Economy

The "Stranger Things" Kids Make More Per Episode Than Most Americans Do All Year

Colman Andrews

Published: July 10, 2019 9:28 am

Last Updated: January 11, 2020 7:54 am

Everybody knows that movie and TV stars make a lot more money than ordinary humans, but sometimes seeing the numbers in black and white brings home just how much they are actually paid.

We’re not talking the George Clooneys or Scarlett Johanssons here, or even the actors paid the most to say the least. It’s the salaries going to the admittedly talented young men and women (or boys and girls) who star in the third season of the breakout Netflix coming-of-age-spookfest “Stranger Things.”

According to research done by CableTV.com, the nine young principal performers in the series earn more than most Americans do make working 40 hours a week all year long. (Of course, that’s not counting people lucky enough to get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars — like these 77 jobs with six-figure salaries.)

The show’s actors take home as much as $350,000 per episode (that’s for Millie Bobby Brown, who plays Eleven). There are eight episodes in the season, so that works out to $2.8 million for the season — just for this one show, and Brown will presumably have the time and opportunity to appear in other TV and movie projects.

The average annual salary in America is $47,060. Brown earns $31,818 for one eight-hour day. A worker paid at that rate would have to labor for 1,383 hours — almost 173 work days — to make that much.

She is by far the highest paid young member of the cast, with a salary that matches that of grownups Winona Ryder and David Harbour. Her teenage peers make a mere $150,000 to $250,000 per episode. Don’t feel so bad, though. That’s only 50 to 80 cents per second. That is almost enough to make the child actors some of the richest people in their home states — this is how much you need to make to be in the 1% in your state.