SAG-AFTRA's ultra low budget tier caps a picture at $250,000

What was announced or recorded

SAG-AFTRA maintains a stack of low-budget theatrical agreements rather than one rule, and vertical drama sits awkwardly across all of them. The union's Ultra Low Budget Theatrical Agreement 1.9 is a standing document, not a dated announcement: it covers "independently conceived and financed live action motion pictures produced entirely in the United States" whose budget "must not exceed $250,000 (excluding deferrals)" and must in no event exceed $625,000 including them. The next tier up, in SAG-AFTRA's Low Budget Theatrical Wage Tables, sets a day-performer minimum of $630 against the ultra tier's $125, both rate cards retrieved as they stand on 16 September 2026.

What the documents establish

The Ultra Low Budget agreement is explicit about what it excludes. It "applies solely to independently conceived and financed live action motion pictures" and is not intended for television broadcast, cable, video/DVD markets, or work otherwise produced primarily for commercial exploitation; animated projects and music videos are also excluded, with eligibility "subject solely to SAG-AFTRA's discretion." The agreement treats the covered work as a single motion picture of a stated running time, priced as one production with one budget submitted before photography and one report due "within four (4) weeks of completion of principal photography." Coverage reaches principal performers, singers, dancers, stunt performers, body doubles, puppeteers, pilots, narrators and announcers, but not background actors. The wage table adds the comparison: $630 a day rather than $125 means the standard tier applies, not the ultra one, whatever the marketing calls the production.

Announced versus delivered

Neither document announces a deal; both are reference agreements a producer signs before shooting, and the delivered fact is the signature and payroll record, not a release. What the text leaves unresolved is how a phone-first vertical series would qualify at all. A serial of dozens of one-minute episodes on a coin-unlock model is not a single motion picture of one stated running time, and its business model is built around exactly the ongoing commercial exploitation the agreement says it does not cover. Nothing extends its theatrical framing to episodic, direct-to-app distribution, so a producer cannot read the ultra cap as automatic licence to hire under SAG-AFTRA terms simply because a vertical series is inexpensive per minute.

What to watch

This is an editorial reading, not a union claim: whether SAG-AFTRA extends a comparably tiered agreement to episodic or vertical formats, as the Writers Guild has for writers, is the fact that would close this gap. Absent that, a producer working with SAG-AFTRA-affiliated performers needs a separate new-media contract, not the theatrical low-budget letter agreements described here.

• Does the production intend theatrical exhibition or direct-to-app release, and which agreement's scope actually matches that plan?
• Is the project budgeted, reported and paid as a single picture, or as an ongoing episodic series with its own accounting?
• Which performer categories are covered, and does the cast include background performers the low-budget theatrical tiers exclude?

The budget ceiling and day rate are precise numbers in a real document, but precision is not the same as fit for a format the document was never written to describe.