Josh Peck revealed on the “Financial Tea with Mrs. Dow Jones” podcast that he and his “Drake and Josh” castmates earned far less from the Nickelodeon series than fans might assume, with take-home pay landing around $125,000 a year over the show’s four-year run.
Peck told the podcast’s host that the cast started out making $3,000 an episode on “The Amanda Show” before moving to “Drake and Josh,” which ran 60 episodes total. By the time the show wrapped, the average per-episode rate had climbed to about $15,000.
“So over four years, we wound up making about $900,000, but I think we probably, between agent, manager, and taxes, we cleared half of that,” Peck said.
With four years of steady work factored in, Peck put the annual take-home figure at roughly $125,000. He noted that the show generated no residuals, a structure he said was standard for kids’ television at the time.
Peck said the cast had little leverage in negotiations because Nickelodeon represented essentially the only outlet for young performers working at that level. The host raised the example of the “Friends” cast negotiating collectively, contrasting it with the “Gilmore Girls” cast, who she said did not negotiate together and were paid less as a result.
