Just How Much Do Dancing with the Stars Contestants Get Paid?
It looks like professional dancers are earning peanuts compared to celebrity contestants.
Although Dancing with the Stars has been on the air for nearly two decades, the show never really gets old thanks to its addictive premise of pairing celebrities with professional dancers and forcing them to compete against other couples. People love to see how famous people adapt to unusual circumstances, either bombing out or embracing their inner dance talent.
While the stars master new skills, the professional dancers try to help them on their journey and lead them on the dance floor — but, surprisingly, it turns out that the pros make a lot less money than their celebrity partners.
According to various sources, the stars start on the show with a respectable $125,000 paycheck, which only gets bigger every week they are not sent home. A Reddit user revealed that for each additional week, the stars get $10,000, and the winner gets an additional $50,000. The biggest paycheck a celebrity can get on the show is reportedly $295,000 for the season, which is certainly a huge amount of money for their dedication to dance. But what about professional dancers?
Thanks to several reports on the matter, fans know that the pros earn somewhere around $50 thousand for a season, which is a pretty ridiculous number considering how much work they actually do. And knowing that the judges earn around $1.5 million for a season without even dancing, fans note that the whole hierarchy on the show seems rather unfair.
'Wow, I didn't realize the judges made that much. I assumed that was about what those hosts made but the Pros deserve more. They are a big draw too,' one fan said.
And with recent reports that professional dancers were forced to take significant pay cuts after Dancing with the Stars moved from ABC to Disney+, it looks like the show may find itself without its pros, as earning peanuts is not what people expect from a job like this. Fans are urging Disney to reconsider its strategy regarding the show and ensure all parties involved are paid fairly.
Source: Reddit.