Eve Plumb isn’t exactly enjoying the wealth she’s made from playing Jan Brady on TV’s beloved The Brady Bunch.
“If I had 10 cents per rerun episode, I could pay down the national deficit,” Plumb writes in the intro to his newly published memoir, Happiness Included: Jan Brady and Beyond, before sharply adding, “I don’t.”
ABC’s hit comedy revolved around the titular blended family and ran from 1969 to 1974 before enjoying a second wind of popularity on various cable networks.
Plumb doubled down last month in an interview with PauseRewind via KOMO News, bluntly stating that “we don’t make Residue” about the show’s cast.
Plumb isn’t the first Brady Bunch cast member to claim that he’s not living lavishly well off from the role that made him famous.
In 1992, Barry Williams, who played Greg Brady, wrote in his memoir that times were different when the six fictional Brady brothers starred on the iconic show.
“Comedic actors’ salaries have changed dramatically since the ’70s,” Williams, now 71, writes in “Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg.”
“The fifth and final year, the highest salary for us kids was $1,100 a week,” he continued, referring to co-star Plumb, 68. Maureen McCormick (Marcia), 69 years old. Mike Lookinland (Bobby), 65 years old. Christopher Knight (Peter), 68 years old. and Susan Olsen (Cindy), 64.
Williams noted that the 22nd episode of the show’s final season brought in the highest revenue.
The “Brady Bunch” kids would have earned just over $24,000, “not bad for a teenager,” he noted.
However, there was a caveat. “Consider agent fees, taxes, and the fact that some children were expected to contribute to the family,” Williams explained. “It was enough to indulge in toys, but not enough to survive the period of ennui that inevitably followed.”
Regarding the remaining money, Williams said, “Payments for subsequent broadcasts of the show disappeared as soon as filming ended.”
In a June 2025 episode of “The Real Brady Brothers.” On the podcast, Knight admitted that his modest salary helped pay his family’s rent.
“I believe the Bradys helped our family,” he told Williams at the time, adding that he felt he “gave them the means to pay the rent.”
Olsen also appeared on the Oprah Network’s “Where Are They Now” series in 2013 and spoke about the survivor shortage.
“Because ‘The Brady Bunch’ is on the air all the time, people tend to think we made a lot of money off of it,” she said at the time. “People just think, ‘Oh, I must be rich, we must all be rich too.'”
She explained on the show, “I didn’t sign a bad contract.”
“This was the situation before 1973,” she continued, noting that actors “were only paid for the first 10 repeat performances.”
Olsen said the last check came in around 1979. “So we haven’t been able to make any money since then,” she said.
But Plumb found another way to compensate for the residual deficit. In 2016, she made a huge profit on the Malibu beach house she bought when she was 11 years old.
The actress unloaded the property, which she originally paid $55,300 for in 1969, for an astonishing $3.9 million.
