‘The Office’ stars: How much were they paid per line spoken. (2024)

The methodology is as follows.

I take the estimated salary of each star per episode per season.
Multiply that salary with the number of episodes for each season to get the total salary per season.
Count the number of lines spoken per character in non-deleted scenes* per season.
Divide the salary per season by the number of lines per season, to get the salary per line per season

*A note here: Some of the lines are spoken by multiple characters at the same time. In those cases I count the line once for each speaking character. I also did a little bit of cleaning to only get lines that are spoken by the actual actor. As an example, there is a line spoken by ‘Young Michael’ that is not being played by Steve Carell. A line spoken in a deleted scene is still a line spoken by the actor but there are so few deleted scenes that I simply choose to ignore them because I don’t think it changes the story.

This is the number of lines spoken by each character for Seasons 1–4.

‘The Office’ stars: How much were they paid per line spoken. (1)

Perhaps a little surprisingly, we see all the stars’ number of lines having a downward trend in Seasons 2–4, perhaps because other characters get more and more speaking time, especially in Season 3 where the Stamford (Thanks Diana G. for the correction!) branch is introduced and then merged with the Scranton branch.

As expected, we also see that Michael is the most speaking character in the show. So it’s not surprising that Steve Carell was earning the most money on the show in absolute terms, but is he making the most money when accounting for the lines he speaks? Yes he does.

‘The Office’ stars: How much were they paid per line spoken. (2)

Amongst the three characters studied here, we find the following.

All three actors get paid more per line spoken as the show progresses.
Steve Carell earns the most money per spoken line. The difference seems to be increasing as the show goes on.
Jenna Fischer seems to be making slightly more than John Krasinski per line spoken. This is because they are estimated to be paid equally but Krasinski has a few more speaking lines.

Of course, the true value that an actress/actor brings to a show goes well beyond the number of speaking lines and cannot be quantified precisely. From the way they deliver the lines to the non-verbal cues that they make, each actor/actress is truly unique!

Thanks for reading.