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Every time a Friends rerun airs somewhere in the world, the six main cast members get a check. Every time an episode of Breaking Bad streams on Netflix, Bryan Cranston gets paid again. That’s residuals — and for most working TV professionals, they’re not a luxury. They’re what keeps the lights on between jobs.
Quick Answer
TV residuals are additional payments made to actors, writers, directors, and certain other crew members every time a show is reused beyond its original broadcast — whether that’s a rerun on cable, a stream on Netflix, a DVD release, or a foreign broadcast. The amounts are set through union contracts negotiated by SAG-AFTRA, the WGA, and the DGA, and they vary based on the platform, the market, and the size of the audience. Residuals are not bonuses or royalties. They are a contractual right, won through decades of labor negotiations.
What Residuals Actually Are
The simplest way to understand residuals is this: the people who make a TV show get paid once to make it. Residuals are what they get paid every time someone watches it afterward.
When a writer spends months in a writer’s room breaking stories and drafting scripts, or when an actor shoots 22 episodes of a network drama, they receive their negotiated fee for that work. But television doesn’t just air once and disappear. Shows rerun on cable, get licensed to streaming services, get sold to foreign broadcasters, and sometimes stay in circulation for 30 years. Residuals are the mechanism that ensures the people who created the work keep sharing in its ongoing commercial life.
They’re often misunderstood as some kind of Hollywood perk — the image of a wealthy actor still cashing checks decades later. The reality for most TV professionals is far more modest. Residuals function as a financial bridge between jobs in an industry where steady employment is far from guaranteed. A mid-level character actor or a staff writer on a network drama might rely on residual income to cover months of expenses while between gigs.
A Brief History: Why Residuals Exist
Residuals weren’t always part of the deal. When television first emerged as a mass medium in the late 1940s and early 1950s, studios paid performers once and retained all rights to reuse the footage however they wanted, forever.
The first major fight came in 1960, when both the WGA and SAG went on strike simultaneously — the only time that had happened until 2023. The trigger was studios selling old films to television networks, airing them to tens of millions of viewers with advertising, and paying the original creators nothing. Writers and actors argued, successfully, that reuse was a new commercial exploitation of their work and deserved additional compensation.
The pattern has repeated every time the industry has undergone a major technological shift. The rise of home video in 1980 sparked an actors’ strike. The emergence of the internet triggered the 2007–2008 WGA strike. And the dominance of streaming drove both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA to strike simultaneously again in 2023 — the first time in 63 years. Each time, the central argument is the same: new platforms are making money from creative work, and the people who made that work deserve a cut.
Who Gets Residuals
Not everyone who works on a TV show receives residuals. They go to specific categories of talent covered under guild agreements:
Actors — Any performer with a speaking role who is a SAG-AFTRA member. This includes series regulars, recurring guest stars, and day players. Voice actors and stunt performers are also covered. Background performers (extras) generally do not receive residuals.
Writers — Credited writers covered under WGA agreements. “Credited” is the key word — only writers who receive an official writing credit on an episode are entitled to residuals for that episode, which is why WGA credit arbitration is taken seriously.
Directors — Members of the Directors Guild of America (DGA), including unit production managers and assistant directors in certain categories.
The amounts differ significantly between guilds. SAG-AFTRA rates are roughly three times higher than DGA and WGA rates for the same platform and market, partly because the actor pool is larger and the fund needs to cover more people, and partly because the union’s negotiating position has historically been stronger on this point.
How Residuals Are Calculated
This is where it gets complicated, and deliberately so. The formulas are negotiated every three years between the guilds and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), and they differ based on several variables at once.
The platform matters. A rerun on a major broadcast network like NBC or CBS generates higher residuals than the same episode airing on basic cable. A licensing deal to a major streaming service generates different rates than a foreign broadcast deal. FAST channels (free ad-supported streaming like Pluto TV or Tubi) have their own formula.
The market matters. Domestic residuals and foreign residuals are calculated separately. A show airing in the UK, Germany, or Japan generates its own residual stream, tracked and paid out by the studio.
The original compensation matters. For actors, streaming residuals under SAG-AFTRA are calculated based on Total Actual Compensation — what the performer was originally paid, including certain overages — multiplied by a percentage that varies by platform size and exhibition year.
For made-for-streaming shows specifically, there are two types of residuals. Fixed residuals apply to shows created originally for streaming platforms, calculated using a formula involving program length, the size of the streaming service (measured by subscriber count), and which year of exhibition it is. Revenue-based residuals apply when a show made for one platform is licensed to another — in that case, the studio pays a percentage of the licensing fee, shared among the covered talent.
The percentage rate isn’t static. It starts at its highest in the first exhibition year and declines gradually over time, reaching a floor rate that continues in perpetuity. A show that keeps streaming 13 years later still generates residuals — just at a much smaller rate than it did in year one.
The Network TV Residual Model (The Old System)
Before streaming changed everything, the traditional residuals model was more straightforward — and considerably more lucrative for working professionals.
Under the classic broadcast model, every time a network reran an episode, it triggered a residual payment. The first rerun generated the highest payment. The second generated somewhat less. Each subsequent rerun paid at a declining rate. Once a show moved into syndication on cable or local stations, a separate set of residuals kicked in, based on the license fees the syndicator was paying.
This created a reliable income pipeline. A show that ran for five or six seasons on a major network, then went into syndication on cable, would generate residual checks for its cast and writers for years — sometimes decades. The Friends cast reportedly still earns around $20 million annually combined from residuals on the show’s continued syndication and streaming licensing. That’s an extreme example, but it illustrates how the system was designed to work: long-running shows with big audiences created long-running income for the people who made them.
What Streaming Broke
When Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon began producing original content at scale in the early 2010s, they operated under a residual structure that hadn’t been designed for them. The made-for-streaming formula was originally negotiated in 2009 as a modest new media provision — at a time when streaming was a small and experimental market. Studios locked that formula in place and then watched streaming become the dominant form of television consumption while paying residuals calibrated for a niche delivery system.
The core problem was transparency. Traditional broadcast residuals were straightforward because everyone could see when and where a show aired. Streaming platforms don’t publish viewership data. A show could be watched by 60 million households in a month and generate residuals calculated on a fixed formula based on subscriber count rather than actual performance. As Bryan Cranston said on the 2023 picket line, the residuals from Breaking Bad streaming on Netflix were a fraction of what the show would have generated under the old network model — despite reaching far more viewers.
A 2023 analysis found that in 2005, residuals made up about 22% of total WGA writer compensation. By 2021, after streaming had become the dominant platform, that figure had only grown to 24% — but adjusted for inflation and the dramatic increase in the number of shows being produced, the per-writer reality was considerably worse than those numbers suggest.
What the 2023 Strikes Changed
The dual WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes of 2023 — which together ran from May through November and marked the longest combined work stoppage since 1960 — produced new contracts that updated the streaming residual structure in meaningful but contested ways.
The most significant new element was a viewership-based bonus system. For both guilds, shows on major streaming platforms that surpass specific viewership thresholds within 90 days of release trigger additional “success bonus” payments on top of standard residuals.
Under the WGA deal, credited writers receive an additional 50% of their fixed domestic and foreign residual if their show hits the threshold. Under the SAG-AFTRA deal, principal performers receive a payment equivalent to 100% of their fixed residual if the threshold is met — though 25% of that goes into a union-managed fund distributed among broader membership, with 75% going directly to qualifying performers.
The viewership thresholds are based on total hours streamed within the window, calibrated to platform size. Shows like Stranger Things, Wednesday, and Bridgerton clearly qualify. Many mid-tier streaming shows do not. Critics within the industry noted that the bonus payments, while real, were relatively modest — one industry analyst called it “effectively a second fixed residual” rather than a meaningful share of revenue. The debate over whether the 2023 deals truly fixed the streaming residuals problem, or only partially addressed it, continues.
Residuals vs. Royalties: An Important Distinction
These two terms get confused frequently, including in mainstream coverage of the strikes. They are not the same thing.
Residuals are union-negotiated, standardized payments set through collective bargaining. Every covered actor who appeared in an episode gets the same residual rate for a given platform — there’s no individual negotiation. The guild sets the floor, and that’s what everyone gets.
Royalties are individually negotiated and tied to a percentage of revenue or profits. Showrunners, creators, and executive producers with sufficient leverage may negotiate backend participation — a share of profits from the show’s commercial success — in addition to their union-mandated residuals. This is a separate contract, not a guild right, and most working TV professionals never see it.
The Friends cast’s $20 million annual figure comes from a combination of residuals and profit participation deals their agents negotiated when the show became a massive hit. A staff writer on the same show earns union-mandated residuals only. The gap between those two outcomes is enormous.
What Residuals Look Like in Practice
The range is wide enough that it’s almost misleading to talk about residuals as a single thing.
At the top end: a series regular on a long-running network hit that goes into syndication can earn residuals that effectively double their per-episode fee over time, providing a substantial passive income for years after the show ends.
In the middle: a recurring guest star on a streaming drama, appearing in four episodes of an eight-episode season, might receive quarterly residual checks in the low hundreds of dollars per episode — real money between jobs, but not life-changing.
At the low end: a day player with one speaking line in a Netflix original might receive a residual check for under $50 per payment cycle. The check is real. The amount is largely symbolic.
The 2023 strikes were fought, in large part, by working professionals in that middle range — people who had built careers in television under a system where residuals functioned as a meaningful income supplement, and who found that streaming had quietly hollowed out that safety net without anyone explicitly announcing it.
Residuals and the Future of TV
The residuals conversation is unlikely to be resolved permanently — it has been renegotiated at every major industry inflection point for 65 years, and the next inflection point (AI-generated content, synthetic performers, algorithmic writing tools) is already arriving.
The fundamental tension isn’t going away: studios and streaming platforms benefit financially from having a large library of content that keeps attracting subscribers. The people who built that library want a share of that ongoing value. How that gets balanced, and what leverage writers and actors have to enforce it, will define the economics of television for the next generation of creators.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are TV residuals?
Residuals are additional payments made to actors, writers, directors, and certain crew members every time a TV show is reused beyond its original broadcast — through reruns, streaming, international licensing, or other secondary markets. They are set through union contracts, not individual negotiation.
Do actors still get residuals from streaming?
Yes, but the amounts are typically lower than what the traditional broadcast model generated. Streaming residuals are calculated using formulas based on platform size, program length, and exhibition year rather than actual viewership. The 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA contracts introduced viewership-based bonus payments for qualifying shows, but the base streaming residual structure remains lower than network TV rates.
Who qualifies for TV residuals?
SAG-AFTRA members with speaking roles (actors, voice actors, stunt performers), credited WGA writers, and DGA directors and certain production managers. Background performers and non-union cast and crew do not receive residuals.
How much do residuals pay?
It varies enormously. A series regular on a long-running network show that went into syndication can earn six figures annually in residuals for years. A day player on a streaming original might receive $30–$50 per payment cycle. Most working TV professionals fall somewhere in between, using residuals to bridge gaps between jobs.
What is the difference between residuals and royalties?
Residuals are standardized union-negotiated payments — everyone covered gets the same rate for the same platform. Royalties are individually negotiated deals, usually for creators and executive producers, tied to a percentage of a show’s profits. Most TV professionals only receive residuals.
Why did the 2023 strikes focus so much on residuals?
Because streaming had become the dominant platform for television while residuals remained calibrated to rates negotiated when streaming was a minor market. Writers and actors were reaching far larger audiences through Netflix and other services than they ever had through broadcast TV, while receiving residuals calculated on formulas designed for a much smaller medium. The strikes produced new viewership-based bonus payments, though debate continues over whether the outcome adequately addressed the gap.
Do residuals last forever?
In theory, yes — as long as a show keeps being used commercially, residuals are triggered. In practice, the rate declines over time and the payments become very small for older shows. A show that aired 30 years ago and still gets occasional cable reruns generates minimal residuals. A show that aired 10 years ago and still streams on a major platform generates more meaningful ongoing payments.
This page is part of our guide on how television works behind the scenes. Related reading: How TV Shows Make Money, How Does TV Syndication Work, What Is a TV Writer’s Room.
Sources
- Rolling Stone — SAG Actors Want Higher Residuals. Here’s How Streaming Residuals Work (August 2023)
https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/how-streaming-residuals-work-sag-actors-strike-hollywood-1234802623/ - Paste Magazine — The Price for Profits: Why Residuals Are at the Heart of the SAG-AFTRA and WGA Strikes (November 2023)
https://www.pastemagazine.com/tv/industry/strikes-2023-wga-sag-aftra-hollywood-residuals-statistics-streaming - Deadline — New WGA & SAG-AFTRA Residuals Model Explained (November 2023)
https://deadline.com/2023/11/streaming-model-explained-sag-aftra-wga-residuals-deal-1235642995/ - Deadline — Streaming Residuals Explained: Suits Success on Netflix a Case Study (September 2023)
https://deadline.com/2023/09/streaming-residuals-explained-suits-netflix-1235552804/ - Variety — Residuals Are Key to Nearly Every Strike in Hollywood History (2023)
https://variety.com/2023/biz/news/residuals-strike-hollywood-history-wga-sag-aftra-1235727986/ - Entertainment Partners — The Beginner’s Guide to Film and Television Residuals
https://www.ep.com/blog/the-beginners-guide-to-film-and-television-residuals/ - Writers Guild of America East — Residuals Survival Guide
https://www.wgaeast.org/levies-and-payments/residuals/survival-guide/ - Backstage — Streaming Residuals Explained: Do Actors Get Royalties from Netflix? (May 2024)
https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/streaming-residuals-explained-77222/ - No Film School — Streaming Services and Residuals — How Do They Work? (2022)
https://nofilmschool.com/streaming-services-residuals - Wikipedia — 2023 SAG-AFTRA Strike
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_SAG-AFTRA_strike