Actors
Also called Actress, Performer, Stage actor, Film actor, TV actor
In brief
In May 2025, BLS counted 55,000 US actors. Median pay was $26,460 a year in May 2003. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 70,540, in May 2012. The last full technology era for actors: Streaming on-demand, 2007 to 2020.
What the sources say
Official outlook
BLS projects little or no change in employment from 2025 to 2035 (0%).
AI exposure studies
- 15.6% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.
Last updated .
Cite this page
Future History. (2026, October 11). Actors: jobs and pay since 1870 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/27-2011
Future History. "Actors: jobs and pay since 1870." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/27-2011.
@misc{futurehistory_27_2011, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Actors: jobs and pay since 1870}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/27-2011}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }
The access date is today's date on your device.
≈ $45,110 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)
The Continental Congress bans theatrical performances as incompatible with the austerity required by the Revolutionary War. The ban, recommended in 1774 and enforced from 1776, was the formal expression of a longstanding Puritan suspicion of theatre as idle and immoral. Most colonial cities had already periodically banned theatrical performance. The prohibition lasted until the early 1790s, when state by state the bans were lifted -- Massachusetts in 1793. This legal precariousness shaped the social and economic standing of American actors well into the 19th century: the occupation was respectable but not fully legitimate, a status that would persist until the founding of the first actor's unions in the early 20th century.
The Actors' Society of America, a forerunner of Actors' Equity, is founded. The transition from stock-company acting (where performers were hired for a season) to the star system (where touring productions were built around a single headliner with an interchangeable supporting company) had created a class of stranded actors: the supporting players who followed a star on tour were often left without pay when the tour folded, because there was no contractual protection beyond the verbal assurance of the booking agent. The 1882 formation of the Actors' Society was the first organizational response to this exploitation -- though it would take three more decades before Actors' Equity was founded (1913) and another seven before the American Federation of Labor recognized it.
October 6, 1927: The Jazz Singer opens in New York. The film includes synchronized dialogue and singing -- Al Jolson's voice is heard on screen in what is effectively the end of the silent film era. Within two years, nearly all major film productions will be talkies. The transition is brutal for a significant fraction of the silent-film acting workforce: studio voice tests eliminate performers whose voices do not record well or whose accents are incompatible with their screen persona. Some of the biggest silent-film stars -- John Gilbert, Norma Talmadge, Clara Bow (whose Brooklyn accent undermined her image) -- struggle to make the transition. New talent is recruited from Broadway and British theatre specifically for voice quality.
June 30, 1933: The Screen Actors Guild is incorporated in Los Angeles by a group of six actors -- Berton Churchill, Charles Miller, Grant Mitchell, Ralph Morgan, Alden Gay, and Kenneth Thomson -- responding to studio exploitation of contract players. When Eddie Cantor joins and advocates for all actors rather than just established stars, SAG membership grows from approximately 80 to more than 4,000 within three weeks. SAG wins collective bargaining recognition from the studios in 1937 following passage of the National Labor Relations Act, establishing the first comprehensive contract covering film actor wages, working conditions, and hours.
United States v. Paramount Pictures (1948) -- the Supreme Court rules that the major studios' vertical integration (owning studios, distribution, and theatres) constitutes an antitrust violation. The studios are required to divest their theatre chains, which begins the unraveling of the contract player system. Without captive theatre chains, studios could no longer guarantee exhibition for every film they produced; this made the fixed cost of maintaining large contract player stables less economically rational. By 1955, the major studios had released most of their contract players and the freelance acting market -- where performers negotiated film-by-film -- had replaced the studio system.
March 7 to April 18, 1960: SAG strikes over residuals for feature films sold to television. Ronald Reagan, then SAG president, negotiates the deal that establishes the residuals framework for television use of theatrical films. The settlement is imperfect -- actors waive residuals for films made before 1960 in exchange for a $2.65 million payment to a pension fund -- but the residuals principle becomes the foundational financial mechanism for screen-acting income for the next six decades. The 1960 residuals framework would eventually become the central dispute of the 2023 strike, when actors argued that streaming platforms were generating billions from their performances while paying residuals at a fraction of the broadcast rate.
July 14 to November 9, 2023: SAG-AFTRA strikes against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers -- the longest actors' strike in Hollywood history at 118 days. The strike is driven by two concurrent demands: fair residuals for streaming (where actors' performances generate billions in subscriber revenue but pay residuals at rates negotiated before streaming existed) and AI protections (where studios sought the right to create digital replicas of actors' faces and voices without consent or additional compensation). The SAG-AFTRA strike has a $6.5 billion economic impact on Southern California. The November 2023 settlement establishes affirmative consent requirements for any AI digital replica use and sets additional compensation for replica use outside the original production context. The agreement is widely cited as the first major collective bargaining framework for AI in a creative industry.
May 2024: Scarlett Johansson publicly demands that OpenAI withdraw its "Sky" AI voice -- a voice assistant that Johansson states is "eerily similar" to her own distinctive voice -- after OpenAI approached her for a licensing deal, she declined, and the company released Sky anyway. OpenAI withdraws Sky from ChatGPT and issues a statement claiming Sky was not intended to sound like Johansson. The incident becomes a reference point in the broader public debate about AI voice cloning and likeness rights: even the most legally protected performers, with top-tier entertainment attorneys, face an environment in which AI voice replication can occur without consent and remediation requires public pressure rather than contractual enforcement.
Will AI replace actors? What the research says
Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.
Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.
What's changing day to day for actors
Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.
AI is taking this onServe as a background or featured background performer (appearing in crowd scenes, restaurant backgrounds, and atmospheric environment shots that give a production the texture of a lived-in world) a role category facing direct displacement from AI-generated crowd simulation tools and productions that now use Runway Gen-4 or Sora to generate background environments without booking human extras.
Serve as a background or featured background performer (appearing in crowd scenes, restaurant backgrounds, and atmospheric environment shots that give a production the texture of a lived-in world) a role category facing direct displacement from AI-generated crowd simulation tools and productions that now use Runway Gen-4 or Sora to generate background environments without booking human extras.[7],[3],[11]
Background performance is the highest-AI-exposure segment of acting employment: The Wrap (2025) documented multiple productions using AI-generated background likenesses, citing large cost savings vs. booking union extras; Runway Gen-4 Ultra (Apr 2026) produces crowd scenes and populated public environments at quality sufficient for many mid-ground and background shots. The SAG-AFTRA 2023 Agreement specifically addressed AI replacement of background performers, requiring consent and compensation for any production that digitally scans a background actor and reuses that likeness in AI-generated sequences, but enforcement against non-union and international productions is limited. The strategic move for working actors is to use background work as a set access and networking tool, not as a primary income source, and to transition toward featured principal roles where the consent framework and audience-value arguments provide more durable protection.
AI is taking this onRecord voiceover and ADR work (narrating audiobooks and documentaries, dubbing international productions, looping dialogue for film and TV post-production, and voicing characters in animated series and video games) a high-volume segment of acting income that is directly in the crosshairs of AI voice cloning tools including ElevinLabs Multilingual v2, Replica Studios, and Respeecher.
Record voiceover and ADR work (narrating audiobooks and documentaries, dubbing international productions, looping dialogue for film and TV post-production, and voicing characters in animated series and video games) a high-volume segment of acting income that is directly in the crosshairs of AI voice cloning tools including ElevinLabs Multilingual v2, Replica Studios, and Respeecher.[12],[13],[8],[4]
Voice-only performance is the most severely disrupted acting segment: Replica Studios markets directly to game studios as a cost-effective replacement for secondary and background character voice talent; ElevenLabs Multilingual v2 produces convincing performance-grade audio from many seconds of source material; Backstage (2025) documented a contraction in advertised VO job postings since 2023. The SAG-AFTRA 2023 Agreement covers AI voice cloning for union members on covered productions, but most audiobook, podcast, and non-union animation work is unprotected. The most defensible path for voice actors is to (1) register with SAG-AFTRA to access union-only contracts; (2) pursue Replica Studios' or ElevenLabs' licensed voice programs where you receive royalties for consented AI use of your voice under negotiated terms rather than being replaced without compensation; (3) develop specialties in emotional range, accent versatility, or character distinctiveness that clone tools underperform.
AI is taking this onPerform in television and digital commercials, delivering scripted and improvised product endorsements, lifestyle scenarios, and brand personas across short-form video formats, a segment of acting employment historically important for income stability that is contracting as brands increase use of AI avatar presenters (Synthesia, HeyGen) for low-to-medium budget commercial content.
Perform in television and digital commercials, delivering scripted and improvised product endorsements, lifestyle scenarios, and brand personas across short-form video formats, a segment of acting employment historically important for income stability that is contracting as brands increase use of AI avatar presenters (Synthesia, HeyGen) for low-to-medium budget commercial content.[14],[15],[16]
AI avatar tools (Synthesia, HeyGen) are commercially deployed for corporate training videos, product explainers, and e-commerce content at scale: the budget tier where most commercial actor bookings used to originate. The Deadline (2024) coverage of SAG-AFTRA AI interim agreements for commercials documented that major brands are already using AI presenters for digital-only campaigns while retaining human actors for broadcast-only to maintain union compliance. The survival path in commercial acting is to move up-funnel toward brand ambassador and spokesperson relationships (direct longer-term contracts that are harder to replace with an AI avatar) and to develop genuine product expertise or lifestyle authenticity in a specific niche: the AI avatar that represents an outdoor adventure brand credibly does not yet exist; the human climber who genuinely uses the gear does.
Where actors go next
Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.
- Special Effects Artists and Animators
- US median pay
- $102,030 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- -0.3%
- Producers and Directors
- US median pay
- $90,360 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- +4%
- Writers and Authors
- US median pay
- $76,910 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- -0.3%
What each move takes
Special Effects Artists and Animators
Actors who have done significant motion capture or virtual production work, and who have developed curiosity about the technical pipeline surrounding their performance, are positioned to pivot toward Special Effects Artists and Animators via the performance capture and virtual production specialization. The transition requires genuine technical investment (Unreal Engine 5, Maya, motion capture pipeline fluency) but is less distant than it appears for actors who already understand performance from the inside: the deepest value in animation and mocap is knowing what a performance is supposed to feel like, which AI tools cannot supply. Virtual production roles on LED volume stages are actively hiring and command premium rates; the actor who becomes a virtual production specialist (operating Unreal environments in real time, understanding how LED calibration affects performance color, and coaching other actors through the technical context) occupies a role with no direct AI substitute and a defensible CRI advantage.
- · Unreal Engine 5 for virtual production: ICVFX fundamentals, nDisplay configuration, real-time environment operation on LED volume sets
- · Motion capture performance and data QC: understanding how mocap suits capture performance and where the AI cleanup pipeline introduces artifacts that need correction
- · MetaHuman Animator and facial performance capture: how facial capture systems translate performance into blendshapes and where human correction is required
- · Python scripting basics for pipeline automation: enough to communicate with TDs and to troubleshoot basic pipeline issues independently
- · Virtual production safety and set protocols: the physical requirements and safety considerations of LED volume and projection-based virtual production environments
How has the work of actors changed since 1750?
The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.
Stock company repertory system (traveling and resident companies)
The dominant technology of acting work from the colonial era through the late 19th century was organizational rather than mechanical: the stock company, which maintained a permanent company of players (each assigned a "line of business" -- the lead, the juvenile, the comic, the villain, the soubrette) and rotated a repertoire of plays. Actors learned their craft by performing multiple roles in weekly rotation, often with minimal rehearsal; the skill was not character creation but swift, reliable delivery within a type. The promptbook and gas footlighting (introduced to American theatres in the 1820s) were the key physical technologies; neither gave the actor new capabilities so much as they gave theatres the ability to operate consistently at scale.
Vaudeville circuit and early silent film (Keith-Albee, Orpheum, Edison Vitascope)
The vaudeville circuit transformed acting into a mass-employment industry. At its peak, the Keith-Albee and Orpheum circuits booked tens of thousands of performers across hundreds of theatres from the 1880s through the 1920s, creating a national entertainment economy that required a large, skilled performer workforce. Thomas Edison's Vitascope brought projected moving pictures to American audiences in 1896; by the early 1910s, film had drawn millions of theatre-goers into nickelodeons, beginning the displacement of live vaudeville. Silent film acting required physical expressiveness -- the camera magnified facial and body language in ways the stage did not -- which made some stage actors technically unsuited to the new medium. Charlie Chaplin, who began in British music hall and American vaudeville, became the exemplary actor who mastered both.
Effect on the workVaudeville at its peak employed tens of thousands of performers nationwide. Sound film and the Depression together collapsed this employment base dramatically: most vaudeville circuits closed between 1928 and 1935, displacing tens of thousands of performers who could not transition to film or radio.
Sound film and the studio contract system (The Jazz Singer 1927, big five studios)
The Jazz Singer in 1927 introduced synchronized sound to commercial film and forced a rapid and brutal transition in the acting workforce: silent-film stars who had built careers on physical pantomime faced sudden obsolescence if their voices did not record well or if their accents were incompatible with the characters they had played on screen. MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, and RKO responded to the sound era by building a studio system of contract players who drew weekly guaranteed salaries and were loaned between studios. This created a stable but highly controlled acting workforce: at peak, the studios employed hundreds of professional actors on contract in Southern California, with thousands more working as day players.
Effect on the workThe transition to sound film eliminated most of the vaudeville performer jobs and displaced a significant fraction of silent film actors, replacing them with stage-trained performers whose voices recorded well. The studio system created stable year-round employment for a smaller population of contract players, concentrated in Los Angeles rather than distributed nationally.
Television broadcast (live anthology drama 1948-58, filmed series 1958+)
Television's arrival transformed acting employment in ways more positive than the sound-film transition. The live anthology drama -- Kraft Television Theatre, Studio One, Playhouse 90 -- created week-by-week demand for new actors from 1948 through the late 1950s, launching careers including Paul Newman, James Dean, Rod Steiger, and Grace Kelly. By the late 1950s, filmed television series (westerns, crime dramas, sitcoms) had displaced live performance as the primary format, and Hollywood became the production center for both film and television. SAG's 1960 strike won residual payments for feature films on television, establishing the residuals framework that would define acting compensation for the next six decades. By the early 1960s most work in Hollywood was television-related.
Effect on the workThe proliferation of half-hour and hour-long weekly series created stable, recurring employment at scale that theatrical film production alone could never have sustained.
Cable television, VHS/home video, and digital SFX (1975 HBO, 1977 Star Wars, 1980s home video)
HBO launched its satellite-distributed cable service in 1975, initiating a four-decade expansion of cable channels that created sustained new demand for screen-acting work. VHS home video (commercially launched 1977) established a second revenue window for films, making lower-budget productions more financially viable and expanding the market for actors who could headline direct-to-video releases. Digital visual effects, beginning with Star Wars (1977) and accelerating through the 1990s, did not directly displace actors but changed what they were asked to do: green-screen performance, motion capture (performance capture emerged in the 1990s with Weta Digital and Digital Domain), and interaction with non-existent environment elements became core acting competencies for a growing segment of the workforce. The SAG-AFTRA merger in 2012 consolidated the major acting unions.
Streaming on-demand (Netflix streaming 2007, "peak TV" era 2010-2019)
Netflix launched its streaming service in 2007; by 2013 it had produced its first original series (House of Cards) and demonstrated that the streaming model could sustain prestige television production. The "streaming wars" period from approximately 2015 to 2022 saw Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Disney Plus, Apple TV Plus, HBO Max, and Peacock collectively ordering unprecedented volumes of original content. The streaming era also intensified the bimodal income distribution already characteristic of acting: premium streaming series paid lead actors at premium rates, while residuals structures for streaming were inferior to those for broadcast television.
Effect on the workBLS OEWS employment of actors swings widely from year to year rather than tracing a steady streaming-era climb: it peaked at 70,540 in 2012, stood at 52,620 in 2019, and was 38,800 in 2024, after the 2023 strikes and streaming consolidation.
AI voice cloning, AI digital replicas, and AI-generated video (ElevenLabs 2022, Runway Gen-4 2026)
The arrival of production-grade AI voice cloning (ElevenLabs Multilingual v2, Replica Studios, Respeecher), AI digital avatar generation (Synthesia, HeyGen), and AI video generation (Runway Gen-4 Ultra, Sora) represents the most structurally significant technology shift for actors since the 1927 sound-film transition -- concentrated not at the headlining tier but at the background, voiceover, commercial, and non-union segments that account for the majority of employed acting hours. The Scarlett Johansson "Sky" voice incident of May 2024 -- in which OpenAI released a voice product audibly similar to her distinctive voice without consent -- illustrated that institutional guardrails against voice replication remain actively contested. Runway Gen-4 Ultra (April 2026) reached quality sufficient to generate background crowd scenes and atmospheric environments that eliminate the need for extras bookings.
Effect on the workLos Angeles production shoot days fell between 2022 and 2025. Backstage (2025) documented a contraction in advertised voiceover job postings since 2023, attributed primarily to AI voice tools displacing entry-level and secondary-character VO work.
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Browse all rolesActors employment and pay by year
In other countries
The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.
Canada (NOC 53121)
- Employment, 2020
- 13,970, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021: number of persons with employment income in NOC 53121 Actors, comedians and circus performers, Canada, reference year 2020. A recipients basis (anyone with employment income during the year), slightly broader than a point-in-time employed count. Statistics Canada Open Licence.
- Median pay, 2020
- C$37,200, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021 (Table 98-10-0586): median employment income for NOC 53121 Actors, comedians and circus performers, Canada, reference year 2020, full-year full-time workers (the basis comparable to the US OEWS full-time median). Statistics Canada Open Licence.
View all 31 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
| Year | US employment | Annual pay (median unless marked) | Source | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1870 | 5,000 | n/a | Decennial Census 1950 Researched context | Report |
| 1900 | 9,500 | n/a | Decennial Census 1900 Researched context | Report |
| 1920 | 17,000 | n/a | Decennial Census 1920 Researched context | Report |
| 1937 | n/a | $2,600 | Est., Salaries of Hollywood in 1937 Researched context | Report |
| 1940 | 21,000 | n/a | Decennial Census 1940 Researched context | Report |
| 1960 | 35,000 | n/a | Est., SAG-AFTRA Researched context | Report |
| 1990 | 49,000 | n/a | Est., National Endowment for the Arts Researched context | Report |
| 2000 | 63,500 | $25,920 | BLS OEWS 2000 Official statistic | Report |
| 2003 | 51,840 | $26,460 | BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statistic | Report |
| 2004 | 59,000 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statistic | Report |
| 2005 | 59,590 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statistic | Report |
| 2006 | 51,880 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statistic | Report |
| 2007 | 44,860 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statistic | Report |
| 2008 | 44,360 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statistic | Report |
| 2009 | 39,880 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statistic | Report |
| 2010 | 54,740 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statistic | Report |
| 2011 | 60,830 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statistic | Report |
| 2012 | 70,540 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statistic | Report |
| 2013 | 63,230 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statistic | Report |
| 2014 | 59,210 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statistic | Report |
| 2015 | 50,570 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statistic | Report |
| 2016 | 48,620 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statistic | Report |
| 2017 | 43,470 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statistic | Report |
| 2018 | 47,430 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statistic | Report |
| 2019 | 52,620 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statistic | Report |
| 2020 | 44,460 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statistic | Report |
| 2021 | 30,100 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statistic | Report |
| 2022 | 54,160 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statistic | Report |
| 2023 | 62,560 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statistic | Report |
| 2024 | 38,800 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statistic | Report |
| 2025 | 55,000 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statistic | Report |