Actor/Musicians (AEA + Local 802)
One performer who acts and plays — how Greenroom prices, reports, and remits both union memberships from a single engagement
A performer who both acts and plays an instrument belongs to two unions at once — Actors' Equity for the acting, Local 802 for the music. They take home one paycheck, but each union is owed its own dues and its own benefit contributions, calculated on its own basis.
Greenroom models this as a single AEA engagement with a Local 802 wage attached to it. You set the payee up once, on one screen, and both unions' obligations fall out of it.
This page is about a payee who carries both memberships. A musician who only plays is an ordinary Local 802 payee — assign the union and job title the usual way, described in Union Configuration.
Setting one up
Open the payee's Engagement & union section on the payee detail page.
- Set Union to Actors' Equity and pick the applicable agreement.
- Choose Actor/Musician as the Job title.
- A required Sub-type field appears. Pick one:
| Sub-type | Who it describes |
|---|---|
| Actor | Contracted to the music track — plays it as part of the regular week |
| Swing | Covers the track only on the performances they actually play |
| Understudy | Same — covers the track only when they go on |
The sub-type is not cosmetic. It decides how many performances the Local 802 wage fires on by default, and it decides which member class the payee files under on the AEA union report. Save through the page's single save bar, as with any other payee edit.
The 802 Reportable Wage
Once the job title is Actor/Musician, a 802 Reportable Wage card appears inside the Pay section, below the AEA rates. This is where you build the basis Local 802 dues and benefits compute against.
The 802 basis is not the AEA salary and not a percentage of it. You construct it:
- Pick a scale line. The dropdown offers the weekly scale rows from whichever Local 802 rule set governs the engagement's dates.
- Add the Schedule-A premiums this engagement carries — On Stage, In Costume, Choreography, Body Paint, Instrument maintenance, and the Media fee. Flat premiums are editable; the Media fee is computed as a percentage of the scale line and shown as text rather than an input.
- Greenroom sums the scale line and every premium into a subtotal, applies the governing agreement's vacation rate to that subtotal, and adds it on.
The result carries a Dues & benefits basis badge. That figure is what every Local 802 percentage fund computes against, and it's the figure compared against the AEA salary for the greater-of cash wage described below.
The scale dropdown offers weekly minimums only. Local 802's rate table also carries a per-performance companion rate, and it is deliberately not offered here — the performance count is already applied later, on the run, so picking a per-performance base would prorate the same thing twice.
Premiums sit inside the subtotal
Vacation applies to scale plus premiums, not to scale alone. This ordering is the union's, and it is worth knowing because it makes the basis meaningfully larger than a casual reading of the agreement suggests.
If the payee's engagement dates fall outside every Local 802 rule set you have loaded, the card says so instead of offering a scale line. Load the rate table first — see Union Rates Reference.
What happens on a payroll run
Telling Greenroom how many performances they played
On the Employees & Loan-outs step, an Actor/Musician's row carries an extra Musician-track performances field. This is the number of performances the 802 wage fires on this week.
What happens when you leave it blank depends on the sub-type:
| Sub-type | Blank means |
|---|---|
| Actor | The AEA week — the entry's own performance count, or a full eight if that's blank too |
| Swing / Understudy | Zero. Nobody assumes a cover played a track they weren't recorded as covering |
A swing or understudy with nothing entered gets an amber flag on the row: "Musician-track performances not set — the 802 wage fires on 0." It's a warning, not a block — you can submit past it, and sometimes zero is genuinely correct (out sick, played nothing). But if the payee did cover the track, entering the count is the difference between remitting Local 802 correctly and remitting nothing at all.
A count you type always wins, including a deliberate 0. The field accepts up to 16 — two full weeks, past any holiday-week nine.
How the money is calculated
Three rules govern the result, and they are worth understanding because the arithmetic is not what most people expect:
The cash wage is the greater of the two, never the sum. The performer is paid the higher of their AEA salary and their constructed 802 reportable wage. The two do not stack. Gross pay does not go up because someone carries a second card.
Each union's benefits compute on its own basis. AEA employer contributions are calculated against the AEA figure; Local 802's are calculated against the 802 reportable wage, prorated by the musician-track performance count. So a payee who played three of eight performances contributes on three-eighths of their 802 basis — not on their AEA salary, and not on the full 802 week.
Both unions' dues come out of the one cash wage. AEA working dues and Local 802 work dues both appear as deductions on the same paycheck, each at its own rate against its own basis.
A payee who is re-roled away from Actor/Musician stops accruing Local 802 obligations immediately, on the next run. Their saved 802 Reportable Wage isn't deleted — it stays on the engagement, inert, and starts applying again if you put the title back.
On the union reports
An actor-musician appears on two union tabs in Union Reports:
- AEA, filed under the member class their sub-type implies. AEA reports separate three classes — Principals, Chorus & Swings, and Stage Management. A Swing files under Chorus & Swings; Actor and Understudy sub-types file under Principals.
- Local 802, showing the prorated 802 basis and each fund owed against it — pension, health, sick pay, and supplemental, according to what the governing agreement carries.
Local 802 health is a per-performance contribution, so it scales with the musician-track count rather than with the week. A fund the agreement marks as not requiring a separate check is labelled as such on the report and folded into the remittance accordingly — see Union Remittance for how destinations and check-cutting work.
Common questions
Why doesn't gross pay go up when I add the 802 wage? Because the cash wage is the greater of the two, not the sum. The 802 wage's job is to establish the basis for Local 802's dues and benefits, not to add pay on top of the AEA salary.
The Local 802 basis on the report doesn't match the reportable wage I built. It's prorated by the musician-track performance count. Three performances of an eight-performance week produces three-eighths of the basis. If the number looks wrong, check the count on the entries step first.
Local 802 health came out as zero. Health is per-performance, so a zero performance count produces zero health. Check whether the sub-type is Swing or Understudy with the count left blank — that combination resolves to zero by design.
Why are there two spellings — Actor/Musician and Actor-Musician? They're two different job titles in two different unions' rule tables: AEA's carries the slash, Local 802's carries the hyphen. Greenroom keeps them distinct on purpose so each union's rules resolve only within its own agreement. You only ever pick the AEA one; the 802 side is resolved for you.