SAG-AFTRA has no word for a buyout. It sold one for three years, then abolished it, and nobody in this search mentions either fact.

The word means five different things, so make somebody tell you which

Buyout is not a term of art. It is a word producers use in five markets to describe five different bargains, and the confusion is not accidental.

The shape is always the same. You are paid once now, instead of being paid again later. What differs is how much later, how much territory, and how many media.

We looked for the word in the documents that ought to contain it. It appears in none of the six SAG-AFTRA contract documents we searched, including the one you personally sign.

It appears in Equity’s published rates without embarrassment. On the video games agreement, the union writes that it has baked the buyout into the fee. That is a union selling perpetual worldwide use and calling it what it is.

SAG-AFTRA does not sell buyouts, and the one it built got abolished

This is the piece of history that explains why the word is missing from the contract, and no page in this search has it.

In 2019 the union introduced an Alternate Compensation Structure. It was optional, elected by the producer, and it was a buyout in everything but name. One bundle was described in the trade press as all you can eat.

It was discontinued on 1 June 2022. Advertisers could keep using the old model until the end of that year. From 1 January 2023 only the current structure has been available.

What replaced it is a meter of a different kind. Rights now run in thirteen week use cycles, and every cycle has to be paid for again.

They stop at the Maximum Period of Use. That is 24 months, calculated as ten business days from the first production day plus two years minus one day. It must appear on your first paycheck.

There is one more thing the union structure does that private buyouts almost never do. Silence ends rights rather than extending them.

Every cycle must be affirmatively paid again. The clock stops hard at 24 months. In a non‑union buyout, silence is usually drafted to run the other way.

In Britain the traditional model is a meter, and a buyout switches it off

This is the divergence that makes most online advice useless to somebody on the other side of it, and no page we read explains it.

Two corrections first. The UK commercials agreement is between Equity and the IPA, the advertisers’ body. It is often miscalled the APA agreement, but the APA deals with crew.

Now the structure. Use fees in the traditional model are calculated as the number of audience ratings multiplied by your basic studio fee. The more the commercial is actually seen, the more you are paid.

That is the opposite of a flat fee, and it is why the word buyout carries a different charge in Britain. A UK buyout is an advertiser paying a multiple of your studio fee to escape that meter.

One widely repeated claim is worth correcting while we are here. A large American site tells readers that British unions do not pay residuals.

That is wrong as stated. The ratings model is a residual equivalent, and on a heavy campaign it can pay considerably more than the American structure would.

What a buyout is worth, and the only real multiple anybody publishes

No union publishes a buyout price. There is no standard, and any page that gives you one with confidence has invented it. But there are four anchors, and one of them is very good.

The good one is hiding in a SAG-AFTRA answer about Spanish language commercials. Foreign use is priced in multiples of your session fee, and the union publishes the whole ladder.

Set those against each other and one thing jumps out. The union charges nine session fees for worldwide use that still expires.

The circulating non‑union convention for perpetuity worldwide is two to three times session. That is a third of the union price for permanent rights rather than temporary ones.

One more anchor is worth keeping. SAG-AFTRA’s own abolished bundle sold a year of very broad use for $20,000, which was roughly twenty five times the session fee of the day.

Perpetuity, the universe, all media, and why it usually holds up

You will read a great deal of advice suggesting these clauses are unenforceable boilerplate that no court would uphold. That advice is wrong, and acting on it is expensive.

The full phrase stacks three separate grants into one sentence. Unlimited time, unlimited territory, and unlimited media including media that do not exist yet.

That third limb is the one that matters most now. It is what a producer points at when arguing that a release signed in 2015 covers synthetic reuse in 2026.

Courts do enforce these. A New York case decided in 2014 upheld a model release with no time limit and no geographic limit at all, covering advertising, magazines, billboards and any other lawful purposes.

The claim that survived in that case was not against the company the actor had signed with. It was against a third party the release had never named. That is the real lesson.

Whether a buyout can take your digital replica

Outside a union agreement it often tries to, and the hereafter devised clause is the hook. Inside one, the rules are now strict. And in two states a vague clause is simply void.

Start with the union position, because it sets a floor everybody else can be measured against. The 2025 Commercials Contract requires no less than 1.5 session fees for each commercial containing a performance generated from your digital replica.

At current rates that is $1,282.80 on camera, before use and holding fees, which are also owed. Not one of the twenty-six pages we audited cites that formula.

Consent has to be clear, conspicuous and written, on a separate rider. Consent to create a replica is a different thing from consent to each use of it.

And it expires. Retention of a replica past the maximum period of use is capped at 24 months at a time and must be renegotiated. Replicas not approved for retention must be destroyed.

We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice. If a buyout in front of you touches your likeness or voice, that is the point to pay somebody who is one.

Five things a buyout takes that nobody prices separately

The fee is the part everybody argues about. These five are usually handed over silently, and four of them have a published union price you can point at.

Exclusivity is a separate product. The union says the holding fee is the fee for exclusivity, in those words. Its abolished bundles priced non‑competitive products at 25, then 15, then 10 per cent, and 200 per cent beyond the third.

A buyout that locks you out of a whole category without a line item for it is taking that for nothing. In Britain a featured performer can reportedly be locked out for up to three years.

You may not be as conflicted as you assume. Under the union contract, holding fees cannot be applied to traditional digital cycles unless a streaming or linear cycle has been paid.

So a digital only union commercial may leave you entirely free to shoot a competitor. Actors turn down work every week on an exclusivity that nobody actually bought.

Name the product, not the client. This is the highest value sentence on the page and it costs nothing to say out loud.

A buyout naming the client gives away every brand that client owns, now and in future. A buyout naming the product does not. The union treats a new product as a new commercial, and your contract can too.

Watch which direction silence runs. In union work rights lapse unless somebody pays again, and the clock stops dead at 24 months.

Private buyouts are usually drafted the other way, so that nothing happening means the rights continue. We could not find any survey measuring how common automatic renewal actually is, so we are flagging the pattern rather than putting a number on it.

Twenty-six pages, and what none of them says

We opened every page ranking for this question and its obvious variants, then checked each figure against the underlying document. Three more were unreachable.

Two specific corrections are worth making by name, because both pages rank and both are wrong rather than merely old.

One tells readers that a union actor need not worry about buyouts. The union sold buyout bundles for three years and its corporate contract sells perpetual use today.

The other tells American readers that British unions do not pay residuals, and advises asking for an American contract instead. The British ratings model is a residual equivalent and can pay more. That page has been up since 2018.

Grading the sources

This page makes a structural claim about a word, prices rights in session fees, and tells you two statutes have already voided a clause you may have signed. It owes you the working on each.

Where we differ from the standard account

So the honest answer to what is a buyout is that it depends who is asking and which paperwork they are holding. The word is doing no work at all. What does the work is three fields, and you can ask for them in one sentence: how long, where, and in what media. Get those written down and you have a normal commercial deal that you can price. Leave them out, which is what the phrase in perpetuity throughout the universe in all media now known or hereafter devised is designed to do, and you have sold everything you have for a number somebody else chose.