If you’re anything like me, you grew up watching Josh Peck on Nickelodeon. And now, he’s pulling back the curtain on how much he really made as a child actor on hit series like The Amanda Show and Drake & Josh.
On a new episode of the Financial Tea podcast, titled “Child Star Finances,” Josh began by talking about growing up with “a lot of financial insecurity” in his family. “I had a single mom, only child, and we sort of oscillated between being lower middle class and then being broke,” he said. “But she worked in sales, so sometimes we’d have a great year, and I was getting a new pair of Jordans, and then other times I’d be calling my grandma to help us pay for dinner because we had zero dollars.”
As you may know, Josh got his start on The Amanda Show when he was 13. This was in the early 2000s, and he said that he and his costars were making “$3,000 an episode.”
It was working on The Amanda Show where Josh crossed paths with Drake Bell, whom he would later star alongside on Drake & Josh, which ran for four seasons from 2004 to 2007.
Drake & Josh — which was about two stepbrothers with clashing personalities navigating teenhood together — was a huge success over the course of its run on Nickelodeon; however, it sounds like the money they made from the show didn’t necessarily reflect that.
“By the time we finished Drake & Josh, so that was, like, 60 episodes total for the whole show. The median rate, the average rate per episode, was about $15,000. So over four years, we wound up making about 900 grand,” he said. “But between agent, manager, and taxes, we cleared half of that. We were making about $125,000 a year.”
Josh said that there are “no residuals on kids’ TV from back then,” which meant that after the series wrapped up when he was 19, the Drake & Josh money stopped coming in.
Knowing that he still had to earn money, Josh said he “had to get to work” after the show finished. “Because that certainly wasn’t enough money supporting my mom and I for four years to not have to worry after another year or two,” he explained.
Josh has previously talked about the fact that he doesn’t get any residual checks for Drake & Josh, which is currently available to stream on Netflix. “I think I was [a part of] a generation of kids who got screwed. It just was sort of [those] early days,” he said on the BFFs podcast in 2022. “I mean, in a weird way, it was Kenan & Kel… All That, and then my show. I think now kids have gotten way smarter, and they’re getting that back.”
