TV Cartoon Voice Actors Approve Raises and New AI Protections

SAG-AFTRA members backed the four-year deals with 94.95% of the vote, and 3% yearly raises add up to 12.6% by June 2030.

The actors who voice TV cartoons locked in a 3% raise for every year of a new four-year deal Thursday.

Two animation contracts went to a vote of SAG-AFTRA members, the 2026 Television Animation Agreement and its basic cable counterpart, both struck with the studios' bargaining group, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Both passed with 94.95% voting yes, the union announced. Over the life of the deals, the raises add up to 12.6%, Deadline reported.

These are the union's busy people. Bob Bergen, one of the negotiating committee's two co-chairs, has sat on that committee since the early 1990s and has co-chaired it since 2010. In the union's Oct. 5 release, he called TV animation "one of the few voiceover contracts that has stayed mostly union" and said its performers are "some of the most employed actors in SAG-AFTRA."

That's not where most of the union's anger is this fall. TheWrap reported that the vote closed out a week of members venting about the shortage of jobs, which has left many of them struggling to keep up with dues and to qualify for the guild's health plan.

For the voice actors, the 12.6% isn't a single jump. It's 3% a year, stacked four times. The contracts cover July 1, 2026, through June 30, 2030, and they reach backward: the first raise counts from July 5, according to the summary SAG-AFTRA put out when its Executive Committee unanimously sent the deal to members on Oct. 5.

The benefits money runs on a slower clock. What employers pay into the Health Plan goes up 1%, backdated to Sept. 6. The pension and retirement rate climbs 1% on July 1, 2028. That same day, a 0.25% contribution starts funding a new paid parental leave fund.

On AI, the union's summary says the deal adds the guardrails won in this year's live-action contracts and keeps the extra terms animation work already had. SAG-AFTRA President Sean Astin, who says he often works in TV animation himself, called it "a dignified deal with essential AI protections" in the union's statement.

The contract also looks ahead to where cartoons are headed. It sets up a new category for big-budget animated shows on free streaming services. Those shows get the same lower budget bar that already applies to animated subscription-streaming shows, because animation costs different money to make.

It's the first contract ratified since SAG-AFTRA kept Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, its strike-era negotiator, through 2032 with the new title of CEO. You can see the change on paper: the Oct. 5 announcement called him chief negotiator, and Thursday's called him chief executive officer. In the new release, he said animation performers deserve "wages that reflect the value of their labor."

Astin had already said what a contract can't fix. "The bottom line is that no agreement can make studios produce more or make audiences watch," he said over the weekend, according to TheWrap.

Source: Deadline, retrieved October 30, 2026. Other sources: firstcomicsnews.com, TheWrap, firstcomicsnews.com (2).