  A well constrained estimate of the distance remains one of the main factors
to properly interpret the observations of accreting X-ray pulsars. Since these
objects are typically well studied, multiple distance estimates obtained with
different methods are available for many members of the class. Here we
summarize all distance estimates published in the literature for a sample of
Galactic X-ray pulsars, and compare them with direct distance measurements
obtained by the Gaia mission. We conclude that the spread of distance values
obtained for individual objects by the different conventional methods is
usually larger than one might expect from the quoted individual uncertainties,
such that Gaia values are in many cases a very useful additional information.
For distances larger than 5 kpc, however, the uncertainties of all distance
estimates (including those of Gaia) remain comparatively large, so conventional
methods will likely retain their importance. We provide, therefore, an
aposteriori estimate of the systematic uncertainty for each method based on the
comparison with the more accurate Gaia distance measurements.
