What to Expect from the SAG-AFTRA 2026 Contract Negotiations: AI, Residuals, Health and Pension Plans, and When to Expect a Deal

If you go back to the summer of 2023, fears that the industry was headed toward a writers strike seemed almost like a certainty. Very few thought the actors would also join them on the picket lines. But after 118 days of being out of work, actors approved a new contract valued at $1.11 billion that provided a brand new method for getting compensated from the top-performing streaming series, some strenuous AI protections that some members believe still didn’t go far enough, and much more.

Three years goes by so fast.

Beginning on February 9, 2026, SAG-AFTRA goes back to the negotiating table with the film and TV studios — the AMPTP — in the hopes of striking a new deal and avoiding another strike. Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA’s chief negotiator and national executive director, has not ruled out the possibility of a strike (why would he?) and some of the same issues that were big concerns then are back on the table again here in 2026.

But things are different this time around. SAG-AFTRA now has a new union president, “Lord of the Rings” star Sean Astin, and so does the AMPTP, Greg Hessinger. Hessinger previously led both SAG and AFTRA, he has deep ties to many industry union leaders, and he has spent the last eight months in the job not negotiating other deals but gearing up for this moment.

While the previous long-time negotiator for the AMPTP, Carol Lombardini, loved saying “No,” Hessinger wants to remove some of the gamesmanship in the process and be more intentional about what the studio CEOs actually want. No more Bob Iger faux pas in the press if they can help it.

“We look forward to working collaboratively with our partners at SAG-AFTRA as we commence formal bargaining,” an AMPTP spokesperson said in a statement. “By taking the time to thoughtfully engage on the challenges confronting our industry, we are optimistic that, together, we can reach a fair deal that reflects our shared commitment to supporting our industry’s talented performers and promoting long-term stability.”

What’s more, you may notice that your calendar only says “February” even though the current union contract doesn’t expire until June 30. The guild jumped at the offer from the studios to negotiate early and take advantage of the extra time, and SAG-AFTRA and the studios will spend the next month bringing proposals. There’s a real possibility that this bargaining period goes by without a new deal and that talks pick back up again in June, after both the WGA and DGA have had their chance to negotiate.

If you ask Astin, all the proposals SAG-AFTRA’s negotiating committee bring to the table are important as they pertain to all members of the union, from intimacy coordinators to background performers to stunt men and women. And while the last contract addressed things like self-tape auditions and make-up and hairstyling requirements, some of those are concerns again. But there will be three issues that take up a lot of the headlines and oxygen. We break them down below:

Frances Fisher, Joely Fisher, Members and Supporters walks the picket line in support of the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strike at the SAG-AFTRA Building on July 14, 2023 in Los Angeles, CaliforniaGilbert Flores for Variety

Health and Pension Plan

While all three of the topics here are going to be critical to all three guilds, refueling each guild’s healthcare and pension plans will be essential. SAG-AFTRA may actually be in a better shape than its peers when it comes to keeping the plans funded, but the guilds have been significantly impacted by the economy, inflation, pretty much all the junk going on in the world. Throwing a few more dollars at the plans won’t necessarily solve anything, so expect the guilds to ask for significant, maybe even historic changes.

One question is whether that comes with changes to coverage that might irk some members, but the bigger one that was reported by Deadline is that the studios may be looking for a longer contract term — IndieWire understands the AMPTP is seeking at first a five-year term instead of three — in exchange for some of that historic healthcare funding. SAG-AFTRA hasn’t even engaged with that hypothetical, while Directors Guild president Christopher Nolan in a recent interview hinted that such a proposal, at least for the DGA, is probably a non-starter.

“If we had agreed to a five-year contract in March of 2020, where would we be now,” Nolan told press last week. “We are living in an industry where things are shifting very, very fast in terms of how they choose to run their businesses, and there are no assurances they’d be able to give us on how that’s settling down or what that path would be.”

Streaming Residuals

Residuals were a major point of contention during the strikes, as the days of actors (or writers or directors) being able to support themselves on residuals from cable re-runs are gone. The WGA fought for a simple bonus structure that if a show reached 20 percent of a streaming platform’s total U.S. subscribers in its first 90 days on the service. It was designed to reward the biggest shows that produce enormous value for streamers and little for the creators.

SAG-AFTRA’s was a little more complicated. It had the same viewership threshold, but while some of that money went to the actors on the show themselves, 25 percent of the bonus went to a fund administered by the employers and the union. It was a way of getting the whole membership paid, not just a handful of actors on the top shows, and it was meant to generate up to $40 million a year, or $120 million across three years of the contract, for all its members.

IndieWire previously reported that some payments were in fact sent out as a result of this, but we understand that the amount paid has fallen well short of initial projections. Expect some major course corrections.

Tilly Norwood, a creation of AI studio Xicoia

Artificial Intelligence

Despite the pretty robust protections SAG-AFTRA and the other guilds got the first time around, AI is always going to be the elephant in the room. The guild’s big talking point last time around was “informed consent and compensation,” meaning that actors should know upfront exactly how a studio intends to use generative artificial intelligence, and they should get paid on the same level at which an actor would normally get paid if the studio chooses to.

In the three years since the studios agreed to those terms, AI models have gotten incredibly more sophisticated (and scary) for the industry, but it’s not as if a synthetic actor like Tilly Norwood has suddenly popped up in a Marvel movie.

So SAG-AFTRA’s latest means of getting ahead of this is to ask for what Variety first reported has come to be known as the “Tilly Tax,” that a studio may be required to pay the guild a royalty if it uses an actor that isn’t real. Essentially the guild wants to make it an even playing field, that if a synthetic actor is used in a film, it should cost the same amount (or more) than it does to hire a real actor, and in that battle, the studio will in theory almost always choose the real person.

There are likely to be more granular asks in terms of understanding the training data of AI models used on a film, but it’s unclear if actors will be able to demand a say on what the studios do with their IP, like in the case of Disney licensing its characters to OpenAI’s Sora 2 model.