What do Coronation Street actors get paid? ITV's recent budget cuts rewrote the old deals
ITV has never published a rate card, and Corrie's cast contracts are private. What exists is a decade of press reporting, one Wikipedia-documented correction from William Roache, and a set of contract changes ITV has confirmed in writing.
Reported per-episode fees across ITV's soaps sit roughly between £400 and £2,000, according to figures published by The Mirror. On top of that sits a guaranteed minimum number of episodes each year and a repeat fee. Long-serving leads reportedly clear £150,000 to £250,000 annually.
How the deal is structured
Actors are paid per episode, not on an annual salary — so earnings track screen time directly. A handful of veterans, including Roache and Barbara Knox, are reported to be on full salary regardless of workload. Most of the cast is paid for time actually filmed, plus residuals when episodes are repeated on ITV, streamed on ITVX, or sold abroad.
That guaranteed episode minimum is the load-bearing part of the whole arrangement. It's also the part ITV changed.
The reported figures
None of these are confirmed by ITV, and all come from press reporting rather than published accounts:
- William Roache (Ken Barlow) — reportedly around £250,000 a year.
- Barbara Knox (Rita Tanner) — reportedly around £200,000.
- Michael Le Vell (Kevin Webster) — reportedly around £170,000.
- Simon Gregson (Steve McDonald) — reportedly around £150,000, across more than 3,000 episodes.
- Jack P Shepherd (David Platt) — offered a contract worth £250,000 in October 2018.
What the budget cuts changed
On 4 February 2025, ITV announced that from January 2026 Coronation Street and Emmerdale would move to a weekday "soaps power hour" — Emmerdale at 8pm, Corrie at 8.30pm, both in 30-minute instalments. Between them the two shows lost an hour of airtime a week. Kevin Lygo, ITV's Managing Director of Media and Entertainment, called the new commissioning pattern "viewer-led".
Equity was told at the time that the schedule change wouldn't affect pay or contracts. Then, later in 2025, it did.
ITV told Digital Spy it had "revised the number of guaranteed episodes" offered to the Coronation Street and Emmerdale actors.
The Sun reported that some performers stood to lose around a sixth of their income, that roughly 80 Corrie actors and 60 Emmerdale actors were notified by email, and that the changes were due to take effect in August. Equity said it was supporting members across ITV's continuing dramas over the contractual terms. Several established names, including Kate Ford and Maureen Lipman, were reported to have moved onto guest contracts.
For the record: Roache has corrected the long-repeated claim that he earned £10 an episode in 1960. The real figure, he says, was £70. By 2010 he was reportedly on £3,000.