A single singer on a union radio jingle costs $420.50 before one note of music is recorded. That figure is not a producer's estimate and it is not a market average pulled from a survey. It is the session fee printed on the Year Two rate sheet of the 2025 SAG-AFTRA Audio Commercials Contract, effective April 1, 2026 through March 31, 2027, published by the union itself and downloadable by anyone who wants to check it. In an industry where almost nobody answers a price question in writing, that rate sheet is the one honest starting point a first-time jingle buyer has.
The One Price the Industry Does Publish
SAG-AFTRA sets a session fee for every category of performer on an audio commercial, and the Year Two schedule prices a solo or duo singer at $420.50, the same figure it prices a single announcer at. Group singers come down per head as the group grows: $309.90 each in a group of three to five, $273.80 each in a group of six to eight, and $242.60 each at nine or more. Pension and health contributions of 23.5 percent of scale ride on top of every one of those fees, discounted to 19.95 percent for producers who qualify.
Read the group tiers again, because they run opposite to the way most advertisers assume a jingle is priced. A four-part harmony costs less per voice than one soloist. The union prices the session rather than the performance, which rewards stacking singers and penalizes the small arrangement a local business usually pictures. A buyer who knows these five numbers can ask how many voices are on the track and do the arithmetic alongside the producer.
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The Band Keeps Its Own Books
Singers are covered by SAG-AFTRA. Instrumentalists fall under a separate union, and the American Federation of Musicians publishes its Commercial Announcements terms in a signatory packet that reads like the wage schedule it is. A side musician's one-hour minimum call is $133.01. A leader or contractor is paid double side scale at $266.02, and a contractor becomes mandatory once a session employs ten or more musicians including the leader. Pension runs 18.15 percent of scale wages, health and welfare adds 6 percent plus a $26 day rate per musician on original sessions.
The AFM terms also contain the most useful piece of production arithmetic in either document. One hour of session time permits a spot to be claimed for every twenty minutes worked, up to eight, so a business cutting three length variations of the same jingle in one booking pays one session fee rather than three. Advertisers who record a sixty in March and come back for a thirty in May have paid twice for a saving that was sitting in front of them at the first booking.
Adding It Up Before Anyone Writes a Melody
Put the two rate sheets together and a conventional union jingle has a floor that can be calculated to the dollar. Five singers at $309.90 each comes to $1,549.50, and the 23.5 percent pension and health contribution adds $364.13, for $1,913.63 in vocal costs. A four-piece rhythm section means three side musicians at $133.01 and a leader at $266.02, or $665.05 in wages, which carries roughly $265 in pension, health and day rates behind it. The people in the room cost about $2,840 at union minimums.
Nothing in that $2,840 writes the song. It does not pay a composer, an arranger or a copyist, it does not rent a studio, it does not pay an engineer to run the session or a mixer to finish it, and it buys no airtime at all. Those costs sit on top of the floor, and they are the reason a fully union jingle for a regional advertiser lands in four figures no matter how simple the brief sounds. Our broader guide to what jingle companies charge walks the full market, and radio commercial production cost covers the spoken-word side of the same bill.
What the Open Market Charges Instead
Most jingles made for local businesses in America never touch either agreement. Non-union production is legal and common, and the market it produces runs in three recognizable bands. At $200 to $800 a freelancer adapts a melody he already owns and sings your business name into it, which is fast and sounds like it. Between $2,000 and $15,000 a dedicated jingle house writes an original melody, hires trained singers and usually attaches market exclusivity. National agency work for brands with television budgets starts around $15,000 and climbs past $50,000.
A custom, exclusive, professionally sung jingle for a local or regional advertiser realistically costs $1,000 to $5,000, and the union numbers explain why that range sits where it does rather than lower. The floor for union singers and union players alone is near $3,000, so a $900 quote for a jingle with a five-voice choir is telling a buyer something about who is actually singing on it. That is a legitimate answer in most local markets. It is only a problem when nobody says so.
Eight Weeks Later
The session fee buys a session. It does not buy a permanent right to keep the recording on the air, and that distinction is where first-time jingle buyers lose control of a budget they thought was settled. SAG-AFTRA prices continued use in cycles: $626.31 for an eight-week digital use period on a single voice under the Year Two Standard schedule, and $379.60 for the first unit of a thirteen-week wild spot buy. The AFM charges $99.76 per spot to renew a thirteen-week cycle, or $79.81 on the eight-week cycle radio buyers typically use. A union jingle running for a year is billed four to six separate times for the same thirty seconds.
Non-union jingle houses rebuild the same structure out of contract language instead of union cycles, which arrives as a term license, a renewal fee, or a market exclusivity window that lapses on a date buried in paragraph nine. Four questions settle it before anyone signs. Who owns the master recording. For how long. In what territory and on what media. What a renewal costs when the term ends. A producer who answers all four in writing is selling a different product from one who answers none of them, whatever the two quotes look like side by side. The same discipline governs spoken performance, which our guide to the voice over commercial lays out in full.
Eighteen Words for a Plumber in Jamison
Price arguments go in circles without something concrete to price, so here is an original hook written for a fictional client.
“THE SECOND TRUCK”, jingle hook for a fictional Jamison plumber, two-part close harmony over upright bass and brushed snare.
SUNG [two voices, close, unhurried, nobody belting]:
If it drips at eleven and floods you by two,
Hoff and Sons in Jamison is already due.
ANNOUNCER [flat, no smile, over the last chord]: Hoff and Sons. Jamison. We answer at two.
Eighteen sung words, carrying the business name, the town and the promise in one sentence that scans. That is the whole test of a jingle hook and most of them fail it, because a melody somebody loved in the studio gets built first and the name is wedged in afterward where it does not fit the meter. Cast union, two singers put this in the three-to-five tier at $309.90 each. Either way the writing decides whether anyone remembers it.
Where That Leaves a Local Advertiser
A jingle costs what the people on it cost plus what the song costs plus what the right to keep playing it costs, and only the first of those three is published anywhere. SAG-AFTRA says $420.50 for a soloist and $309.90 a head for a small group. The AFM says $133.01 for a player and double that for the leader. Everything above those floors is negotiable, and everything about the term is a contract question rather than a price question.
For a small or regional business the practical answer is simpler than the arithmetic suggests. A well-written thirty-second spot with one memorable line will outperform a mediocre jingle at four times the price, and a jingle earns its cost when the business plans to run the same identity for years rather than months. We produce both and we put the number on the page, as our radio advertising production page sets out.
Jingle or spot, you own it outright
Radio, streaming audio and custom jingles, produced broadcast ready from $199, most jobs delivered in a day, no term and no renewal fee. Tell us about your business and we will pitch you a premise on spec, or see pricing first.