Animation Artists Are Anonymously Sharing Salaries, And The Pay Disparities Are Huge

Prompted by Instagram account Salty Animators, animation artists and production staff have been anonymously disclosing their salaries, revealing vast pay disparities across the industry.

Salty Animators has rounded up posts in an Instagram Story (click on the Highlight titled “Payrates” on the account). They make for interesting reading, not least because many contributors also give their job title, location, experience, gender, and industry (gaming, vfx, or animation).

At the upper end of the scale, some experienced artists are making well into six figures:

Meanwhile, others are earning three or four times less, with one junior 3d digital matte painter at Technicolor-owned MPC Episodic being paid as little as 26K a year (note: the currency was unspecified for this entry and it’s unclear whether it’s the Canadian dollar or the British pound, though in either case, it’s still too low):

Among other things, the salary disclosures underscore the big pay disparities between different regions and nations, with L.A. artists generally paid much more than others (although these variations reflect local cost of living to some extent). Here are some examples of pay in other countries:

This kind of detailed information on salaries across the industry is hard to come by, although it is becoming more common for artists to share numbers on social media. Doing so can help them figure out how much they are worth. As Salty Animators concludes: