Voice-Over Union Rates Compared: US, UK and Germany

A national television commercial, one year of usage. In Germany that costs roughly €700 in performer fees. In the United States the session alone is $643 before a single residual is paid. In the United Kingdom the studio fee is £200 and the real number depends on how many people watch it.

Same job, three completely different pricing logics. Anyone commissioning voice across borders — or any performer quoting into a foreign market — needs to understand the structure before the numbers make sense.

Three systems, three logics

The headline difference is not the amounts. It is what you are paying for.

The United States runs on session fees plus residuals. You pay for the recording session, then you pay again each time the usage cycle renews. The performer's income accumulates over the life of the campaign.

The United Kingdom runs on a basic studio fee plus use fees calculated from audience measurement. The recording is cheap; the exposure is what costs.

Germany runs on licences. There is barely a session fee at all in the normal model — the fee is the licence, priced by where the audio runs, for how long, in which territory. The German industry phrase is that usage defines the fee.

Confusing these is how buyers end up with a licence they did not buy and performers end up unpaid for usage they did not authorise.

United States: SAG-AFTRA

Figures below are from the SAG-AFTRA Commercials Contract cheat sheet, effective 1 April 2026 to 31 March 2027.

• Off-camera (voice-over) session: $643.00 for two hours
• On-camera principal: $855.20 for eight hours, for comparison
• Non-air demo, voice-over: $321.50
• Pension and health: 23.5% on top of earnings (19.95% for JPC authorisers)
• Payment terms: session within 15 business days of the last date worked; residuals within 15 business days of first air

The session fee is the floor, not the cost. Use fees are paid per cycle depending on where and how long the spot runs, and P&H sits on top of everything. A buyer budgeting only the session figure will be wrong by a wide margin.

Note also that these are union minimums under a specific contract. Non-union voice work in the US operates outside this structure entirely, which is why quoted American rates vary so enormously.

United Kingdom: Equity

Equity's audio rates are spread across separate agreements with individual employers rather than one rate card, which makes the UK the hardest of the three to summarise. The figures below come from Equity's audio rates summary; note the dates, because several of these agreements are some years old and Equity's current published rates should be checked directly before you rely on them.

• TV commercials (IPA/Equity agreed document): £200 basic studio fee per hour. Tags at BSF for the first, then 10% of BSF for each additional tag. Test commercials at the normal one-hour session fee.
• Commercial use fees: calculated from TVRs or impressions multiplied by BSF, via the usefee.tv calculator. Internet minimum is 400% of BSF for one year on one website.
• Video games (OMUK agreement, October 2021): £300 per hour for games budgeted above £5 million, £200 indie, £175 micro. The first hour is paid at twice the hourly rate, which bakes in a perpetual buyout for that production.
• English language teaching (April 2023): half-day £229, full day £382 for linear recordings. Complete buy-out rises to £309 and £656.
• BBC radio (August 2022): full day £294 for two transmissions, £201 for one.
• Radio commercials (Bauer and Global, February 2023): banded by RAJAR listening figures, from £30 for stations under 250,000 weekly reach up to £855 above five million.

The banded radio structure is unusual and worth understanding: the same script, recorded once, is paid per station according to that station's audience. One fee per voice, per script, per station.

Germany: the VDS licence model

The Verband Deutscher Sprecher:innen publishes the Gagenkompass, a survey of actual fees in the German-speaking market. The edition below is dated June 2026. The VDS is explicit that these are orientation figures rather than a binding recommendation, and it reports three values per line — a lower average, a middle and an upper. The middle figure is quoted here.

• TV, linear national: €700, up to one year
• Streaming TV / CTV: €700
• Online paid media: €700
• Radio, national: €500 — regional €400
• Corporate video up to two minutes: €350, unlimited in time
• Internal e-learning up to five minutes: €350
• Audiobook: €350 per final audio hour
• Games: €250 first hour, €200 each hour after
• Audio description: €6 per net broadcast minute, minimum €200 per session

The multipliers are where the model reveals itself. An additional territory costs 100% of the original fee. An additional year costs 100%. An additional cut of the same recording costs 100% — and in none of those cases does the performer return to the studio, because you are buying rights, not labour.

Unlimited rights are priced accordingly: unlimited duration at a minimum of three times the single fee, unlimited territory or unlimited media at a minimum of four times. Combine them and the factors multiply. Unlimited in both time and territory is twelve times the base fee.

Two further points buyers routinely miss. Studio costs are not included in any of these figures. And German commissioners owe the Künstlersozialabgabe under §24 KSVG on artistic services — a statutory levy that sits outside the fee entirely.

The same job, priced three ways

Take a single national TV spot, one year, one territory:

• Germany: €700 covers the licence outright. Add studio costs, VAT and the KSK levy.
• United States: $643 for the two-hour session, plus use fees per cycle for the year, plus 23.5% P&H on the total.
• United Kingdom: £200 basic studio fee, plus use fees derived from actual TVRs — which means the final cost is unknown at the point of booking.

The German figure is the only one you can state with confidence before the campaign runs. That predictability is the real argument for the licence model, and it is why buyers working across multiple markets often find the German structure the easiest to budget against, even when it is not the cheapest line item.

What to take from this

If you are buying, ask which model you are in before you compare quotes. A €700 German licence and a $643 American session fee look adjacent on a spreadsheet and are not remotely the same transaction.

If you are performing, the German framework is worth studying even if you never work in Germany. It gives you language for something the other systems handle loosely: the principle that a recording session and a usage right are separate things, priced separately.

That principle now has teeth beyond commercial usage. The VDS states plainly that even unlimited usage rights exclude use for machine learning or artificial intelligence — that has to be licensed on its own terms. With the EU AI Act transparency rules now in force, keeping AI training rights out of a general buyout is no longer a theoretical concern. It is the exact issue behind the German dubbing boycott against Netflix, running since February 2026.

All three sets of figures are minimums or averages, and all three are upwardly negotiable. Experience, recognition and how badly the client wants that particular voice move the number more than any rate card does. If you need native-language talent across several of these markets at once, the practical answer is usually to price each territory in its own system rather than forcing one model onto all of them.