$900,000 gross, roughly half of it gone before it reached his bank account. That is how Josh Peck describes four seasons of Drake & Josh.
Peck, 39, told the Financial Tea with Mrs. Dow Jones podcast that he and co-star Drake Bell made about $125,000 a year on the Nickelodeon sitcom, which aired from 2004 to 2007. His pay started at $3,000 an episode on The Amanda Show, where he landed his first recurring role at 13. By the end of Drake & Josh, the average rate was about $15,000 an episode.
“So over four years, we wound up making about 900 grand,” he said. “But between agent, manager and taxes, we cleared half of that.”
He counted 60 episodes. The Hollywood Reporter notes the series actually ran 56, plus two TV movies.
No residuals
The money stopped when the cameras did. Peck said there are “no residuals on kids’ TV from back then at least,” so the final episode was the final paycheck. He made the same point on a different podcast in 2024: “It aired from 2004 to 2007, but, fun fact, because kids’ TV doesn’t have residuals, it’s still on every day.”
His 2022 memoir, Happy People Are Annoying, gave a slightly different version of the math. After fees, he wrote, the take was $450,000. Spread over the five years it took to shoot the episodes, that came to a little under $100,000 a year. LADbible set that against the 2007 US household income of $50,740.
Why he talks about it
Peck grew up with a single mother who worked in sales. “We sort of oscillated between being lower middle class and then being broke,” he said. A good year meant a new pair of Jordans. A bad one meant calling his grandmother to help pay for dinner.
When the show ended he was 19. “I had a little bit of a runway, but I had to get to work,” he said, because the money “certainly wasn’t enough” to support his mother and himself for four years without worry. He still calls himself “very lucky” to have had to work out what came next at that age.
The habit stuck. “If you have it ingrained in you that you never want to be broke again, you will run like your pants are on fire for as long as you can. And I have,” he said. It also made him obsessive about small charges. A $20 late fee, he said, felt so irresponsible that he would punish himself over it.
Peck was less than forthcoming about money in his own book, too. In the podcast he said he “wasn’t very transparent” about the financials there.
Sources
- Josh Peck Reveals His ‘Drake & Josh’ Pay After Four Seasons
- Josh Peck shared exactly how much he made from Drake and Josh despite 'not making any residuals'
