Fewer than 5,100 WGA West writers reported earnings in 2025 — a 27% drop from the nearly 7,000 who were working at the guild's 2022 peak, according to the union's latest annual financial report, released to members in July 2026 and detailed by Deadline.

The figure of 5,072 working writers represents a 10.2% decline from 2024 alone. Those who did work generated $1.7 billion in total earnings, down 1.3% year-over-year. Against the 2022 high-water mark, total writer earnings are down about 25%.

Television has taken the harder hit. TV writing jobs among WGA West members have fallen more than 33% since 2022. Feature film writing has contracted less steeply, down about 14% over the same period, with 2,007 screenwriters reporting film earnings in 2025. Feature writers did see a modest earnings bump — about $521 million for the year, up 7.2% from 2024. That followed a 20% surge in total writer earnings from 2023 to 2024, a partial recovery from the steep losses of the 2023 strike year, when earnings had plunged 31.8% to $1.29 billion.

Residuals — the reuse payments writers collect when their work is re-aired or streamed — also continued to shrink. Total residuals fell 4.9% year-over-year to $535.5 million for 2025. Streaming residuals specifically totalled just over $330 million for television and film, a drop from 2024's $346 million and the first-ever nominal annual decline for streaming residuals since the category was established. Overall residuals are still up 14.3% over a five-year window, but the trend line has been downward since 2022. One bright spot: high-budget SVOD (subscription video on demand) residuals grew more than 300% over five years to reach $77.83 million in 2025, reflecting the deal terms negotiated in the guild's 2023 contract.

The WGA West attributes the employment contraction to studios and streaming platforms pulling back on scripted programming after years of heavy spending. The numbers bear out a story that writers and crew members have felt anecdotally for several seasons: fewer shows being ordered means fewer rooms staffed and fewer scripts bought.

The guild cautions that its 2025 figures reflect the most up-to-date information available as of March 2026, and that preliminary numbers are likely to change in future reports. Prior years have seen revisions as late-reported earnings are incorporated.

For anyone who tracks what gets made and who gets to make it, the report is a snapshot of an industry still contracting. Writers who kept working in 2025 earned slightly less on average than the year before. More than a quarter of the writers who were employed at the 2022 peak were not employed at all in 2025.