What a session pays, and why it is not what you earn
Every figure here was read off SAG-AFTRA’s own Year Two commercials rate sheet on 8 September 2026. Commercials run on a separate contract from film and television, so none of the film numbers apply.
Start with the thing that dates almost every other page. The 2022 Commercials Contract expired on 31 March 2025. Members ratified a successor on 21 May 2025 by 96.9 per cent, and it runs to 31 March 2028.
It raises rates by five, four and three per cent across its three years. We are in year two, which began on 1 April 2026.
Session minimums, 1 April 2026 to 31 March 2027What one day of work pays before anything else happens
On-camera principalEight hour session
$855.20
The number people mean by a commercial rate. It was $822.30 in year one and $783.10 under the expired contract.
Off-camera principalVoiceover, two hour session
$643.00
Three quarters of the on-camera rate, which is the ratio that runs through almost every line of this contract.
On-camera groupThree to five, six to eight, nine or more
$626 to $458
$626.10, $554.30 and $458.30. A group contractor takes a further 25 per cent of the group rate on top, paid by production.
Off-camera groupSame three bands
$363 to $257
$362.60, $314.80 and $256.70. Singing groups are also barred from being held exclusive unless separately bargained.
Hand model or body partFirst commercial of the day
$711.80
Includes one year of use in the fee. Each additional commercial the same day is $178.00.
General extrasEight hours
$466.60
Stand-ins $513.10. Extras receive no use fees and no holding fees at all, which is the single most important thing on this page for anybody doing background work.
OvertimeBeyond the eighth hour
$26.73
Per quarter hour. Past midnight it becomes $40.09 a quarter hour. Meal violations run $27.00 for the first two half hours, then $53.00 each.
Auditions past the secondThird and fourth callbacks
$213.82
A third audition over two hours pays $213.82 per role. A fourth or later over four hours pays $427.62. Almost nobody claims these.
Now the correction that changes every number you have read on this subject.
The session fee is not a payment on top of your residuals. It is an advance against them. The union states it plainly: all session fees may be applied to all use types.
So work an example. Your commercial runs a use cycle worth $1,000. You receive the $855.20 session fee, and then $144.80. You do not receive $1,855.20.
Every page in this search that adds a session fee to a residual figure has overstated the job by roughly one session fee per cycle. We checked twenty of them and not one gets this right.
Two details in the table above that catch people out.
Extras are outside the residual system entirely. The session fee covers a year of use, and there are no holding fees, so background work on a commercial is a flat day rate and nothing else. The 2025 contract simplified this by removing the old thirteen-week categories.
The first thirteen-week cycle starts on the first day of production, not on the first air date. That matters because the first holding fee falls due thirteen weeks from the shoot, whether or not the commercial has ever been seen.
The use fees, which is where the money actually is
A commercial pays by how it is used, and the current contract sells use in two ways. Either per airing under the old Class A system, or as a flat cycle for a fixed period.
Class A still exists, and the interesting thing about it is what happened to its rates. They were frozen at 2022 levels for the entire three-year term. So did national cable, single channel cable, streaming, and one of the two digital categories.
Class A per airing, on-camera principalFrozen at 2022 rates until 31 March 2028
First useThe first national airing
$783.10
Off camera $588.90. Remember this figure, because it is also the session fee under the contract that expired, and that coincidence is doing a lot of damage. See the audit below.
Second useThe decay begins immediately
$158.21
A fifth of the first airing. The third and each of the fourth to thirteenth pay $125.51.
Fourteenth use and beyondEach national airing
$60.17
Sixty dollars, for a spot on national network television. This is the number that makes people think residuals are broken, and it has not moved since 2022.
The thirteen use guaranteeBought as a block
$1,936.67
Cheaper for the advertiser than buying thirteen airings one at a time. Off camera $1,498.38.
The alternative is a cycle, which buys unlimited use in a category for four weeks, thirteen weeks or a year. This is how most commercials are actually bought now.
Cycle purchases, on-camera principalFour weeks, thirteen weeks, one year
Streaming platformsInclusive of all other digital use
$10,000
For a year. The union’s own announcement flags this as the big win, up from $7,500. Four weeks is $1,300. Frozen for the rest of the term.
National cableFour, thirteen, fifty-two weeks
$13,500
$1,500 for four weeks and $4,100 for thirteen. Also frozen at 2022 rates. A single named network instead runs $801.12, $2,189.74 and $7,210.12.
Traditional digitalWebsites, social, unpaid video
$3,712.80
For a year, with $764.40 at four weeks. Adding paid pre-roll costs twelve per cent more, and that variant is frozen for the whole term.
Wild spotAll broadcast markets
$7,862.40
A year across all markets, or $4,368.00 excluding New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Chicago was restored to major market status in 2025.
Social mediaPer thirty day cycle
$128.28
Exactly fifteen per cent of the session fee, with another fifteen if YouTube is included. A month of social use pays less than a sixth of a day’s work.
Foreign useMultiples of the session fee
Nine times
Worldwide is nine sessions. The United Kingdom alone is three, Europe two, Asia and the Pacific two, Japan one, rest of world one.
One figure here is contradicted by the union’s own paperwork, and we are not going to pick a side quietly.
The thirteen-week streaming rate appears as $3,400 in the summary of new provisions and as $3,000 on both published rate sheets. The four-week and fifty-two-week figures match exactly across the two documents. Only the middle row disagrees.
We have published $3,000, because the rate sheet is the operative document and was issued later. But two official documents disagree and you should know that before you rely on the number.
Holding fees, and the exclusivity you are being paid for
A holding fee is not a bonus for doing nothing. It is the price of keeping you off a competitor’s advert, and understanding that changes how you read your own contract.
The amount is one session fee, so $855.20 on camera today. It falls due every thirteen weeks for as long as the advertiser holds you.
How long they can hold you changed in 2025. The maximum period of use went from twenty-one months to twenty-four, and the clock now starts on a knowable date, ten business days after the first day of principal photography.
That gives a floor you can calculate. A commercial that is held but barely aired pays four holding fees a year, which is $3,420.80. Across the full twenty-four months it is roughly $6,841.
What exclusivity is worth, and what most performers give away.
The holding fee buys the advertiser one thing only: that you will not appear in an advert for a competing product. That is the standard bargain and the fee is the payment for it.
Being kept off non-competing products costs them considerably more. One to three unrelated products is 150 per cent of scale session and use. Four or more is 200 per cent. Complete exclusivity may only be agreed under a term contract with a guaranteed amount.
Almost no page in this subject mentions that premium, and performers routinely sign wider exclusivity for nothing. If you are being asked to sit out a whole category, that is a priced item in the contract, not a courtesy.
And if they stop paying the holding fee, you are released. Non-payment ends the exclusivity, and late payment runs damages of $13.09 a day after twenty-five business days, owed whether or not anybody gave notice.
Several groups cannot be held exclusive at all. Seasonal commercials, non-identifiable voices, dialects, cartoon voices, lip sync work and off-camera solo or duo singers are all outside it, unless separately bargained. Nor can work you did as an extra be used to hold you.
There is also a new escape route worth knowing. If a commercial is bought as traditional digital only, there is no automatic exclusivity and no automatic holding fee. If the advertiser wants you held, it has to be negotiated and paid for separately.
The union’s own website has not caught up with its own contract.
The page explaining how long a performer is held still says twenty-one months and seven cycles. The correct answer has been twenty-four months and up to eight cycles since April 2025.
The page explaining wild spot use still describes the old system of market units. The current visual contract prices wild spot in two flat market tiers. Units survive only on the separate audio contract.
We are not scoring points. It is the reason so many otherwise careful pages are wrong, because they checked with the union and the union told them the old answer.
Twenty pages, one current rate, and nobody explains the crediting
We opened every page ranking for this question and checked each figure against the union’s Year Two rate sheet. The results are worse than on any subject we have audited.
First, the trap that lets stale pages survive a fact-check.
The expired 2022 contract set the on-camera session fee at $783.10. That same number sits on the current rate sheet today, as the Class A first-use fee, because Class A was frozen rather than increased.
So a page quoting a $783.10 session fee is quoting a dead rate. But anybody checking will find $783.10 on the live rate sheet and conclude the page is fine. The same trap exists for the off-camera pair at $588.90.
Twenty pages, read on 8 September 2026What each one says a commercial pays
A producers’ payroll blogDated 27 March 2026
Current
$855.20 and $643.00, correct, with the right list of frozen categories and the right twenty-four month period. The only page in the field on the current contract, and it is written for producers rather than actors.
Backstage, the main articleUpdated 31 July 2024
2022
Gives $588.90 to $783.10 as the starting session fee. Still describes Class A and a twenty-one month lifespan, both superseded. It does link the union, which is more than most.
A payroll company’s rate guideDated 1 July 2026
2022
Dated this year and citing the current rate sheet, while quoting 2022 session rates. False freshness is the normal condition of this subject.
Five salary aggregatorsIndeed, ZipRecruiter, Glassdoor and two more
No rate
Not one mentions the union contract. They give annual salaries from $29,477 to $79,885 for the same job title. A spread of two point seven times, in the same month.
One of those fiveIts own stated method
Six people
Publishes an hourly rate for commercial actors based on six salary profiles. The page also renders a currency error where its own high and low figures should be.
A 2016 rate sheet, still upMarked valid as of 2016
2016
Seventeen precise dollar figures from a contract three agreements ago, with no source. Another page reprints the same 2016 numbers with a 2021 date on it.
Pages citing no source at allSeven of the twenty
Unsourced
Including two that give confident ranges for non-union work, which as far as we can establish nobody has ever measured.
Pages explaining the crediting ruleAll twenty
None
Not one page in the field tells you the session fee is an advance against use. Every page that attempts the arithmetic therefore overstates what the job pays.
Pages mentioning exclusivityFive of the twenty
Five
The best of them is a Backstage piece from December 2019. The most useful writing on the subject in this search is nearly seven years old.
The circular citation, which is worth seeing spelled out.
Backstage, the acting trade magazine, reports commercial actor earnings of $57,000 a year. Its source for that is ZipRecruiter.
ZipRecruiter derives the figure from employer job postings and third party data, publishes no sample size, and does not mention SAG-AFTRA, session fees or residuals anywhere on the page. A trade publication has laundered a job board scrape into an earnings claim about its own industry.
The digital replica rules are new, and they are the strictest in acting
The 2022 contract had nothing on artificial intelligence. The current one has a full regime, and it is more detailed than what film and television performers got.
A digital replica is defined as a program built from your voice, image or performance that can independently generate new performances. Consent is required at least forty-eight hours in advance, and it must come with a reasonably specific description of what will be generated.
Without that description, your consent covers only uses consistent with historical editing practice. Consent can never be perpetual.
What the replica provisions actually requireNew in the 2025 contract
The paymentPer commercial using the replica
1.5 sessions
One and a half session fees, plus scale use and holding fees for each spot, exactly as if you had shot it live. All of it counts as gross compensation for benefits.
Reading a new scriptEven a face-mapping test
Extra session
Building the replica from footage already shot that day costs nothing extra. Reading anything new is a further session fee.
NudityExplicit carve-out
Barred
A replica may not be used to render a performer nude or partially nude unless they explicitly consented as part of a specific description.
DeletionIf no retention is agreed
90 days
All copies permanently and irrevocably deleted, certified in writing. Retention may only be extended in blocks of no more than twenty-four months, and you are not held exclusive during one.
Synthetic performersWholly generated, not a replica of you
Restricted
May not be used primarily or materially for reasons of economy. Breaching that means paying the plans the economic equivalent of what a human would have earned.
Extras upgraded by replicaBackground becomes principal
Principal rate
If a replica turns background work into a principal performance, principal session minimums are owed.
TrainingOn the work you did
Barred
A producer may not use, or let anybody else use, the results of your services to train a generative system without the union’s consent.
One provision matters more than the money. Union rules prohibit members from consenting to use of their digital replica in non-covered work, and transfer paperwork has to say whether the resulting content is covered. That is the clause that stops a union job becoming the training set for a non-union one.
What you keep, and the one rule that is worse than in film
Commercial money arrives in more pieces than film money, and one specific rule in the agency regulations treats commercials differently. It is not in your favour.
The ten per cent agency cap applies here as everywhere. On film and television an agent may not commission scale work at all, and has to negotiate above scale to earn anything.
Commercials carry a carve-out. The union’s own guidance states that an agent may commission a commercial at scale, in the worst case. To keep commissioning at renegotiation they must then negotiate above scale.
So the same performer, on the same minimum, keeps less from a commercial than from a film day. We could find no page in this subject that mentions it.
One session, and what happens around itYear two rates, on-camera principal
Session feeEight hours
$855.20
The gross, and an advance against your first use cycle rather than an addition to it.
Agent commissionPermitted at scale on commercials
–$85.52
Ten per cent, and the film rule that protects your minimum does not apply here. Not all residuals are commissionable, and the union publishes a chart of which are.
Pension and healthPaid by production, not by you
23.5%
Up from 20.5 per cent under the old contract. An authorised advertiser pays a discounted 19.95 per cent until March 2028.
Toward health coverageCommercial earnings count
$28,090
The 2026 threshold for a year of union health cover. Thirty-three on-camera sessions, if none of them were credited against anything.
More members work under the commercials contract than any other SAG-AFTRA agreement, and the union says they earn over a billion dollars a year on it. What it does not publish is any distribution at all. No median, no percentiles, no count of how many members do commercial work.
Nine things we could not confirm
This subject has more unresolved detail than any we have researched, partly because the union’s rate sheets are published as documents that resist being read accurately.
Checked, and not settledWhat is actually behind each one
The thirteen-week streaming rateTwo union documents
Conflict
$3,400 in the summary, $3,000 on both rate sheets. We published the rate sheet figure and flagged it above rather than choosing silently.
Dealer and Spanish language ratesTwo unlabelled blocks
Unassigned
Both sets of figures are on the sheet. We could not establish which block belongs to which category, so we have printed neither.
The wild spot row labelsNumbers union, labels not
Second hand
The dollar values are on the union sheet. The labels come from a payroll company, and one earlier reading attached the same numbers to a different category.
The Class A thirteen-week capReported as $20,000
Inferred
Strongly implied by the freeze and by elimination, but we could not read it directly off the sheet, so it is not in our tables.
Seasonal useNo rate row exists
Absent
Seasonal survives in the contract only as an exclusivity carve-out. Whether it still has its own rate, we could not establish.
When Class B and C disappearedBoth are gone
Unknown
Neither appears anywhere on the current sheet. We could not find which negotiation removed them, so we do not give a date.
Non-union commercial ratesAnybody
No data
No survey, no sample, no method exists that we could find. Every figure in circulation is an estimate, including the union’s own description of the range.
British commercial ratesEquity rate card
Behind a login
The United Kingdom pays a basic studio fee plus a usage percentage rather than residuals. The current card is members only and we are not printing a pound figure we could not read.
A national commercial pays for a yearRepeated everywhere
Folklore
No origin, no evidence, and the contract caps it. Held but unaired, a commercial pays $3,420.80 a year. It is true only of heavy network rotation, which is shrinking and frozen.
One more absence is worth stating on its own. We could not find a single named working actor who has published a full account of what one commercial paid them across its whole run, itemised into session, use and holding fees. Anonymous forum posts exist. Nothing on the record does.
Grading the sources
This page publishes exact dollar figures from a contract that changed last year, counts twenty competitors, and refuses several widely repeated numbers. So it owes you the method on each.
The claim, and where it came fromWhat we found
Every session and use figureThe union’s Year Two rate sheet
Primary
Read on 8 September 2026 and cross-checked arithmetically. The group contractor fee is exactly 25 per cent of each group rate, and social media is exactly fifteen per cent of session, which confirms the column mapping.
The crediting ruleThe union’s own contract page
Quoted
All session fees may be applied to all use types. Stated by SAG-AFTRA in those words, and the load-bearing fact on this page.
The exclusivity percentagesSection 16 of the contract
Older edition
Quoted from the 2016 consolidated text. The 2025 memorandum lists no change to that section, but we could not read the current consolidated contract to confirm word for word.
The audit of twenty pagesEach opened and read
Counted
Every figure dated against the rate sheet it belongs to. Three further pages were paywalled or blocked and are excluded from every count.
The union’s own stale pagesThree of them
Verified
We checked each one on the day of writing. They may be corrected after publication, which would be a good outcome.
The held but unaired figureOur own arithmetic
Ours
Four holding fees at the year two session rate. Labelled as our calculation, because the union publishes no worked example and neither does anybody else.
Celebrity endorsement figuresTrade reporting
Anonymous
The published Super Bowl fee ranges rest entirely on unnamed agency executives. We have left them off this page, because a page about scale should not lean on them.
Three pages we could not readPaywalled or blocked
Absent
Two trade articles and one advertiser-side column. None of them is counted in any figure here, and one of them reports fees trending down, which we would want to read before saying so.
Where we differ from the standard account
What does a commercial pay?
Commonly saidA session fee, and then residuals on top of it, presented as two separate amounts you add together.
What we foundThe session fee credits against your use fees. On a thousand dollar cycle you receive the session and then the difference.
Are the rates on these pages current?
Commonly saidPresented as current everywhere, including on pages dated this year that cite the current rate sheet.
What we foundOne page in twenty has the rate in force. The contract most of them describe expired in March 2025.
How long can they hold you?
Commonly saidTwenty-one months, which is also what the union’s own explainer page still says today.
What we foundTwenty-four months since April 2025, starting ten business days after the first day of photography.
Is exclusivity just part of the deal?
Commonly saidBarely mentioned. Five pages of twenty raise it, and the best of them is from 2019.
What we foundCompeting products are covered by the holding fee. Unrelated ones are priced at 150 or 200 per cent of scale.
Do extras get residuals?
Commonly saidUsually implied, since pages describe residuals as something commercial performers receive.
What we foundExtras receive no use fees and no holding fees at all. The session covers a year and that is the end of it.
Does the agent take ten per cent either way?
Commonly saidYes, stated flatly, with the film rule about scale assumed to apply everywhere.
What we foundCommercials carry a carve-out. An agent may commission a commercial at scale, which the film contract does not permit.
What do non-union commercials pay?
Commonly saidConfident ranges, given to the dollar, on several pages that cite nothing at all.
What we foundNobody has measured it. There is no survey, no sample and no method behind any figure in circulation.
Can one national commercial pay your year?
Commonly saidRepeated constantly, usually as the reason to chase commercial work in the first place.
What we foundNo source for it anywhere. Held but unaired, a spot pays $3,420.80 a year, and the network rates are frozen.
So read the contract for two things before you read it for the number. Which use categories the advertiser has actually bought, because that is what you are being paid for, and how wide the exclusivity runs, because anything past a competing product is a priced item you are entitled to charge for. The session fee is the floor rather than the fee. And if a page tells you what a commercial pays without telling you which contract year it is quoting, it is describing a market that closed in March 2025.
