Actor
Also known as: Actress, Performer, Film Actor, TV Actor, Stage Actor, Voice Actor
Portray characters in theater, film, television, or other media, bringing scripts to life through emotional expression and physical performance.
Salary Range
The highest-paid specialization or seniority level for actors.
About 1 in 333 reaches this level
About 67,500 actors (BLS Employment Projections, SOC 27-2011, 2025); the median is ~$29/hour (BLS OEWS, May 2025) and most earn little. The ~0.3% (~220) who become working leads or series regulars can earn ~$3M in strong years; the ~25-30 A-listers commanding $20M+ per film (Dwayne Johnson up to $50M) are a tiny outlier.
Salary data based on 2025 BLS, Glassdoor, and industry reports. Actual compensation varies by location, experience, and employer.
How to Become One
No formal certification required. Train through acting classes, workshops, or conservatory programs, and audition for roles. SAG-AFTRA membership opens access to union productions.
For more information: SAG-AFTRA ↗
A degree isn't required, but these programs can strengthen your career prospects:
Cost to Qualify
No credential gates any of these nine careers — the real barrier is an audience, an audition, a portfolio, or luck, and BLS confirms no formal education is required to enter acting or music performance. These are also nine of the lowest entry-level salaries in our whole dataset ($20K-$40K), so 'free to start' does not mean 'easy to make a living' — the missing cost shows up later, as unpaid years spent building a body of work instead of a tuition bill up front.
Sticker price, not what most people pay — scholarships, aid and in-state status all move it. Room and board is shown separately on each college's page.
AI Risk Assessment
Acting is safest at the top and most exposed at the bottom. The smaller work many actors live on, like voice roles, commercials and background parts, is where AI performers and digital copies of actors are aimed. Voice acting is furthest along: in a 2026 survey by the National Association of Voice Actors, about 21% of voice actors said they had lost work directly to AI, up from 14% a year earlier. On screen, the AI-made performer Tilly Norwood "crystallized AI fears" in late 2025, as Variety put it, and the actors' union SAG-AFTRA had already won a rule that when an AI performer replaces an actor in a union commercial, the equivalent pay goes into the union's pension and health funds.
The union's new contract with the studios, tentatively agreed in May 2026, slows this down but does not stop it. According to IndieWire, it keeps all the 2023 AI protections, adds 12 AI provisions covering digital copies of actors (including background actors and children), and makes studios show "significant additional value" before using a fully synthetic performer instead of a person, with a penalty if they do. A lawyer IndieWire spoke to thought that bar would not be hard for a studio to clear. The government expects little room to grow: BLS projects little or no change in actor jobs from 2025 to 2035, with about 6,300 openings a year, as studios shift from making more shows to making money, and says that "artificial intelligence (AI) may replace some actors in certain subfields."
We keep this at 4, which is more than the on-camera evidence alone shows. A 2025 Microsoft Research study of how much of each job's tasks AI chatbots can help with ranked actors 432nd of 785, because a chatbot cannot perform. The 4 rests on the first rungs of the career: voice, background and commercial work are being replaced now, those are the jobs new actors use to get started, and there are few openings to begin with. Stage acting and lead roles are much safer.
What would change this score. If studios start casting synthetic performers in real roles despite the contract, or BLS projects a decline, this goes to 5. If the 2026 protections hold and voice actors' losses level off, it could come down to 3.
Sources
Ratings reflect a 10-year outlook based on 2025-2026 research, weighted toward entry-level impact. Individual outcomes will vary.
Related Careers
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