By the numbers

Here's how many students appear for DGCA CPL exams every year

We counted every CPL exam result DGCA published from 2024 to early 2026. The exam-hall crowd grew by a third in a single year, and most of it is people coming back for another attempt.

Aryan · Founder, Ready Aviator·10 June 2026·4 min read

Illustration of a long queue of student pilots in uniform winding toward an exam-hall door, with a control tower in the distance

Your admit card has a computer number on it. So does everyone else’s. Put together every number DGCA ever published and you can see something the coaching brochures never show you: exactly how many people are chasing the same licence as you.

Almost 23,000 people sat the exams last year

In 2024, 17,397 students wrote at least one DGCA CPL paper. In 2025 the count hit 22,933, a third more people in a single year. To picture that crowd: you’d need about 127 fully boarded A320s to seat everyone who sat a DGCA exam last year.

Students sitting DGCA CPL exams, year by year

Unique students who wrote at least one paper

17,397

2024

22,933

2025

+31.8% in one year

14,867

2026

first 4 months only

And 2026 isn’t slowing down. The first four months alone put nearly 15,000 students in front of a question paper.

Most of this crowd is people coming back

Illustration of a student pilot studying late at night beside a wall calendar with months crossed off

Here’s the part the growth number hides: the queue doesn’t empty out and refill each year. It stacks. Two-thirds of 2024’s students were back again in 2025, still working through their papers.

4,483

students have written DGCA papers in 2024, 2025 and 2026: three years and counting with the same syllabus

Fresh faces joined too: 11,305 students sat their very first DGCA exam in 2025. Which means they joined a line where most of the people ahead of them were already on attempt two or three of something.

So what happens to everyone in this queue?

Here’s a preview: 2025 set an all-time record for new CPLs, with 1,628 issued. The same year, 22,933 students sat exams. Those aren’t the same people, because the licence takes years of exams, flying hours and paperwork. But the size of that gap is the story.

14×

even in a record year for new CPLs, the exam queue was fourteen times bigger than the number issued

Which paper does most of the stopping, and how many attempts is normal: that’s the next thing we’re counting on this blog. One thing the queue teaches everyone early: pilots measure prep in time, not money. Every retake is another three-month wait.