How Dubbing Actors Are Paid in Europe: Four Systems

A dubbing actor in Rome is paid by the riga, in Paris by the ligne, in Madrid by the take, in Berlin by the Take — and only three of those four units sit inside a collective agreement. This page collects what each system pays, which document each rate comes from, and how the billing unit itself is defined. That unit decides what a dubbing budget looks like long before anyone books a studio.

Every figure below is dated and taken from the agreement or from the association that publishes it. Where a number is a market convention rather than a negotiated minimum — the German case — it is labelled as such. And minimums are minimums: leads, established voices and short-notice work are negotiated above them.

Four markets, four billing units

The unit is the part worth understanding first, because it is what a quote is actually built from.

• Italy — the riga, a maximum of 50 typed characters, plus an attendance fee for each three-hour turno.
• France — the ligne, exactly 50 characters including spaces, counted per role by software.
• Spain (Madrid) — the take, plus a fee for the convocatoria, the call itself.
• Germany — the Take, a playable chunk of roughly two to ten seconds, plus a Grundgage per project.

Two of those are character counts, so cost tracks the density of the script. Two are units of playable dialogue, so cost tracks how the dialogue was cut into recordable pieces. None of them is a minute of finished programme, which is how most people outside the industry assume dubbing is quoted.

Italy: the turno, the riga and a clause about AI

Italy renewed its sector contract, the CCNL doppiaggio, on 6 December 2023. It was signed by the producers’ association ANICA together with the unions SLC-CGIL, FISTEL-CISL and UILCOM-UIL, and it replaced a text that had been frozen since 2008. The economic part took effect on 1 January 2024, with a second step on 1 January 2025.

From that second step, a dubbing actor receives an attendance fee (gettone di presenza) of €84.00 for a three-hour turno, plus a per-line rate that depends on the genre band:

• Fascia A — single works: features, animated features, trailers — €2.50 per line
• Fascia B — lip-synced serials: series, sit-coms, mini-series, anime — €2.30 per line
• Fascia C — soaps, telenovelas, in-sync documentaries, docu-reality — €1.75 per line; serial animation and anime are billed at this rate
• Fascia D — everything not lip-synced — a flat €100.00 covering the first 30 lines, then €0.75 per line

The same table sets €230.00 per three-hour turno for dubbing directors and €130.00 for assistants, and pays dialogue adapters by the minute of programme: €36.00 in fascia A down to €13.00 in fascia D.

A riga is not a spoken line but a typographic one. The contract text published by the dialogue writers’ association AIDAC defines it as a maximum of 50 typed characters including spaces, punctuation and the technical markings, excluding the character name, with 18 to 20 of them to a script page. The 2023 renewal is also the first of these four agreements to carry a dedicated section on artificial intelligence, and the trade press reporting the signed text describes the pay rise as having been traded against a reduction in working pace.

Spain: the convocatoria and the take

Spain negotiates dubbing regionally, so there is no single Spanish rate. Madrid’s III Convenio Colectivo de Profesionales de Doblaje y Sonorización, agreed with the dubbing artists’ union ADOMA, is the reference most international work is priced against; Barcelona and Valencia run their own conventions and their own numbers.

The Madrid salary annex for 2026 sets, for work paid by the call:

• Video: €50.05 per general convocatoria plus €5.49 per take
• Cinema: €66.75 per general convocatoria plus €7.31 per take
• A casting or test call for any product: €64.25
• Videogames: €106.47 for the first half-hour or part of it, €63.88 for each half-hour after
• Audiobooks: €82.77 per half-hour or part of it, for actors

Spain is also the only one of the four markets that puts dubbing actors on staff at scale. The same annex sets €1,950.20 a month across 14 payments — €27,302.81 a year — for an actor on an indefinite contract, and €2,786.19 a month, €39,006.59 a year, for a director-actor.

The working day is capped: an ordinary convocatoria runs a maximum of six and a half continuous hours, Monday to Friday. Saturdays, Sundays, public holidays and any call after 22:00 carry a 100 percent supplement. The convention contains inflation-indexed revision clauses, which is why the Madrid rates have moved every January since 2023.

France: the ligne, fixed at fifty characters

France sets dubbing pay in a national salary agreement, the accord national de salaires du doublage, signed on 29 July 2004 and applicable on ministerial extension. It is the most prescriptive of the four: no hourly rate and no per-product flat fee is permitted, only the line.

The lexicon annexed to the agreement defines the ligne as 50 characters — letters, signs and spaces. Lines are counted per role, in full, by a single piece of software, and any remainder counts as a whole line. Roles must each carry a distinct label so their lines can be counted separately.

The grid works in bands. Up to 44 lines the actor is paid a session fee for a half-day or a full day, varying with the band and with how many roles and crowd work are included. Above that threshold the per-line rate applies from the first line. At the last publicly posted step of the grid, 1 January 2008, that rate was €6.22 per line for a cinema release and €5.91 for national broadcast television, with a degressive formula above 101 lines — for television, 6.26 − N/288 where N is the number of lines, and a steeper curve for series of 52 episodes or more. Those columns are dated: the structure has not changed, but the rates have been renegotiated since and the current grid is not posted publicly.

The other half of the French system is the DAD-R convention, which pays performers for exploitation on top of the session fee. The salary grid is the base those rights are calculated on, and using the grid is what makes the assignment of rights valid. That is the mechanism which keeps French studios from quietly moving to flat fees.

Germany: the Take, and the market without an agreement

Germany dubs more foreign content than any other European market and is the only one of these four with no sector-wide collective agreement for dubbing actors. Pay is a Grundgage per project plus a Takegage for every take recorded, negotiated individually and oriented on recommendation tables from the producers’ association BVDSP — the general table dating from 2008, with updated ensemble tables issued in 2023 for group sessions.

Because there is no agreement, there is no authoritative minimum. The reference wiki maintained by German voice professionals records a floor of €52.50 base and €2.60 per take, with €60.00 and €3.00 becoming the working standard, freely negotiable upwards and quoted separately for cinema and television. It also notes a practice worth checking in any deal: some studios treat the first ten takes as included in the base fee.

A Take is defined by usage, not by contract. It is a playable unit of roughly two to ten seconds, usually one or two sentences, numbered consecutively through the dialogue script.

German courts have twice been asked whether the customary fee is appropriate. In the case of Marcus Off, the German voice of Johnny Depp in the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films, the Berlin Kammergericht ruled on 1 June 2016 that he was owed ten times the fee originally agreed, applying the bestseller provision in § 32a of the German Copyright Act; the Federal Court of Justice rejected the distributor’s appeal against non-admission in April 2017. On 12 July 2018 the Landgericht München I awarded further payment to Johannes Raspe, the German voice of Robert Pattinson in the Twilight films, and held in the same decision that the fees customary in the dubbing industry have long been so low that they cannot be regarded as appropriate. Raspe’s side announced an appeal against the way the court calculated the excess success.

The InteressenVerband Synchronschauspieler, which financed both cases, argues that dubbing fees have barely moved since the mid-1960s and points to the NDR collective agreement, whose dubbing rates it put at roughly 300 percent above the customary market. That is the association’s figure, stated by its board member Till Völger in 2018, and it went together with the complaint that the producers had declined to form an employers’ body to negotiate with at all. The producers have not published a counter-calculation.

The same hundred lines, priced four ways

The units are not equivalent, so what follows compares structures rather than purchasing power. This is plain arithmetic on the published minima for one day of series work, one role, 100 lines or takes, before social charges, agency commission and exploitation rights:

• Italy, fascia B: €84.00 attendance fee + 100 × €2.30 = €314.00
• France, national broadcast television, at the 2008 grid step: 100 × €5.91 = €591.00, plus DAD-R rights
• Spain, Madrid, video: €50.05 convocatoria + 100 × €5.49 = €599.05
• Germany, at the €60.00 / €3.00 market convention: €60.00 + 100 × €3.00 = €360.00

A German take often holds more text than a 50-character Italian riga or French ligne, so the German column buys more spoken words than the number suggests. The comparison that survives the caveats is not price but certainty: three of these figures are enforceable minima with a date and a signature behind them. One is a custom.

What the billing unit does when AI arrives

Each of these systems pays for a performance measured in units of script. A synthetic pass over the same episode produces no righe, no lignes and no takes to invoice, which is why the argument about AI in dubbing has been an argument about consent and about pay structure at the same time. Italy answered it inside the contract, adding an AI section in the 2023 renewal. Germany, with no contract to amend, has been fighting the question clause by clause in individual engagements — our running coverage of the Netflix consent dispute tracks where that stands.

For anyone signing a dubbing deal, the rate matters less than what the rate covers. A per-take fee that also licenses training or synthesis is a different product from a per-take fee for a recording, whatever the number next to it. Which rights you hold in the first place depends on where you are: we compare that country by country in who owns your voice.

If you are commissioning dubbing

Budget from the script, not from the runtime. Ask the studio for a line or take count before you ask for a price, because that count is what every one of these systems multiplies. Ask which regional convention applies in Spain. Expect rights payments on top of the session fee in France. In Germany, ask the studio to state its base and take rates in writing, since nothing external fixes them.

Voice work outside lip-sync dubbing — narration, corporate film, e-learning, advertising — is priced on a different logic again, usually by usage and licence term rather than by line. If that is what you need, Voicfy quotes per project with native speakers in each language, and you can brief a project in a few minutes. For the union side of non-dubbing rates, see our comparison of voice-over union rates in the US, UK and Germany.