Screenwriter
Also known as: Script Writer, TV Writer, Staff Writer
Write original scripts and adapted screenplays for film, television, and streaming, crafting dialogue, story structure, and character arcs that bring visual narratives to life. Work ranges from solitary spec writing and pitching to collaborative writers-room environments on TV and streaming series.
Salary Range
The highest-paid specialization or seniority level for screenwriters.
About 1 in 2,000 reaches this level
Of ~140,300 writers and authors (BLS Employment Projections, SOC 27-3043, 2025), only ~65 are showrunners on successful series earning $2.5M+ total comp — about 0.05%.
Salary data based on 2025 BLS, Glassdoor, and industry reports. Actual compensation varies by location, experience, and employer.
How to Become One
This career typically requires a bachelor's degree. Here are the top colleges for it:
Cost to Qualify
Four years of tuition and required fees runs about $56K at a typical public college in our list (in-state) and about $288K at a typical private one. Both are pricier than the US national averages (about $48K public in-state, $180K private nonprofit, College Board 2025-26) because our 161-college dataset only includes nationally-ranked schools, not every US college. This excludes room and board, which we show separately on each college's page.
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
Screenwriters write the scripts for films and TV shows. Writing is where AI is strongest: a 2025 Microsoft Research study of how much of each job's tasks AI chatbots can help with ranked writers and authors 3rd of 785 jobs. AI is already at the first gate of Hollywood. Variety reported in October 2025 that agents and assistants at the talent agency WME use an AI tool called ScriptSense to sort through submissions, and that studio script readers, who write summaries and notes on incoming scripts, fear for their jobs. When a group of union script readers tested six AI tools against human readers, the AI's one-line pitches were as good as the humans', its plot summaries were weaker, and its notes were "an almost total fail across the board."
The Writers Guild has real protections. Under its contract, AI is not a writer: material written by AI cannot count as "literary material," a studio cannot hand a writer an AI-generated script and pay only a rewrite fee, and it cannot make a writer use AI. The new contract, which runs from May 2026 to May 2030, keeps those rules and adds that studios must tell the Guild if they license writers' scripts to train AI. So far the bigger damage has come from outside AI: the Guild reported that TV writing jobs fell 42% in the 2023-24 season, to 1,819, with staff writers and other lower-level jobs down 46%. The Guild blamed cord-cutting, the pullback in streaming series, and the studios' long refusal to settle the 2023 strikes.
We keep this at 4. The work is among the most AI-exposed there is, the lower rungs that new writers climb are few and shrinking, and AI is already in the script-reading pipeline. The Guild's rules slow AI down, but they only cover Guild work. Established screenwriters and showrunners are much safer than people trying to break in.
What would change this score. If studios start licensing scripts to train AI and ordering AI-drafted material at scale, or TV staffing keeps falling, this goes to 5. If staffing recovers and the Guild's rules hold, 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.
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