The ‘Brady Bunch’ Kids Made A Lot Less Money Than You Think

When the Brady kids found themselves short of cash for an anniversary present for Mike and Carol, they formed the Silver Platters, a music group vying to win a hundred bucks on the Pete Stern Amateur Hour. The sad part is, the actors who played the Brady Bunch siblings didn’t make much more cash than they would have by winning the talent show. 

“Salaries for sitcom actors have changed considerably since the ‘70s,” wrote Barry (Greg) Williams in his book, Growing Up Brady. “In our fifth and final year, the highest salary among us kids was $1,100 a week.” 

The show produced 22 episodes in that final season, meaning the richest Brady kid made $24,200 at the height of their earning power. “Not bad for a teenager,” Williams admitted, but not enough to sustain an out-of-work actor for more than a year or two.

Heck, it’s not even 24 grand. “Take into consideration agent commissions, taxes and the fact that some of the kids were expected to contribute to their families,” Williams explained. “It was enough to indulge in toys, but hardly enough to carry you through the slow periods that inevitably followed.”

What about residuals, those checks that keep coming in the mail when the show runs in syndication? “Payments for subsequent airings of the show dried up shortly after we finished filming,” Williams wrote.

“People do tend to assume that we made a lot of money off The Brady Bunch because it’s on all the time,” said Susan (Cindy) Olsen on the Oprah Network’s Where Are They Now series. “People just think that, ‘Oh, I must be rich, we all must be rich.’”

Olsen backs up Williams’ claims about residuals. “It wasn’t like we signed some bad deal,” she said. “This is the way things were before 1973. People only got paid for reruns for the first 10 runs.” Olsen figures those checks stopped coming by 1979, “so we made no money since.”

That likely explains why most of the Brady kids kept signing up for cringey iterations of the original show — The Brady Bunch Variety Hour, The Brady Brides, A Very Brady Christmas, The Bradys, A Very Brady Renovation and cameos in the Brady Bunch movie spoofs. Not a prestige project among them, but hey, a paycheck is a paycheck.

Actors’ unions fought for changes to the residual rules in the early 1980s, but it was too late for the Brady kids. Eve (Jan) Plumb said the cast tried to get retroactive pay, but failed. “If they use clips of the show in a movie now, they have to get our permission and pay us, but that’s usually very low money, and often we get asked to have clip usage for free,” she said. “I’m a big proponent of being paid for my work, and since the going thing now is to use clips, to pay the actor, um, I’m going to continue to ask for that.”

So the next time Plumb auctions off a bunch of her Brady Bunch memorabilia? Don’t judge — it’s one of the only ways to get a fair return for a lifetime in syndication.