2025–26 Instructor Survey Results
Every spring, AIARE surveys instructors and course leaders to learn as much as we can about who’s out there working and what the work is like. These insights help us steer the content of instructor training courses, pro training, continuing education opportunities, and the resources we make available to our providers and the general public. Here are some topline takeaways from this year’s survey:
Who’s in our instructor pool?
AIARE instructors are still mostly male (72%), living in western mountain states (>95%), averaging 43 years of age. Most of us (64%), have been skiing, snowshoeing, snowmobiling, or climbing in the winter backcountry for much longer than we’ve been teaching AIARE, and most of us (90%) have been teaching AIARE for less than ten years.
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What’s the work like?
Average day wages for instructors continue to inch up with the average minimum daily wage for teaching an AIARE 1 now at $310/day, AIARE Rescue at $300/day, and AIARE 2 at $311/day. For CLs, those average day wages are $450 (AIARE 1), $427 (Avalanche Rescue), and $403 (AIARE 2). Unfortunately, 41% of instructors do not receive any additional compensation for prep, travel, or equipment, but the remainder report support in the form of per diems, hourly prep time compensation, travel support, and equipment stipends. One of the reasons we collect this data is to ensure that providers notice this trend—instructors report an average 5 hours of prep work on any AIARE course. On average, AIARE Instructors are teaching four courses per winter (AIARE 1, AIARE Rescue, or AIARE 2).
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What does AIARE do with this information?
Understanding who’s out there working and how they’re working helps us lean into some goals. AIARE hopes to see greater diversity in our instructor pool. We want more women and non-binary students to learn from instructors like them, or at least have the option to, and we want more men to benefit from the experiences of co-teaching with more women too. Our ongoing scholarships, along with seeking to develop and hire new instructor team members, will keep helping us uplift women, non-binary folks, LGBTQIA+, and BIPOC instructors as role-models.
We also want to keep working with our providers to make teaching AIARE a rewarding and sustainable way to work in the winter. We want to see greater percentages of AIARE instructors continuing to teach for more than 10 years. There could be a variety of reasons why so many instructors stop teaching after 10 years, but those veteran instructors have a wealth of experience to pass along to new instructors. We want to help providers understand how to retain and sustain our most experienced educators.
2026–27 Outlook
This winter, we’re launching new curricula, including an AIARE 1 Refresher course, to create more opportunities for Providers and Instructors to have an impact on their students. We hope the AIARE 1 Refresher course will boost interest in AIARE 2, and provide another short course form to put AIARE instructors in front of more students for more programs in a winter. We’re launching a new Course Leader Training to make that program more accessible and more rewarding for those AIARE Instructors who would like to lead their peers one day, and increase their earning potential in the process.