How Much Does a Commercial Diving Course Cost in Chile

The only public price that exists in Chile: SIS Capacitaciones, Valparaíso

Search "how much does a commercial diving course cost" in Chile and you'll find school websites, contact forms and testimonials, but almost no numbers. Of the schools that come up when you search for where to study — SIS Capacitaciones, INSUBUCEO, Escuela de Buceo Puerto Montt, Diversub, Subpacífico and AUSO Capacitaciones — reviewed one by one in our guide to where to study commercial diving in Chile, only one publishes the full price of its commercial diver course: SIS Capacitaciones, at Muelle Barón in Valparaíso.

Its Commercial Diver course with an Underwater Welding specialisation runs 6 months, 630 hours, with online theory on Mondays and Thursdays from 19:30 to 21:30 and in-person practice on Saturdays. The total price is CLP 2,900,000, and the next intake starts in October 2026. To enrol you need to be 18, hold a secondary education certificate, know how to swim, pass a medical fitness check and have no criminal record.

This is the figure you'll see repeated through the rest of the article, simply because it's the only one that exists publicly. That doesn't make it "the market price": it's the price of one school, in one city, on one given date. Look at any of the other five and you'll have to ask for a quote, because not even the ones with an active website publish it.

The full breakdown: what it costs to get into the trade, not just the course

Most pages that talk about price stop at the school's tuition fee. But to work as a commercial diver in Chile you also need a valid DIRECTEMAR licence (the Dirección General del Territorio Marítimo y de Marina Mercante — the General Directorate of the Maritime Territory and Merchant Marine, under the Navy), and that licence (registration) has its own fees, its own paperwork and its own expiry date. None of that appears in the course price. Here's the full table, with what we know and what we don't.

Sources: SIS Capacitaciones, ChileAtiende, entry 1240 and DIRECTEMAR's FAQ on professional diving.

Adding up only what has a public price, the real floor for getting into the trade through this school is CLP 2,900,000 plus US$ 27.22 in DIRECTEMAR fees, not counting the medical certificate or the criminal record certificate, which have no published rate. We don't convert that US$ 27.22 into pesos: the fees are readjusted every 1 January, and a fixed conversion would be out of date within months. Add them at the exchange rate on the day you pay them.

What the course price does and doesn't cover

SIS Capacitaciones' CLP 2,900,000 covers the full training: 630 hours spread over 6 months, the Underwater Welding specialisation certified to the Chilean standard NCh 2728:2015, the first aid course, and the diving equipment, which according to the school is included in the initial CLP 900,000 enrolment fee. That matters, because personal equipment tends to be one of the costs people don't see coming when they only look at the tuition fee.

What that price doesn't cover is everything that depends on DIRECTEMAR rather than the school: the exam, issuance and validity fees, the medical certificate, the criminal record certificate, the AFP certificate, up-to-date military status and the notarised sworn statement. You handle all of that yourself, at your local port authority (capitanía de puerto). For the full process, requirement by requirement, see our guide to the professional diver's licence in Chile and the site's certifications section.

DIRECTEMAR's fees: the part almost nobody budgets for

According to ChileAtiende's entry, getting licensed as a professional diver in Chile involves three fees: US$ 8.18 for the exam, US$ 9.52 for issuing the licence and US$ 9.52 for validity. They're paid at any port authority in the country, and they're readjusted every 1 January. For the exam itself, the Port Authorities (Capitanías de Puerto) examine basic shellfish divers (buzo mariscador) — theory and practical — while the Maritime Governorates (Gobernaciones Marítimas) examine intermediate shellfish diver, specialist and commercial diver, plus instructor, supervisor and contractor, mostly on the theoretical side only.

You can prepare on your own, studying the TM-035 regulation, through state-recognised training bodies — like the schools in this guide — or with the online simulations on the Capitanía Digital portal. Application dates are published every year on DIRECTEMAR's website: that's the page to check before enrolling in any course. These are small fees in absolute terms, but they're the clearest example that "the course price" and "the cost of getting licensed" are not the same thing: no school advertises them, because the school doesn't charge them.

The medical certificate, the criminal record check and the rest of the paperwork

The medical fitness certificate is, along with the equipment, the cost that catches people out the most. The regulation requires it to be valid for submission for a maximum of 30 days from issue, which in practice means you can't get it months in advance: it has to be fresh when you submit it. On top of that, your licence's full one-year validity is counted from that same certificate's issue date, so its date sets when your renewal clock starts ticking.

There's no public price in our sources for this certificate, nor for the criminal record or AFP certificates. That doesn't mean they're free: it means there's no official figure to cite without making one up. The honest way to budget for it is to treat those documents as an open line item and confirm the cost when you apply for them, rather than trust an unsupported number. The rest of the paperwork — application form, ID photocopy, 3x3 cm colour photos, up-to-date military status and notarised sworn statement — also has no public price in our sources: these are procedures, not purchases, and they vary depending on where you get them.

Personal equipment: why there's no single price

SIS Capacitaciones is, again, the only solid figure we have: its CLP 900,000 enrolment fee includes the diving equipment. That means that, for that particular school, the equipment cost is already inside the total CLP 2,900,000 and isn't a separate line item.

What we don't know is whether the other schools do the same. INSUBUCEO, AUSO Capacitaciones and Subpacífico don't publish a course price, so we also don't know whether their tuition includes equipment. Before enrolling at any school other than SIS, that's the first question to ask: does the price include equipment, or do you have to buy it separately? The difference can weigh heavily on the total budget, and no public source answers it for you.

To understand what equipment each licence category requires — from "light semi-autonomous equipment" for a basic shellfish diver to "whatever equipment is needed to carry out underwater work" for a commercial diver, per the TM-035 regulation — see the site's equipment section.

How you pay: initial enrolment plus interest-free instalments

Of the schools we reviewed, SIS Capacitaciones is also the only one to publicly detail its payment terms, and it's a concrete figure worth knowing if you're working out how to finance the course: CLP 900,000 initial enrolment fee — which includes equipment — plus five interest-free instalments of CLP 400,000, spread across the course's 6 months. Added up, those five instalments come to CLP 2,000,000, which together with the enrolment fee make up the total of CLP 2,900,000.

Source: SIS Capacitaciones.

That the instalment plan carries no interest matters: there's no hidden financing cost in the instalments, at least according to what the school publishes. We don't have that same detail for any other school in the country, so if instalment financing matters to you, ask directly when enrolling anywhere else.

Renewing the licence: the cost that repeats every year

The professional diver's licence in Chile isn't a one-off procedure. According to DIRECTEMAR, it's valid for one year from the date the medical certificate was issued, which means you have to renew it every year, and that renewal has its own cost, though much lower than getting licensed for the first time.

What we know for certain is the validity fee: US$ 9.52 a year, adjustable every 1 January, according to ChileAtiende's entry. On top of that you need a new medical certificate — because it's that certificate's date that sets when your licence expires — and that certificate has no public price in our sources, same as the first time round. There's no course or school involved in renewal: it's a direct procedure with the port authority.

Shellfish diver vs. commercial diver: two different budgets for getting into the trade

Not every professional diver's licence in Chile demands the same thing. The TM-035 regulation and ChileAtiende's entry set out several categories, from Diver's Assistant to Commercial Diver, each with its own minimum age, its own level of schooling and its own scope of work. If your end goal is the Commercial Diver licence, it's worth understanding how different the entry route through Shellfish Diver (buzo mariscador) is, because it's the lowest door into the trade and the one that comes up most in searches from people just starting to look into it.

Sources: DIRECTEMAR, TM-035, ChileAtiende, entry 1240 and AUSO Capacitaciones.

The honest conclusion: we can't compare the two routes' budgets in pesos, because the only shellfish diver course in our sources — AUSO Capacitaciones — doesn't publish a price. What is verifiable is that the shellfish diver route requires less formal schooling to get into and authorises narrower work: extraction and aquaculture, not "any underwater work". For the detail on each category, see how to become a commercial diver and how to become a commercial diver in Chile, step by step.

What you could earn — and the limits of that data

No salary figure alone justifies a CLP 2,900,000 expense that you can't cross-check. Here's what there is, with its source and its limits.

According to WageIndicator / Tusalario Chile's 2026 projection, divers in Chile earn between CLP 755,051 and CLP 1,470,366 a month. At the start, the range drops to between CLP 755,051 and CLP 1,187,083; after five years of service, it rises to between CLP 817,538 and CLP 1,492,555, based on a 44-hour working week. It's important to say what that figure doesn't do: it doesn't distinguish between a shellfish diver and a commercial diver, nor between aquaculture work and industrial work. It's a range for "divers" in general.

We also have one specific data point, not an average: a job listing published by STS Chile for a Commercial Diving Supervisor post stated a gross pay of CLP 2,425,000 plus a taxable bonus. That figure corresponds to a supervisory post — not an entry-level one — and to one specific listing at one specific moment, not a market average. We present it as a single reference point, not as what you can expect to earn straight out of the course.

We don't convert any of these figures into dollars or euros: doing so without giving the exact exchange rate and date would be inventing a precision we don't have. For more context on how a diver's pay in Chile is put together — bonuses, working hours, type of contract — see how much a diver earns on the site and our dedicated article on how much a commercial diver earns in Chile.

Does the investment pay off? An honest calculation, no promises

With the data available, you can run a simple calculation: taking WageIndicator's entry-level range — between CLP 755,051 and CLP 1,187,083 a month — SIS Capacitaciones' total course cost, CLP 2,900,000, works out to between 2.4 and 3.8 months of entry-level gross pay. That's arithmetic, not a forecast: we're dividing a real price by a real pay range, both with their source.

What that calculation doesn't include: tax and social security contributions on gross pay, the fees and certificates with no public price, the annual licence renewal, and something no source quantifies — how many months a year you actually work in a trade that usually depends on seasonal or per-job contracts, often under subcontracting. There's no seasonality figure or effective employment rate for newly licensed divers, so we're not going to make one up.

There's also no official figure for the number of licensed divers in Chile, or for how many positions open up each year. The only volume figure in circulation is a press estimate from El Desconcierto — around 30,000 divers in the country — with no explicit source: if you cite it, cite it as a press estimate, not an official record. Given that uncertainty about demand, the honest thing to say is that the entry-level figure (2.4 to 3.8 months' pay) is reasonable in absolute terms, but it says nothing about how long it'll take you to land your first contract, or how many months a year you'll actually work once you're in. To see where hiring happens, see jobs and companies.

Other schools: why there aren't more prices to compare

This is the least satisfying part of the article, but it's the honest part. We reviewed six schools and only one has a full public price. Here's what we found at each one:

• SIS Capacitaciones (Valparaíso, Muelle Barón): full price published, CLP 2,900,000. It's the reference point for this whole article.
• INSUBUCEO / Inmersión Submarina (Valparaíso, Playa Las Torpederas): a four-and-a-half-month Commercial Diver course, with instructors accredited by the DGTM y MM. Doesn't publish a price.
• Escuela de Buceo Puerto Montt (Vargas & Labrin Ltda.): exists and operates, but its website couldn't be checked at the time we gathered this data — its security certificate had expired. There are no prices or durations we can state.
• Diversub Chile: offers a commercial diving course, but its page returned a 404 error when checked. There's no data we can state.
• Subpacífico: a commercial diving academy, not verified in detail in this review.
• AUSO Capacitaciones: a blended-format Basic Shellfish Diver course. Doesn't publish a price.

If none of these six works for you, see the full list of schools in the country. And if your longer-term plan involves working offshore or on diving support vessels, keep in mind that this article covers air commercial diving — the branch with the most training options in Chile today, mostly in aquaculture — not saturation diving, which is a different trade with a different economics: if that's what interests you, start with what a saturation diver is and where saturation diving work happens.