Three thousand dollars an episode. That was Josh Peck’s rate on The Amanda Show, by his own account, and by the end of Drake & Josh the average had climbed to about $15,000.
Peck, now 39, laid out the numbers on the Financial Tea with Mrs. Dow Jones podcast, and the internet has not agreed on what to make of them. The Nickelodeon show ran four seasons, from 2004 to 2007, with Drake Bell as his co-star. Both men, Peck said, were making “about $125,000 a year.”
He walked through the arithmetic. Sixty episodes in all. Roughly $900,000 over four years. Then the cuts. “Between agent, manager, and taxes, we cleared half of that,” he said.
Where the figure came from
Peck tied the interview to his childhood. “I came from a lot of financial insecurity growing up. I had a single mom, as an only child, and we sort of vacillated between being lower-middle-class and being broke,” he said.
His mother worked in sales, so the swings could be large. “Sometimes we had a great year, and I was getting like a new pair of Jordans, and sometimes I was like calling my grandma to help us pay for dinner because we had like $0,” he recalled.
He also admitted that his book had skimmed over the details. “When I was writing my book, I wasn’t very transparent with it, the financials in my book,” he said.
The reaction
Peck said he knows how the number lands. “People always will say, ‘Well, compared to so many other tougher jobs, like who are you to say anything?’ And I go, ‘I’m not.’”
His point, he said, was about expectations. People assume the pay was far higher and wonder why he would ever have to work again. “If you made the salary of a dentist or something like that, you couldn’t just stop working after four years,” he said. Having once been broke, he added, drove him hard: “You will run like your pants are on fire for as long as you can and I have.”
On Reddit, the split was plain. One commenter wrote, “Oh nooo he was a kid making 200k a year. Sounds terrible.” Another said that around $500,000 over four years, at roughly 16 to 20 years old, was “an extraordinary income for someone that age with limited education and no hard skills.”
Others took his side. “You can’t retire on that. Not even close,” one wrote. Another put it this way: “The point is that they didn’t make life-changing ‘set for life,’ money after four years.”
