Sunday, August 19, 2012

Salary Gaps

The current issue of TV Guide cover features an article about the salaries of TV stars and includes numerous lists of actors, actresses and assorted TV personalities and how much they earn per year. Some interesting bits of information from this article:

* Mark Harmon makes $500,000 per episode of NCIS, which, based on a 22-episode season, comes out to $11 million a year. (The top annual salary for an admiral in the U.S. Navy is about $225,000.)

* Ellen Pompeo, Patrick Dempsey, and Sandra Oh each earn $350,000 per episode of Grey's Anatomy, or $7.7 million annually. (The average salary of a physician in Seattle is $98,000.)

* Mariska Hargitay earns almost $8.5 million playing a New York City detective on Law & Order:SVU. (Excluding overtime and shift differential, a detective in the NYPD with ten years experience earns just under $100,000 a year.)

*Kaley Cuoco earns $6.6 million playing a waitress on The Big Bang Theory. (The average salary for a waitress in Los Angeles is $44,000, with a high of $68,000.)

* Judge Judy makes an incredible $45 million per year! (The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court earned $223,500 in 2011. A U.S. District Court judge earned $174,000, which Judge Judy earns in less than a day and a half!)

According to the US Census Bureau, the median household income is about $51,425, and the median income per person is about $27,041. What's wrong with this picture?

2 comments:

  1. The Judge Judy one bothered me most. I'm rude to people all the time, and no one pays me a dime for it. Need new agent.

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  2. I'm very glad I found your blog. Thanks for the sensible critique. I and my friends were just preparing to do a little analysis about this. I'm very glad to see such good information being shared freely out there.

    ReplyDelete