Writers received $330.7 million in streaming residuals in 2025, down from $346.6 million the year before — the first-ever nominal decline in the category, according to a Writers Guild of America report issued in July (Variety).

Residuals are the payments writers collect when their work is reused or re-aired — the cheques that arrive after a show has already been written and produced. Streaming residuals, specifically, cover the money writers earn when their series or films are carried on platforms like Netflix, Disney+ or Max.

The WGA is the only industry guild that releases residual data, which makes its annual report the clearest window into how the streaming economy pays the people who write for it.

The overall picture is one of contraction. Total residuals for writers — across streaming, broadcast and everything else — peaked in 2022 when adjusted for inflation, and have since fallen 18% to $535.5 million in 2025, the report says. Writers' up-front earnings, the money paid for writing the script in the first place, fell 24.5% over the same period. The number of writers reporting any earnings at all dropped 27%.

Yet inside that decline, one category is still growing. Residuals for shows originally made for streaming platforms — not network reruns shuffled onto a streamer, but series and films commissioned by the platforms themselves — grew to $77.8 million in 2025. The WGA report says these made-for-streaming residuals grew 38% per year from 2020 to 2023, and have grown 13% per year since then, adjusted for inflation.

Streaming residuals were a central battleground during the 2023 Hollywood strikes, when both writers and actors shut down production for months. The contract that ended the writers' strike introduced a success-based streaming residual: if the equivalent of 20% or more of a US streaming service's subscribers watch a title, the writers get a bonus on top of their base residual (The Hollywood Reporter). A studio executive told Reuters that writers negotiated a 46% increase in residuals for streaming programmes starting in 2022 (Reuters).

The wider industry, meanwhile, has started to recover. In February 2026, the WGA reported that industry profits were beginning to grow again after the 2022 downturn, and projected global streaming revenues to increase from $78 billion in 2024 to $88 billion in 2025 (Variety).

What makes the numbers stand out is the gap between a growing market and shrinking pay. Streaming is expanding. The pool of writers earning from it is not. The made-for-streaming residual category is climbing, but it is still a fraction of the total — $77.8 million out of $535.5 million — and not enough to offset the broader decline.

For the people who write what audiences watch, the first-ever drop in streaming residuals lands at a moment when the business they write for is posting record revenue projections.