I see many cargo firms have a minimum of 20-50hrs of ME.
In rough hiring times, if they could, they’d list 0. That’s their insurance company’s lower limit. Not theirs.
Depending on the job, you may have easily doubled those numbers in your first month. Which is why the low end is so weird in aviation.
Think about it. 50 hours is less time than most professionals spend in a single work week at any other job. The actuaries say, “Yeah um, we see a rather large spike in claims when pilots don’t even have the equivalent of the amount of time I spent at my desk figuring this out, this week.”
Hahaha. I don’t know where the money break even is for any particular person, but I knew people who bought light twins and flew them hundreds of hours all over the place getting tons of XC and weather and maintenance experience in them in the 90s when nobody was hiring. Nowadays you wouldn’t need to do that for very long.
If you show up with minimum hours and nobody else beat you in the hiring process, and you don’t scare the chief pilot at most of these places, you won’t be at minimum hours for very long.
What you need if you’re targeting a certain job is insider info about whether they’re really hiring at minimums. If they have a pool of ME pilots to pull from with considerably more hours, what’s on the website may just be window dressing for years when they don’t.