The payments writers receive when their work is reused have risen 14.3 per cent in five years, the guild reports, though the recent direction is down

Residuals in 2025

When a screenwriter is paid for a script, that is not necessarily the end of the matter. If the film or episode is shown again, sold to another outlet or made available on another platform, the writer is owed a further payment. These are residuals. For many writers they are what pays the mortgage between jobs.

The Writers Guild West’s latest annual figures include a line on residuals that repays attention, because it points in two directions.

The Figures

According to Deadline’s summary of the guild’s annual report, residuals are up 14.3 per cent over a five-year period, even though they have been on a steady, if marginal, decline since 2022.

So compared with five years ago, more is being paid. Compared with three years ago, slightly less.

The same report records that the number of members with any writing earnings fell 27 per cent between 2022 and 2025. Set against that, a marginal decline in residuals looks like relative stability. Initial employment has dropped sharply. Payments for reuse have held up much better.

Why They Would Hold Up

That is what residuals are for. They are paid on work already done.

A writer whose series ended in 2019 continues to receive payments as it is repeated and streamed. The contraction in new commissions since 2022 does not affect those. Indeed, when companies make fewer new programmes they lean more heavily on their libraries, and reuse generates residuals.

In that sense residuals act as a shock absorber. In a downturn, the flow from past work continues while new work dries up.

Why They Would Slip

The same logic explains the recent drift. Residuals lag behind production. The work produced in the boom years is now a few years old and its reuse is tapering. Less new work has been made since, so less is entering the pool. A marginal decline today may become a larger one later, as the thinner output of 2023 to 2025 becomes the library.

Other pressures are frequently mentioned. Companies have removed programmes from their streaming services altogether, sometimes for accounting reasons. A programme that is not available generates nothing. Traditional sources of residuals, such as broadcast repeats and cable syndication, have been shrinking for years as those businesses decline.

The 2023 Dispute

Residuals from streaming were at the centre of the 2023 strike. Under earlier agreements, a writer was paid a fixed residual for a streaming programme regardless of how many people watched it. A series could be a worldwide success and its writers would receive the same as for one nobody saw. Streaming services also did not disclose viewing figures.

The gap between the two sides was wide. The public record of the strike notes that the guild estimated its proposals would yield writers about 429 million dollars a year, whereas the studios’ offer would yield 86 million.

The settlement, reached after nearly five months, increased foreign streaming residuals, introduced a bonus tied to viewership for the most-watched streaming programmes, and required companies to share some viewing data with the guild in confidence.

The five-year increase now reported will reflect those gains, together with those of the 2020 agreement and the growth in streaming reuse.

The Writers’ Case

The argument for residuals rests on fairness and on the structure of the work.

Screenwriters are freelances. They are employed project by project with long gaps between. Their initial fee compensates for the writing. It does not compensate for the fact that the company will go on earning from that writing for decades.

Residuals give the writer a share in the continuing value of what they created. They also make a freelance career possible, by providing income in the years when nothing sells.

The Companies’ Case

The studios’ position has its own logic.

A streaming service does not earn money from an individual programme in the way a cinema release or a syndicated repeat does. Subscribers pay a monthly fee for everything. Attributing revenue to one title is not straightforward, and a payment formula tied to viewing requires data that companies regard as commercially sensitive.

Residuals are also a cost attached to keeping a programme available. If the cost of carrying an older, little-watched title exceeds its value to the service, the rational response is to remove it. Higher residuals can therefore, at the margin, lead to less work being available, which helps nobody.

And companies point out that they bear the risk. Most programmes lose money. Writers are paid whether or not the work succeeds.

The 2026 Contract

Earlier articles on this site covered the agreement reached this year. Its main emphasis was on the health plan and on artificial intelligence. Residuals were not the central battleground they had been in 2023. That is consistent with the figures: a part of writers’ income that has held comparatively steady was a lower priority than one in crisis.

What Writers Should Understand

Residuals depend on credit. They are paid to the credited writers of a produced work. An uncredited rewrite, however well paid, generates none. That gives credit a financial importance beyond reputation.

They depend on the work being shown. A programme pulled from a service stops paying.

They are collected and distributed through the guild, which audits the companies. That function is one of the practical benefits of membership.

And they cannot substitute for employment over the long run. They follow from work done. If less is made, there will in time be less to pay residuals on.

The Outlook

The five-year rise is a real achievement for the guild’s negotiators. The gentle decline since 2022 is a warning. The measure to watch is not the next year’s total but what happens once the output of the lean years makes up most of what audiences are watching.

This article reports figures from trade coverage of guild documents and from the public record of the 2023 strike. The London Prat has a long memory for repeat fees and discusses them in its UK satirical news on residual cheques and its British satirical news about repeat fees. Bohiney Magazine covers the American side.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/