considerable drop in revenues and the number of students trained than their recreational colleagues.
This results in an average income per student trained as follows:
Tech diving instructors are earning significantly more than non-tech diving instructors, which is consistent with the fact that they invested substantially more in training to get there.
On average, all dive instructors earned more per student during the pandemic, possibly helping to offset the additional costs related to more stringent hygiene protocols.
What is the level of teaching income for diving instructors who are teaching full-time?
In both years (2020 and 2019), the annual income level presented above is quite low to make a living, but it includes instructors working part-time. So let’s look at the annual income level from diving instructors who are teaching diving full time.
It is still not much to plan retirement, but it is a little bit better!
On average, tech diving instructors earn more than double what their recreational (non-tech) dive instructors take home. Side note: I wouldn’t want this to generate a “gold rush” to the teaching of tech diving. It is not necessarily for everybody.
Obviously, full-time dive instructors are also training more students:
This means an average income per student as follows, for instructors teaching full time:
Based on these numbers, full-time dive instructors are generating more income per student.
In both cases (full-time and part-time), revenues per student went up during the pandemic.
How much are scuba diving instructors earning per hour?
This is, on average, how much income dive instructors estimate earning per hour when working as an instructor:
A Note About Full-Time Dive Instructors
From these survey results, it appears that instructor-respondents who defined themselves as full-time instructors are doing other dive industry work besides teaching. The survey results give us an average annual salary of $25,815.00 and 80 students trained per year (pre-pandemic). This is an average of fewer than two students per week!
Therefore, these “full-time instructors” are likely to be working full-time in the dive industry but not full-time as dive instructors. This could explain why full-time instructors are earning less, per hour, than part-time ones. The full-time instructors probably spend time on even less profitable activities like filling cylinders and handling rental gear.
Thinking of becoming a dive instructor? Check: Your Career and/or Life as a Scuba Diving Instructor: How to make a good living out of your passion for diving.What was the impact of the pandemic on your activities as a dive instructor?
From the results above, we confirmed that, on average, the number of students trained and revenues went down significantly during the pandemic.
However, 3.8% of recreational dive instructors actually experienced growth during that period, as we can see in the following graph.
This is consistent with Scubanomics’ analysis of 2020 entry-level scuba diving certifications in the USA. While the pandemic caused a drastic drop in teaching activities, states like Florida and Hawaii witnessed growth as people were looking for activities that didn’t require an international flight.
What is your “employer”?
About a third of recreational diving instructors teach as independent/self-employed. This ratio is more-than-half for tech diving instructors.
This ratio is significantly different for full-time recreational diving instructors. Quite logically, as we see in the graph below, teaching in a resort is more likely to be associated with working full time as a dive professional.
So… Can we make a living as recreational scuba diving instructors?
If you compare the income of a full-time recreational diving instructor ($24,909.43 pre-pandemic) to the poverty line ($12,880 in the USA), it appears the answer could be yes. Still, you are dangerously close to the poverty line!
Diving instructors are divided on that question, as we see by their answers below.
It is close to being a 50/50 split opinion, although the “yes” side is winning slightly.
Is it a good investment?
Even if you were OK with $25 thousand in annual income as a full-time recreational dive instructor, let’s not forget that you had a significant investment to make for the “right to work for close to nothing”!
Recreational diving instructors have invested, on average, about 34 thousand dollars ($18,523.94 in training and $15,193.53 in gear) to get the credentials and equipment needed to teach scuba diving. If you hadn’t gone down that path, you could have invested that money in a retirement fund generating annual returns.
Things worsen when you factor in the number of hours you spend on becoming a scuba diving instructor. This ‘time’ has value because you could spend doing something else for remuneration.
So… $24,909.43 in annual income is misleading. In reality, you are either working for very, very, VERY little, or you are not getting any significant return on the investment you made to become a recreational dive instructor. Or both!
How much ‘diving’ is done by dive instructors, outside of teaching?
This is the average number of dives done outside of teaching by scuba diving instructors:
This is a drop of 43% for recreational dive instructors, from pre-pandemic to pandemic year, and 42% for tech diving instructors.
Recreational Diving Instructors as Watersport Participants
Besides scuba diving for fun and teaching diving, what do recreational dive instructors do as participants in an activity?
There is no surprise that snorkeling is the winner. It is a close cousin!
What recreational dive instructors intend on participating in is more interesting.
In the above graph, we see the intention to participate in the activity (as a participant, not an instructor) by dive instructors who have never done the activity before.
Tech diving as a whole is of interest to recreational scuba diving instructors, and the clear winner is rebreather diving.
More than 30% of dive instructors want to give rebreathers a try!
The interest in surface-supplied air (tankless) diving is also interesting at 6.4%, considering the fact that it has not been promoted by large dive training organizations, and only 2.8% of dive instructors have already participated in such a dive.
What are scuba diving instructors’ goals for the future?
First, let’s look at what additional instructor credentials are of interest to recreational dive instructors.
Intend to Pursue Further Instructor Credentials
Recreational dive instructors are interested in teaching general tech diving courses, presumably before graduating to cave and rebreather.
Otherwise, we have two noteworthy areas of interest:
- Adaptive/handicapped scuba: 21%. This is more than 1 out of 5 recreational diving instructors interested in the specialization. We should expect further development on this front by dive training agencies. And we shouldn’t be surprised to see some acquisitions and consolidations as well.
- Tankless (surface-supplied air) diving: 5.9%. This activity is currently outside traditional dive training agencies, and therefore, a 5.9% level of interest may be significant.
What additional professional goals do recreational scuba diving instructors have within the dive industry?
These are the goals current recreational dive instructors intend on pursuing:
- Become an instructor trainer: 25.7%
- Own a resort/dive center in a tourist destination: 21.6%
- Own a dive center in a non-tourist location (dive shop): 9.2%
- Own a liveaboard: 8.3%
It is also worth noting that 41.7% of current recreational diving instructors had no stated additional professional goal.
Training Agencies!
A dive instructor article cannot be complete without at least some mention of dive training agencies!
On average, recreational diving instructors are affiliated with 1.4 dive training certification agencies, and the following graph represents the split among survey respondents.
For tech diving instructors, we had an average of 2.1 dive training agencies per instructor, which makes sense since tech diving instructors often have a main dive training agency for rec courses and another one for tech diving.
Additional Observations by Recreational Dive Instructors
The survey ended with two open-ended questions. Here are some of the noteworthy comments we read in these answers.
We didn’t re-type them all, but we thank all of you who have provided feedback.
What are your main challenges as a dive instructor?
- Earning enough money to live on.
- Being a female who teaches freediving can be really challenging. I have been very challenged over the years with finding equity in this industry, and to be taken seriously.
- Low pay relative to the time it takes to properly teach to standards while also ensuring students have an outstanding experience at every step.
- Students are unwilling to put in the time and effort to become efficient divers. The majority just want a card without putting in the work.
- Balancing my actual work with this as a part-time gig.
- Lack of leadership in certifying agencies such as PADI, SSI, etc.
- You will never make a living wage as a Dive Instructor. All of our dive instructors are retired and have pensions, so the income made in diving is only fun money.
- Teach respect for the sea, diving safety, and fun.
- Over-saturation with scuba instructors.
- In the industry in my country, everyone wants to do it for free or for a small allowance just to be able to dive.
- Acquiring students as an independent instructor.
- Bringing new divers in, and extremely high dropout rate.
- So many cut-rate independent instructors. They drive the value of scuba training down, and they can be sloppy, not following standards.
- Attracting students and finding places (pools) to conduct confined water sessions.
- Dive shops that offer low-cost training by not following standards.
- Being priced competitively to compete with local dive shops who sell bargain basement training, as I’m working independently now. Finding new clients. Equipment manufacturers refuse to work with independents/non-retail establishments.
- Logistics: access to pools, distance to suitable OW sites. Overhead costs, especially certifying agency fees.
- Many dive shops offer super short/fast classes that do not and cannot possibly teach to standard. But students don’t realize this, so that is the course/shop they opt for because they can complete the class sooner for the same cost. It forces the market to adjust, resulting in poorly trained divers… And the new divers are not at all aware that they are essentially being “cheated” out of good, quality training.
- Equipment companies, training agency, pool availability.
- Being an instructor that is being remembered by students as someone that showed them the beauty of the underwater world.
- Affiliating with local dive shops. There is just way too much petty bickering and deceit.
- Oversaturation of instructors. Students wanting to pay the least amount possible for training. The reluctance of students to take refreshers if out of the water for an extended time. Students overestimating their skills and training and diving FAR outside of those.
- Industry devaluation and discounting. Industries like skiing and golf charge significantly more for training than we do in scuba.
- If you don’t mind to be ill-paid, ill-treated, all those for long hours of work some time for weeks without a break, very often without a proper work visa and health insurance, to be told you are lucky enough to be diving so to STFU…
- It is a negative income activity for me.
- None. I do it for fun, so I don’t need the money from it.
It is noteworthy that numerous respondents included references to the difficulty in finding pools and to training standards not being followed. We only included a handful of these comments above.
Final thoughts shared by scuba instructors on the ‘economics’ of being a dive instructor.
Ready? Set. Go!
- You do it because you love it, and that’s a terrible business model. I don’t expect it to improve. Millennials are keen on learning to dive, but as one of many experiences they do once. I fear it’s a dying industry.
- The economics are both opaque and not really discussed in usable detail with instructor candidates.
- The market is flooded with instructors, and new divers have little to no idea what to look for in an instructor, so course price is often the decisive factor.
- It’s not a career you should go into if you want money, but if you are passionate about diving and the marine environment.
- It’s a bit of a Ponzi scheme.
- There are too many instructors out there. The industry pushes instructors too much to crank out certifications (and sometimes absurd “specialties”) instead of regularly providing good diving experiences for entry-level certified divers.
- The industry is outdated.
- Even though my QuickBooks all-time report shows I’ve dug a pretty big hole since 2003, I stay around year after year because I love teaching.
- People pay $1000 for an iPhone. Why is diving so cheap?
- I lose money doing it. But I do it because I love it. I love being able to give people the gift of exploring our underwater world. I love being an advocate for our water life and coral conservation. If I could do it full-time, I would. But it’s just not a full-time career option.
- While instructors want to make a living teaching, they need to understand they need to also do retail, repair, behind the scenes, etc.
- Dive Instructors and DMs are a dime a dozen. PADI churns out so many Dive Instructors and Divemasters that there will never be a demand for either. Thus wages will stay stagnant for many years.
- It isn’t a viable career path if you plan to support yourself in retirement.
- Open water classes should not be the loss leader in the shops.
- As a diving instructor and guide, I have to make sure that my students or guests are safe and healthy coming back to the surface. This aspect is very seldom recognized in the payment.
- It’s possible to survive, but difficult to thrive.
- There are too many inexperienced instructors on the market who are willing to work for very low income.
- As long as I break even with insurance, dues, and equipment maintenance and upgrades, I’m happy.
- You do it for the lifestyle, definitely not the money.
- Long hours, poor pay, dangerous work, high expense of gear, and insurance costs.
- Membership fees should have been lowered during the pandemic.
- Tough to make a living at it but a great side business opportunity, especially as an independent contractor who can write off “business” expenses.
- I am pretty much concerned about the increasing difficulties that the scuba diving market has been facing.
- The requirement to dive a “shop uniform” at instructor cost places a heavy burden on the instructor for little to no extra pay. Shops that change “uniform” make things hard for instructors.
- If you’re doing it for the economics and expecting to earn a living, you’re sadly disillusioned.
- I can’t imagine making a living as a dive instructor. For me, a retiree with adequate resources, it’s a hobby. I enjoy diving, teaching, and meeting people. It’s nice that instructing defrays some costs of my dive hobby. But dive instructor is not and never will be my career.
- The current model is broken. Retaining profits weakens year to year as the cost of materials, certifications, insurance, and equipment all go up, but the price of courses offered does not climb the same amount.
- The industry is declining in the number of divers and divers abandoning the sport. Dive center staff is being abused and poorly paid or, worse, not paid as a way to gain experience, dive count for certification, and knowledge.
- The industry is racing to the bottom.
- What’s the difference between a family-sized pizza and an instructor’s wages? Only one feeds a family.
And, of course, we had to take note of this one:
- I love your series; it’s the only reason I go to medium.com.
Well… Thank you!
From the Scubanomics survey on dive instructors, we have, so far, produced the following reports:
- Part 1: This article, on the “economics” of being a recreational scuba diving instructor compared to a technical diving instructor.
- Part 2: A Look At Dive Instructors Who Did Not Renew Their Teaching Status: The “economics” of the dropped-out scuba diving instructors. Their reasons. Their profile.
- Part 3: Differences in dive professionals’ income, based on the instructor’s gender, location, training agency affiliation, experience, age, and more.
Subscribe to be kept in the loop. You may also pursue this discussion with the author, Darcy Kieran, on LinkedIn.
A Very Special Thank You!
Michael Menduno (InDepth) and Darcy Kieran (Scubanomics) want to warmly thank the following organizations for their support of this study:
GUE, SITA, International Training (TDI/SDI/ERDI/PFI), The Underwater Marketing Company, Tec Clark — The Dive Locker, RAID, DAN Europe, X-Ray Mag, DiveNewsWire, and Scuba News Canada.
Additional Resources:
Also from Darcy Kieran:
- Handbook: Your Career and/or Life as a Scuba Diving Instructor: How to Make a Good Living Out of Your Passion for Scuba Diving.
- Logbook: Advanced Scuba Diving Logbook with Checklists for certified scuba divers, divemasters & dive instructors.
- Handbook: Advanced Guide to SPF Scuba Diving for Scuba Divers, Divemasters & Dive Instructors: Develop Better Scuba Diving Skills, Dive Safer, Save Money & Have More Fun!
- Handbook: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide To Scuba Diving: How to Increase Safety, Save Money & Have More Fun!
- Logbook: STARTER Scuba Diving Logbook with Checklists while getting your open water diver certification!
- Reference book: Scuba Diving Industry Market Reports, Data & Statistics.
Side note: During your surface intervals, have a look at my novels with a scuba diving twist, starting with “Mystery of The Blue Dragon” and “Shadows on Ocean Drive.”
You could help the dive industry by taking part in ongoing dive industry surveys. You will also find results from our past scuba diving market studies here.
Don’t be left out! Subscribe to Scubanomics: The Dive Industry Compass to be the first to know about new dive industry market data & insights. Otherwise, be our “dive business buddy” on LinkedIn, Facebook, and elsewhere.
What now? Have a look at the complete Scubanomics Table of Contents.
