FAA A&P Mechanic Eligibility Requirements

Minimum Age: 18 Years Old

The FAA requires you to be at least 18 years old at the time of certification under 14 CFR §65.71(a)(1). There is no minimum age to begin accumulating experience or attending an AMTS program, and there is no upper age limit. You can work as a mechanic's helper or student apprentice before turning 18, but you may not be certificated until you meet the age requirement.

English Language Proficiency

You must be able to read, write, speak, and understand the English language under 14 CFR §65.71(a)(2). This requirement exists because aviation technical publications, maintenance manuals, FAA regulations, and Airworthiness Directives are all written in English, and safety-critical communication with the FAA, DMEs, and other certificate holders depends on English literacy. If you have a language or speech impediment, the FAA may authorize alternative means of demonstrating compliance. There is no formal language test — the DME assesses your English proficiency during the oral examination.

Experience Path: 18 or 30 Months of Documented Practical Experience

If you are not a Part-147 graduate, you must accumulate practical experience directly on aircraft (or aircraft components related to the rating sought) under the supervision of a certificated mechanic. Under 14 CFR §65.77, you need 18 months of experience for a single rating (Airframe only or Powerplant only). For both ratings simultaneously, you need 30 months of experience concurrently covering both Airframe and Powerplant work. The experience must be practical — hands-on maintenance tasks — not administrative or ramp duties. It must be documented and certified by your supervising mechanic on FAA Form 8610-2.

Part-147 Path: Graduation from an FAA-Approved AMTS

Graduates of FAA-certificated Aviation Maintenance Technician Schools (AMTS) operating under 14 CFR Part 147 satisfy the practical experience requirement through their school's FAA-approved curriculum. The school's training record, signed by the school's director of training, serves as the experience documentation on Form 8610-2 in lieu of a supervising mechanic's sign-off. Part-147 programs must meet minimum curriculum hour requirements set by the FAA, covering general, airframe, and powerplant subject areas. Confirm that your school holds current FAA Part-147 certification before enrolling.

What Counts as Practical Experience?

The FAA defines practical experience as hands-on work on aircraft or aircraft engines. This includes tasks such as performing scheduled inspections, removing and installing components, performing repairs (sheet metal, composites, hydraulics, electrical), conducting engine runs, and using technical publications and tools correctly. Experience gained in military aviation maintenance, on aircraft components in a FAA-repair station (14 CFR Part 145), or in certain industrial settings may qualify — the DME and the FSDO (Flight Standards District Office) make the final determination. General ramp-agent or parts-counter work does not qualify.

Check Your Eligibility Before the Exam

Use AMTprep's free eligibility checker at /eligibility to walk through the age, English, and experience questions and get an immediate readiness assessment. The checker maps your inputs to the 14 CFR §65.71/65.77 criteria and shows you exactly how much experience you still need to accumulate. Because the DME will verify your experience documentation on exam day, it is important to start maintaining accurate records from your first day of work.

How the FSDO Actually Evaluates Your Experience

The regulation sets the standard, but a person at your local Flight Standards District Office decides whether you have met it. Understanding what that person is looking at changes how you prepare.

They are looking for three things. First, duration: enough calendar time doing qualifying work, 18 months for one rating or 30 months concurrent for both. Second, breadth: evidence that the work spanned the subject areas of the rating rather than clustering in one corner of it. An applicant with 30 months of nothing but interior refurbishment has the time but not the breadth. Third, supervision: that the work was performed under someone holding the appropriate certificate and rating, who is willing to certify it.

Breadth is where applications most often stall. The practical fix is to map your logged work against the ACS subject areas for the rating you are seeking and look for the empty columns. If you have never touched a landing gear system, an environmental system or a fuel system, that is visible in your record and it is the kind of gap that produces a request for more documentation rather than an authorisation to test.

The FSDO may interview you about the record you have submitted. This is not adversarial, but it is real: they are confirming that the person in front of them did the work described. Be able to talk about specific jobs, what was wrong, what you did, and what reference you worked from.

Military Experience and the JSAMTCC Route

Military aviation maintenance experience can satisfy the 14 CFR 65.77 requirement, but it does not do so automatically and it is not something an online checker can determine for you.

The Joint Service Aviation Maintenance Technician Certification Council exists precisely to bridge this gap. It maps military occupational specialties against the FAA requirements and identifies which specialties, at which skill levels and with how much time, correspond to eligibility for the airframe rating, the powerplant rating, or both. Your service's programme office is the right first stop, because the mapping is specific to the specialty rather than to military service in general.

What you will need is documentary: your DD Form 214, job qualification or training records showing the specialty and skill level, and where possible a record of the actual maintenance tasks performed. Records that describe duties in military terminology benefit from a plain-English translation into the FAA's subject areas, because the person evaluating them may not know what your rating abbreviation means.

Two practical notes. Experience gained in one specialty may qualify you for one rating and not the other, so a decision about whether to pursue both may hinge on the evaluation. And it is worth starting the FSDO conversation before separation rather than after, while your records and the people who can certify them are still accessible.

Documenting Experience So It Survives Review

The single most common avoidable problem in the experience route is a record that describes time rather than work.

An entry reading three years, line maintenance, various aircraft tells an evaluator nothing they can assess. An entry recording the date, the aircraft, the task performed, the reference used, and the hours spent, signed by the supervising mechanic, is evidence. The difference costs a few minutes per entry at the time and can cost months at the end if it was not done.

Log continuously rather than reconstructing. Records built from memory years later are both less accurate and less credible, and supervisors move on — a mechanic who has left the company cannot sign for work they no longer remember supervising. Every entry you leave unsigned is an entry that may become unsignable.

Organise by task area, not chronologically. Chronological logs make duration easy to prove and breadth impossible to see. A record grouped by the kind of work performed lets both you and the evaluator answer the breadth question at a glance, and shows you your own gaps early enough to seek work that fills them.

This is exactly what an experience logbook is for, and what the eventual Form 8610-2 submission is built from. A well-kept record makes that form a transcription exercise; a poorly-kept one makes it an archaeology project.

Eligibility Mistakes That Cost Months

Four mistakes account for most of the delay candidates experience between deciding to certificate and being authorised to test, and all four are avoidable.

The first is logging time instead of work. Months on a payroll are not the unit the regulation measures; practical maintenance experience is. A record that says two years, line maintenance is not assessable, and rebuilding it retrospectively is difficult and less credible than keeping it as you go.

The second is unsigned experience. Supervisors move on, shops close, and a mechanic who has left cannot certify work they no longer remember supervising. Every entry you leave unsigned this month is an entry that may be unsignable next year. Get signatures while the person is still down the corridor.

The third is narrow experience. Time spent entirely within one system, one aircraft or one kind of task can satisfy the duration requirement and still fail the breadth question. Mapping your work against the ACS subject areas periodically shows you the empty columns early enough to go looking for work that fills them.

The fourth is leaving the FSDO conversation until the end. On the experience route the FSDO reviews and authorises before you test, that review takes time, and a request for further documentation restarts the clock. Candidates who book an examiner before that authorisation is in hand end up rescheduling — and the examiner's next slot may be weeks out.

Frequently asked questions

Does military aircraft maintenance experience count toward the 18/30-month requirement?

Yes. Documented military aviation maintenance experience is generally accepted by the FAA toward the practical experience requirement. You will need official military records (such as a DD-214 or training records) documenting the nature and duration of your experience, which your DME and the FSDO will evaluate.

Can I count experience on homebuilt or experimental aircraft?

Work on experimental aircraft may count in some circumstances, but the FAA scrutinizes it more carefully because experimental aircraft are not required to be maintained to FAR Part 43 standards. Experience on type-certificated aircraft or in a Part-145 repair station carries more weight. Discuss your specific situation with your local FSDO or a DME before relying solely on experimental-aircraft experience.

What if my experience spans multiple employers?

You can accumulate the required experience across multiple employers. Each supervising mechanic who can personally attest to your work signs Form 8610-2 for the period they supervised you. Keep contemporaneous records (logbook entries, time cards, or letters from each employer) to support the sign-offs.

Is there a maximum age for earning an A&P certificate?

No. There is no upper age limit for the A&P certificate. The FAA only requires you to be at least 18 years old. Many mechanics enter the field as a second career well into their 40s or 50s.

Can I count time as an apprentice or mechanic's helper?

Yes, provided the work was practical maintenance appropriate to the rating and was performed under the supervision of an appropriately certificated mechanic who will certify it. What does not count is time in a role that was not hands-on maintenance — stores, ramp handling, tooling, or general labour around a hangar — regardless of how long it lasted or how much you learned by being nearby.

Does experience have to be full-time or continuous?

The regulation speaks in months of practical experience rather than in hours, and it does not require the time to be unbroken. What matters is that the period genuinely represents practical experience with the procedures and equipment appropriate to the rating. Very part-time work spread thinly over a long period is where applicants run into difficulty, because the FSDO is assessing substance and not merely the span of dates on the record.

ACS subject areas covered here

These are the FAA Mechanic ACS areas this guide maps to. Each page breaks the area down and carries free practice questions with worked rationales.

• Regulations, Maintenance Forms, Records, and Publications (AM.I.I)

Primary sources

• 14 CFR §65.71 — Eligibility Requirements: General (eCFR)
• 14 CFR §65.77 — Experience Requirements (eCFR)
• 14 CFR Part 147 — Aviation Maintenance Technician Schools (eCFR)
• FAA Form 8610-2 — Airman Certificate and/or Rating Application (PDF)

Related guides

• How to Become an FAA Aircraft Mechanic (A&P Certificate Guide)
• FAA A&P Written Tests Explained — General, Airframe & Powerplant
• FAA Form 8610-2 and IACRA — Applying for Your A&P Certificate