As we reported on Saturday, the WGA Negotiating Committee unanimously approved a tentative agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers for a four-year term. Last night, the WGAW Board and WGAE Council also unanimously voted to send the 2026 MBA to the membership for ratification.
We are proud of what we achieved in this negotiation, made possible by your support.
Our most significant accomplishment was restoring our health plan to a sustainable path after facing severe pressure from industry contraction and runaway healthcare cost inflation. The companies agreed to substantially improved health contributions—an increase of 3.25% in the health contribution rate upon ratification, with the contribution rate reaching 16.75% by the second year of the contract, in addition to long-overdue increases to health contribution caps. We will be transferring $25 million and 0.25% from the over-funded Paid Parental Leave Fund to the Health Fund. In total we project this will bring in $280 million in new funding to the health plan over the term of the agreement. We also negotiated necessary plan changes, effective in 2027, adhering to goals of preserving choice and keeping out-of-pocket costs for writers as manageable as possible.
For our pension plan, we secured the ability to divert funding from minimums in the final two years of the agreement, if necessary.
We achieved minimum increases totaling 10.5% over the term of the contract, with a higher increase for Comedy-Variety writers in Year 1.
We increased foreign and domestic HBSVOD residuals, as well as the viewership-based streaming bonus first established in 2023.
For screenwriters, we established a new minimum for “page-one” rewrites, which is significantly higher than the standard rewrite fee. We expanded the number of writers covered by the guaranteed second step provision, and required studios to notify producers that only our employers may request work from the writer or receive direct delivery of the script.
In television, we established that writers on if-come deals must be in “no position” and non-exclusive until they are paid the commencement fee to write the pilot script. We expanded writers in production protections for rooms that briefly overlap with production, and improved on span protections for short-order series.
We strengthened the AI protections won in 2023, expanding our access to information and mandatory meetings if companies seek to license our work to train commercially available GAI systems.
We also successfully resisted a number of proposed rollbacks, including efforts to lower interest rates on late payments, to bring back four-week mini-rooms and the ability to credit mini-room compensation against later pay, to remove the requirement to employ writers in production on shows filmed in Canada, and to erode 13-week minimum guarantees in Comedy-Variety. In addition, we defeated an automatic trigger that would have mandated further changes to health benefits based on reserve levels—a proposal that previously led to a strike authorization vote in 2017.
Members can review the full details of the agreement in several ways:
- The complete tentative agreement, codified in the Memorandum of Agreement (MOA)
- A Summary of the MOA
- An FAQ addressing key provisions
The 2026 MBA ratification vote will begin on April 16 at 10 am PT/1 pm ET and close on April 24 at noon PT/3 pm ET. Eligible voters will receive an email with the ballot link and supporting materials when the vote opens.
Current members in good standing will also receive a separate invitation to attend contract informational meetings, where the Negotiating Committee and staff will review the agreement and answer questions.
Thank you for your support throughout this negotiation. We felt it every day, and this outcome would not have been possible without the strength and solidarity this membership is known for.
WGA Negotiating Committee