The 'Friends' Characters' Salaries, Then and Now

Back in Season 2 of Friends, Rachel, Phoebe and Joey staged a small revolt over dinner plans because, as Rachel put it, the other three just didn’t get “that we don’t make as much money as they do.” It’s the closest the show ever came to a pay stub: Search the fan transcripts of all ten seasons, and you’ll find tabs, bets, loans, and a $700 fertility study, but not a single salary for any of the six.

So we went to the government: the figures below are the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ average annual wages for the New York area in November 2004, the year the show ended, and in May 2025, the most recent release. The New York area BLS measures today is bigger than the one it measured then, and its survey leaves out the self-employed, so treat these as ballparks, not paychecks.

Monica Geller, Chef
Rachel Green, Fashion Executive
Chandler Bing, Data Processor
Ross Geller, Paleontologist and Professor
Phoebe Buffay, Masseuse
Joey Tribbiani, Actor

Monica Geller, Chef

Monica worked her way up the hard way: she was promoted to head lunch chef and fired in the same Season 2 episode, took a job at the Moondance Diner because she had $127 in the bank, and eventually ran the kitchens at Alessandro’s and then Javu.

A New York chef or head cook averaged $49,810 in 2004, which comes to about $83,800 in 2025 dollars. The 2025 average is $74,840, so the job pays more on paper than it did in the show’s final season – and less once you account for inflation.

Rachel Green, Fashion Executive

Rachel opened her first Central Perk paycheck in Season 1 only to ask, “Who’s FICA? Why’s he getting all my money?” New York waiters and waitresses averaged $22,010 in 2000 and $55,000 in 2025. She then became an assistant buyer at Bloomingdale’s, where a buyer averaged $56,210 in 2004 and $92,580 in 2025, roughly flat after inflation.

By Season 7, she was a merchandising manager at Ralph Lauren with “a big pay raise,” and New York purchasing managers, the closest BLS match, averaged $101,280 in 2004 and $189,490 in 2025.

Chandler Bing, Data Processor

Chandler’s job was a running joke on the show, and it’s no easier to look up. The show’s own description, “statistical analysis and data reconfiguration,” points to his being a statistician, a job that averaged $63,910 in New York in 2004 and $145,760 in 2025, one of the few on this list that pulled well ahead of inflation.

If he counts as a computer systems analyst instead, it went from $77,270 to $129,150. He then quit to take an unpaid advertising internship in Season 9, which pays the same in any decade.

Ross Geller, Paleontologist and Professor

Ross went from the museum to a lecture hall at NYU and got tenure in the final season, then reminded everyone, “I got tenure. I didn’t win the lottery.” New York professors of earth sciences averaged $68,260 in 2004, and $115,190 in 2025, almost exactly the rate of inflation, and geoscientists outside the classroom went from $68,630 to $104,070.

Phoebe Buffay, Masseuse

Phoebe is the friend who lost the most ground. New York massage therapists averaged $56,620 in 2004, which comes to about $95,300 in 2025 dollars, and the 2025 average is $61,880, with a median of just $50,600. That BLS figure leaves out self-employed therapists, though, and Phoebe often worked for herself, at one point joking that she’d raised her rates to $500 an hour.

Joey Tribbiani, Actor

Joey is the hardest to price, because the BLS doesn’t publish an annual salary for actors at all, only publishing an hourly one with a footnote noting that the work often lasts a day or a week. In 2025, a New York actor averaged $52.43 an hour, with a median of $28.81. For his one big movie, Shutter Speed, Joey got a penny for every dollar the film made, which is a better deal than it sounds, as long as the movie gets made.

The real money on Friends went to the people playing these characters: the cast made $22,000 an episode in the first season and per Mental Floss, $1 million an episode by the last.