What are Salaries of Professional Actors?

Shakespeare might have said that all the world's a stage, but that doesn't make it easy to become a professional actor. Since many acting jobs only last a few months or even as little as a couple of hours, it can be difficult for an actor to find steady employment, let alone a reliable actor salary. If you've chosen to try to make your career on the stage or screen, no doubt you've been warned by well-intentioned friends and family that actor salaries can be quite small - there's a reason the phrase "starving artist" came into being, after all. However, before you go out and get one of those day jobs everyone says not to quit, consider that there are thousands of people who do manage to live comfortably on an actor salary. Arm yourself with detailed actor salary research to help you make the most informed decisions possible.

Actor Salary Data

Actor salary varies a great deal. A man with one line in a local production of The Time of Your Life is still an actor. So is George Clooney. That doesn't mean that one man's salary has anything to do with the other's. This is why for actor salary research in particular, it's important to look at median actor salaries instead of average actor salaries - it discounts both the highest and lowest salaries to give you a more realistic picture (for more on this topic, read the classic Ask Dr. Salary article, "Why is Median Better than Mean for a Typical Salary?").

Measuring Actor Salaries

PayScale's Median Salary by State chart for actor salaries shows that while New York and California are among the top states for high actor salary, Florida and Pennsylvania are also fairly high up on the list. It may be tempting to pack up and move to New York to try your hand as a Broadway star, but it's worth it to look into regional theater in other states with high actor salaries as well. If you don't make your big break right away, keep at it - measuring salaries of professional actors by years of experience shows that actors with 10-19 years of experience earn the highest actor salaries by a long shot.

Interested in other careers in the arts? Continue your salary research on makeup artist salary, musician salary.