Each principal Friends cast member reportedly earned $1 million per episode in the final season.
Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer negotiated their salaries collectively for the later seasons. Their unified bargaining helped the six actors receive equal pay, despite differences in individual fame and character storylines.
The reported $1 million figure applied to each actor for season ten, which consisted of 18 episodes. This made the cast members among the highest-paid television performers of their time and reflected the show’s enormous audience, syndication value and advertising success.
Salary figures can vary in reports because contracts may include bonuses, backend participation and other compensation. The commonly cited figure is therefore best understood as the reported per-episode salary for the final season, not the total amount each performer earned from the entire series.