Eve Plumb isn’t reveling in the riches she earned from playing Jan Brady on TV’s beloved “The Brady Bunch.”
“If I had a dime for every rerun episode, I’d pay off the national deficit,” Plumb wrote in an intro to her newly-released memoir “Happiness Included: Jan Brady and Beyond,” pointedly adding, “I don’t.”
The hit ABC sitcom, which revolved around the titular blended family, ran from 1969 to 1974, and has enjoyed a second wind of popularity on various cable networks in subsequent years.
Plumb doubled down in an interview with in an interview with PauseRewind last month, via KOMO News, bluntly stating of the show’s cast, “We don’t make residuals.”
Plumb’s assertions that she isn’t living large off a role that made her a household name isn’t the first from a “Brady Bunch” cast member.
In 1992, Barry Williams, who played Greg Brady, wrote in his own memoir that times were different when the six fictional Brady siblings starred in the iconic show.
“Salaries for sitcom actors have changed considerably since the ‘70s,” Williams, now 71, wrote in “Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg.”
“In our fifth and final year, the highest salary among us kids was $1,100 a week,” he continued, referring to co-stars Plumb, 68; Maureen McCormick (Marcia), 69; Mike Lookinland (Bobby), 65; Christopher Knight (Peter), 68; and Susan Olsen (Cindy), 64.
Williams noted that the show’s 22 episodes from its final season meant the highest-earning
“Brady Bunch” kid would have earned just over $24,000, which he noted was “not bad for a teenager.”
Still, there was a caveat. “Take into consideration agent commissions, taxes and the fact that some of the kids were expected to contribute to their families,” Williams explained. “It was enough to indulge in toys, but hardly enough to carry you through the slow periods that inevitably followed.”
Regarding residuals, Williams noted that “payments for subsequent airings of the show dried up shortly after we finished filming.”
In a June 2025 episode of “The Real Brady Bros.” podcast, Knight admitted that the modest paychecks had helped him pay the rent for his family.
“I believe the Bradys helped us in our family,” he said at the time, speaking to Williams, adding that he felt “it gave [them] the resources to pay the rent.”
Olsen, too, spoke to the dearth of residuals in a 2013 appearance on Oprah Network’s “Where Are They Now” series.
“People do tend to assume that we made a lot of money off ‘The Brady Bunch’ because it’s on all the time,” she said at the time. “People just think that, ‘Oh, I must be rich, we all must be rich.’”
She explained that it “wasn’t like we signed some bad deal” on the show.
“This is the way things were before 1973,” she continued, noting that actors were only “paid for reruns for the first 10 runs.”
Olsen said the last checks rolled in around 1979. “So we made no money since then,” she shared.
Plumb, however, has found other ways to make up the dearth of residuals. In 2016, she made a massive profit off a Malibu beachfront home she bought at age 11.
The actress unloaded the property — which she initially paid $55,300 for in 1969 — for a jaw-dropping $3.9 million.
