For years now, we've watched the Technician Class license totals decline dramatically. Even the General Class is showing signs of weakness: a decline of 1500 from the Class totals in 2024, and an additional 300+ decline so far this year. The bright spot in all of this has been a slow rise in the Extra Class totals. But there's an inherent weakness in those gains.
For the month of March, I tracked the daily FCC reports on a spreadsheet to get a clear idea of the "churn". What I found is that the "they upgraded" narrative doesn't add up. This is the idea that declines in each Class are accounted for by upgrades to the next higher Class, so everything is really just fine. It's a glib talking point that never gets backed up with evidence.
But the Extra Class is a unique situation where this "upgrade" narrative can't be applied. There is no higher Class to upgrade to.
In the day-to-day FCC figures, there are declines as well as increases in the Extra Class. Overall, though, the increases have added up to a net gain. One might wonder which Class operators "upgraded" to in days with declines. It seems obvious that they either allowed their license to expire -- after reaching the pinnacle of privileges -- or these operators died years ago and the ten-year license term simply caught up with them. If it's the latter, it provides a hint at the mortality figures that the "upgrade" narrative tries desperately to obscure.
Adding up every day in the FCC reports that showed a gain in the Extra Class totals, I arrived at a figure of 337 new Extra Class licensees in March 2025. Congratulations to all of those hams that achieved the highest peak in the "incentive licensing" system.
Hmmm. Here's the interesting part, though. The total for the Extra Class only rose by 31 in March. We lost 306 Extra Class licensees in order to gain 337.
This is a level of attrition that scarcely seems sustainable. In essence, we are losing 9 Extra Class licensees for every 10 we gain. Yep, that's still a gain. But it's a pretty expensive gain.
Other than anecdotal and anomalous accounts, we have no idea if those new Extra Class license-holders are significantly younger than the "departing" Extra Class operators, either.
It's completely obvious that the "upgrade" narrative is nothing more than a clumsy attempt to muddy the waters in discussions of the decline in licensed amateurs. If the decline in the Technician Class can be attributed to upgrades to the General Class, then why are the General Class totals going down? And if someone attributes the decline in the General Class to upgrades to Extra Class, then why don't we see concurrent, parallel increases in the Extra Class? We lost more General Class licenses in 2024 than we gained in the Extra Class.
Performing this same day-to-day exercise with the General Class is probably futile, because the "upgrade" narrative will just be invoked to explain away the reality. But we gained 585 new General Class licenses in March, while ending up with 318 fewer General Class licenses than we began the month with. That's a pretty glaring gap of over 900 licenses that can't accounted for by the 337 new Extra Class licensees. Did more than 560 Generals in March simply exit the hobby and refuse to renew their licenses?
Ten years ago, I performed the same arithmetic on the Technician Class, concluding that we were losing 8 Techs for every 10 we gained. I said this wasn't sustainable in the long-term. Everybody laughed and pointed at the then-current increases in the Technician Class. Well, I turned out to be correct. We've seen a net decline of over 26.7k in that Class since the end of 2022.
Such high attrition rates require a constant and considerable supply of "new blood", and they must be interested in upgrading or else the whole scheme falls apart. Adding up the daily gains in the Technician Class for March, we see 1165 newly-licensed Technicians. But we ended up with a net loss of 1352 in that Class. That's a pretty huge gap of over 2500 licenses to explain away with the glib "they upgraded" line -- especially when the total number of General Class licenses went down, not up. And we only saw 585 new General licenses during the same period, rather than the 2500 that the "upgrade" narrative would presume.
With the steep and continuing decline in the Technician Class, the upgrade chain has been broken. Yes, some Techs are upgrading. It's just not enough to fill the gaps left by death and upgrades to Extra Class. And we may very well just be replacing dead men with old men, for the most part. While we regularly hear about any "young" person entering the hobby, it's unusual that we never hear about retirees doing the same. There's a delusional notion that all new entrants to the hobby are "young", and it's backed up by nothing more than anecdotes.
If the shiny prize of HF operation is actually less attractive to current Technician Class license-holders than the Old Guard imagines it to be, then the entire "incentive licensing" scheme collapses. Every newly-minted Tech quickly learns that they are expected to express some kind of shame over their lowly status at the bottom of the amateur radio social hierarchy. For many, it's just another insincere thing that they are expected to bleat upon cue.
If we look at another "incentive licensing" application, we may find some insight. When teen-agers get their drivers license, do they generally see this as the first step on their journey to get a license to drive a semi tractor-trailer, complete with hazmat certifications? Maybe some do. The difference here is that current semi drivers are not delusional enough to present every teen driver as a future semi driver. On the other hand, most senior hams see every newly-licensed ham as desperately craving the opportunity to climb that ladder and gain new privileges. They even go so far as to portray any Technician Class licensee that fails to accomplish that goal as lazy and stupid. This combination of extremely condescending 'encouragement', backed up by toothless shaming, has proven to be a dismal failure. Yet, it's the only tool in the senior ham's toolbox. They simply can't accept that anyone could be content to remain a Technician, and they can't see current Techs as anything more than future General Class licensees.
Summary
The Extra Class is experiencing very high attrition rates, while achieving only marginal net gains. The fact that this situation is the bright spot being spun as a big success says a lot about how delusional the "decline deniers" have become.
While this analysis only covers one month, it's actual data. This is in contrast to the mere assertions of the Old Guard, and the propensity to point to old figures that the "decline deniers" routinely exhibit. All of this information is publicly available. Anyone can replicate this exercise with a little copy-and-paste work on a spreadsheet. Or... just keep bleating glib assertions and see who's gullible enough to buy it.
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