How Much Do Voice Actors Actually Make?

There are two honest answers to how much voice actors make, and they contradict each other. One is a rate card. The other is a bank statement. This chapter gives you both, and then it gives you the distance between them, because that distance is where your career will actually live.

Every figure here comes from a union contract, a government dataset, a platform's own help pages, or a company's own published terms. Where a number is stale or contested, it says so. Where nobody publishes a number at all, it says that too — loudly, because the absence is usually the point.

Start at the ceiling. It is worth seeing what the best money in this business looks like before we go anywhere near the floor.

Union scale, and the money nobody explains to you

Under the 2025 SAG-AFTRA Commercials Contract (in force 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026), the session fee for an off-camera voice-over on a national television commercial is $618.30. That is what you are paid to stand in the booth and record it.

Almost every article about voice acting pay stops there. That is why almost every article about voice acting pay is useless. The session fee is not the money. The money is the use fees — what you are paid each time the spot actually airs.

On a Class A network buy, the same contract pays $588.90 for the first use. $123.81 for the second. $98.48 for the third, and $98.48 again for every use from the fourth through the thirteenth. From the fourteenth use onward it drops to $44.74 each. And on top of all of it, the employer pays 23.5% of your gross into the union's pension and health fund. That is not deducted from you. It is added on.

Now the term you will hear thrown around and never explained. A 13-use guarantee means the advertiser buys thirteen airings up front — whether or not the spot ever runs thirteen times. It is a floor, paid in advance, and under the 2025 contract it is worth $1,498.38. If the commercial runs twice and gets pulled, you still keep it. And if the spot is a genuine hit and runs and runs, the Class A ceiling for a single thirteen-week cycle is $15,000.00 — after which the clock resets and, if they want to keep running it, they pay again.

Other categories in the same contract work on fixed-period fees rather than per-airing counts. A wild spot — a commercial rotating through local markets — pays $630 for four weeks, $1,575 for thirteen, $5,670 for a year. National cable pays $1,125 / $3,075 / $10,125 across the same three windows. Streaming and digital pays $975 / $2,250 / $7,500. Radio has its own contract: a national terrestrial radio spot pays $808.49 for four weeks, $1,674.72 for thirteen, and $4,273.43 for a year, while a single-market radio commercial pays $251.53 for a sixty-minute session with thirteen weeks of use.

This is why commercial voice actors chase one national spot instead of a hundred corporate videos. And it is why losing a national is a financial event, not an inconvenience.

The other union contracts, and what a good year adds up to

Animation. Under the 2023-26 TV Animation Agreement, a segment over ten minutes — a standard half-hour episode — pays $1,246. Ten minutes or under pays $1,130. Each voice after the third on a short segment adds $365. Pension and health here is 19%, notably lower than the commercial rate. Now do the year: a series regular recording twenty episodes at $1,246 grosses $24,920 before commission, dues and tax. That is a good year in animation. Hold that number. It matters in about four paragraphs.

Video games. Actors struck for eleven months and ratified the 2025 Interactive Media Agreement 95.04% to 4.96%. Under the previous contract, a Day Performer four-hour day covering up to three voices paid $1,102.00, and a single-voice one-hour session paid $551.00, with $367.50 for each additional voice. The 2025 deal raised compensation 15.17% on ratification, plus 3% each November of 2025, 2026 and 2027. SAG-AFTRA has not published a recalculated dollar rate card, so the honest statement is this: applying the confirmed 15.17% to the old four-hour day gives roughly $1,270 — a figure we derived, not one the union quoted. Session bonuses for sessions seven through ten rose to $285 each, with $2,100 in total additional compensation once you pass ten sessions. And note the structural fact: video games pay no residuals at all. You are paid for the session. The game can sell fifty million copies and you get nothing further.

ADR and looping for film and television pays $1,204.00 for a session with recognisable voicing of five or more lines. Audiobooks have no single union contract — SAG-AFTRA holds roughly 90 separate agreements with individual publishers, with minimums clustering at $200 to $275 per finished hour.

And it costs money to be there at all. SAG-AFTRA's initiation fee is $3,121, annual base dues are $246.14, and work dues run 1.575% of covered earnings. There is also Global Rule One, which says a member shall not work for any employer without a union agreement — anywhere on Earth. Which means joining can cut you off from the non-union corporate and e-learning work that was feeding you. It is not a formality. It is a genuinely hard decision, and in the National Association of Voice Actors' 2026 survey, 65% of SAG-AFTRA respondents admitted to doing non-union work in violation of that rule, citing pay and availability. The rule that defines membership is being broken by two-thirds of the people it governs, because the union work is not there.

Now the counterweight

Everything above describes a functioning, well-paid profession. Here is who is actually in it.

Speaking to Rolling Stone in August 2023, SAG-AFTRA's chief economist put two numbers on the record. Only 7% of SAG-AFTRA actors and performers earn $80,000 or more a year. And only 14% earn enough to qualify for the union's own health plan — at the time, $26,470 a year. Both figures are from 2023, and I am dating them deliberately, because they are the most recent hard numbers the union has published and they are three years old.

What we do know is that the health plan's earnings threshold has since risen, to $28,090. The bar went up. There is no published evidence that earnings did. The current qualification percentage is not public — so nobody can tell you honestly what it is today, and anyone who does is guessing.

Read the 14% again slowly. It means that as of 2023, 86% of SAG-AFTRA members did not earn enough from performing to qualify for their own union's health insurance. These are not the people who failed. These are the people who made it — who got in. That is the top of the pyramid. And go back to that animated series regular grossing $24,920 for a full season of work: they are below the threshold too.

The most recent empirical picture comes from NAVA's 2026 State of Voiceover Survey — 1,379 respondents, fielded January to February 2026. 30% of working voice actors saw their income decline in 2025. 41% grew, 21% held flat. And 21% say they knowingly lost a job to a synthetic voice. One caveat, and it is the important one: that survey can only see people already working enough to be surveyed. It cannot see the person who bought a microphone, paid for a demo, auditioned for a year and booked nothing. That population is invisible in every dataset that exists, and it is the largest population in this industry.

Non-union: what the open market actually pays

Outside the union there is no scale. There are rate guides — and you must understand exactly what a rate guide is. It is what you should ask for. It is not what the market pays.

The reference the industry actually uses is the GVAA Rate Guide, which puts e-learning at around $35 per finished minute and a raw-hour band of $600 to $2,400, with IVR phone prompts structured as a session fee starting around $150 plus a per-prompt rate. One honesty note: the GVAA page repeatedly failed to load when we tried to verify it, so treat those figures as partially confirmed rather than nailed down.

Independent guides give wider bands, and the disagreement is worth showing rather than hiding. E-learning at $15 to $55 per finished minute, or $0.10 to $0.35 a word. A single one-to-two-minute e-learning module at $350 to $450. A basic IVR phone system at $200 to $500. And corporate narration at roughly $250 to $350 an hour according to one guide — or around $3,600 per finished hour according to another. Those two numbers do not agree with each other, and I am not going to pretend they do. That is the honest state of the data.

The gap between the number in a rate guide and the number on a Fiverr gig is the entire story of this industry. Where you land between them is mostly a function of who is hiring and whether they already know your name.

Audiobooks: the number that is a lie

Audiobook narration is where most beginners eventually land, so this needs doing properly. There are two ways to be paid on ACX, Amazon's audiobook marketplace. Per finished hour is a flat fee for each hour of completed audio you deliver. Royalty share means no money up front, and you split the title's royalty with the rights holder instead.

The royalty numbers changed on 26 May 2026, which means most articles you will read about this are now wrong. Under Audible's new model, an exclusive title earns a 50% royalty (30% non-exclusive), and on a royalty-share deal the narrator and rights holder split that fifty-fifty — so 25% each. Titles still on the legacy model earn 40% exclusive, giving the narrator 20%, and that legacy model is being discontinued at year-end. And here is the clause nobody mentions: royalty-share payments run for seven years only. After that you are entitled to nothing further from that title, ever again.

On the flat-fee side, a working non-union professional range is commonly given as $100 to $350 per finished hour, with the quoted going rate for a good narrator often put at $200 to $400. Set that beside the union minimums we saw earlier — $200 to $275 PFH. Look at the overlap. The union floor for an audiobook is roughly what a good non-union narrator charges. That tells you exactly how low the ceiling is in this category.

The honest median, and the numbers you should not trust

There is no clean median voice actor income. Anyone who hands you one is guessing. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics has no occupation code for voice actor at all — the closest is 27-2011, Actors. As of the May 2023 data (the newest full table available), that code shows a median hourly wage of $20.50, a 10th percentile of $13.00, a 90th percentile of $100.01, a mean of $41.01, and total employment of 62,560. BLS does not publish an annual mean for actors, and the reason is itself a fact worth sitting with: actors do not work year-round.

Now the aggregators, which you can disprove without leaving your chair. On a single day in July 2026, ZipRecruiter published an average voice actor salary of $100,198 a year on one page — and $27.36 an hour, about $56,903 a year, on another. Same site. Same day. Off by nearly a factor of two. Indeed said $38.68 an hour. All of these are built from job postings, not from paychecks. When somebody quotes you an average voice actor salary, ask them where it came from. They will not know.

So what does a voice actor make?

Here is the whole thing in four lines. The union rates are real, and a national commercial with a full run is genuinely good money. Among people successful enough to be in the union, only 7% cleared $80,000 as of 2023 and 86% could not earn their way to health insurance. Outside the union, the rate guides say one thing and the marketplaces pay another, and the platform quietly takes 20% on the way through. And underneath all of it sits an uncounted population who bought the microphone and never booked anything.

None of that is a reason not to do this. It is a reason not to do it casually. The people earning the good numbers are not luckier than you. They are better than you, and they got better on purpose, in rooms, with someone listening. That is not a sales pitch — it is the only mechanism that has ever worked, and it matters more now than it did five years ago, because the entry-level rungs a beginner used to climb are precisely the ones AI has taken. AI didn't take the top of this industry. It took the ladder. Which leaves exactly one route: be good enough to skip it. The next chapter is about how people actually get that good — and how to tell the coaches who can do it from the ones selling you hope.