Survivor: What does the winner of Survivor get? (and the Money for Losing Players!)

The Contestants of the CBS Original Series ‘Survivor’ Season 49.

Ever since Survivor premiered in 2000, the contestants have competed to win the $1 million grand prize and the title of Sole Survivor.

However, the winner doesn’t get to pocket the entire $1 million, since thousands of dollars have to go to federal and state taxes. The total amount of money a winner receives depends on their state’s income taxes.

It’s crucial that the winner pay the taxes, as season 1 winner Richard Hatch spent nearly three years in federal prison for not paying up. He told PEOPLE in April 2023 that legal fees and missed work “more than wiped out the money.”

As inflation has increased over the years, some viewers have questioned why the prize fund hasn’t proportionally increased.

June Deery, professor of communication and media at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, spoke about the fund to The Hollywood Reporter in February 2025, saying, “The coveted commodity on most reality shows is not only the prize but the media exposure. Even if participants aren’t catapulted into A-list celebrityhood, the attention capital they accumulate on TV can be monetized online — from pitching sponsors or regular YouTube ads.”

Eva Erickson, Star Toomey, Mary Zheng, and David Kinne on Survivor: Fiji.

Has Survivor ever increased the prize fund?

The $1 million prize fund has stayed the same since season 1 in 2000. However, the CBS show doubled the jackpot to $2 million once to celebrate the 40th season, Survivor: Winners at War, in 2020. The season featured 20 winners from past seasons of Survivor to compete for the highest prize fund in history. Tony Vlachos was named the winner.

“The $2 million prize was all CBS,” host Jeff Probst told Entertainment Weekly in January 2020. “The truth is, Kelly Kahl is the guy at CBS who back in season 2 moved Survivor to go up against Friends. And we beat Friends in the ratings and his career was really made in that moment.”

Probst continued, “He’s been invested in Survivor forever. And he has given us free rein to do what we want for a long time. And this season he said, ‘Can you try to make winners happen? And can we give them a $2 million prize?’ “

How much do the second and third-place finishers get?

Even though they couldn’t snag the title of Sole Survivor, contestants who get second and third place also walk away with a significant amount of money.

The runner-up receives $100,000 and the third place finisher gets $85,000, according to Today. Kaplan confirmed the prize amounts during a 2021 appearance on the Trading Secrets podcast.

Do all Survivor contestants get paid?

Every contestant who has appeared on Survivor has reportedly been paid some amount of money for their time.

Kaplan claimed on her Trading Secrets podcast appearance that the amount of money a contestant wins depends on how they placed and how many people are competing on a certain season.

According to Kaplan, “the same pot of money exists no matter how many players there are.” So if there are more contestants in a season, then each person gets less money. The sooner the contestants get eliminated, the less money they take home. (Season 50 will feature the largest group of contestants ever at 24.)

“So, what happens is, roughly, the first person voted out makes like $2,500, [and] it goes up very incrementally,” Kaplan claimed. “Those people only make a few thousand, and there’s a couple hundred [dollars] difference between them.”

However, once there are enough people eliminated and people qualify to be members of the jury, their payout “starts going up by $10K,” according to Kaplan.

“It works backwards,” she said, claiming that each person on the jury makes $10,000 less than the contestant who made it one place ahead of them (excluding the winner).

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