Josh Peck revisited his Nickelodeon earnings on Financial Tea with Mrs. Dow Jones, sharing that his early pay started at $3,000 an episode on The Amanda Show and climbed to a median of about $15,000 per episode across Drake & Josh—adding up to roughly $900,000
Josh Peck remembers the number like it still surprises him.
On the Thursday (June 25) episode of the Financial Tea with Mrs. Dow Jones podcast, the 39-year-old actor—best known for starring on Drake & Josh and The Amanda Show—opened up about how much money he and co-star Drake Bell actually made during their Nickelodeon run.
Peck said they “started out making $3. 000 an episode on The Amanda Show.” From there. the pace climbed after roughly 60 episodes total across Drake & Josh. “The median rate, the average rate per episode was about $15,000,” he explained. “So over four years, we wound up making about 900 grand,” he told host Haley Sacks.
But Peck stressed that the figure didn’t translate into take-home cash. “Paying our taxes, manager, and other team members cleared half of that” right away.
He also addressed how the paycheck gets misunderstood once people hear the headline number. “We were making about $125,000 a year,” he said. Then he pushed back on the idea that the job must have been easy to walk away from. “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. ’” Peck explained. “The only reason I say it is because people always assume that it’s so much more. and why would you ever have to work again?. But of course. if you made the salary of a dentist or something like that. you couldn’t just stop working after four years.”.
The money story wasn’t just financial—it was personal. Peck, who stars in Grandfathered, said he effectively became the breadwinner at home after growing up with a single mom.
“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 shared. “And I saw that in myself forever, just a deep financial insecurity that drove everything I did.”
His family life is front and center too. Last summer, Josh and his wife Paige O’Brien welcomed their third child.
Josh Peck Drake & Josh Drake Bell The Amanda Show Financial Tea with Mrs. Dow Jones Haley Sacks Nickelodeon Grandfathered Paige O’Brien earnings