The IATSE Changes That Land on Your Timecard This August

Most crew find out a contract changed when a paycheque looks different. The IATSE Basic Agreement rolled out on a staggered schedule rather than all at once, and the largest single batch of that schedule landed on 2 August 2026. Here is what actually moved, what it means on a real day, and what a production has to do differently.

What changed on 2 August 2026?

Four things, all effective the same day. Wages, benefits, the industry training contribution, and the penalty structure around long days.

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Rates are as published in GreenSlate's Basic Agreement change schedule, updated July 2026. The premium rate applies to employers who are not $15M contributors; the basic rate applies to those who are.

Why does the benefit rate matter more than the raise?

Because it is per hour, and it does not care whether the hour was scheduled.

A 3.5% wage increase is a percentage of a day rate that was negotiated once. The Motion Picture Industry contribution is a flat amount attached to every hour worked, so it scales with the shape of the day rather than the plan for it. On a 12-hour day at the premium rate the employer contributes $188.97 in MPI alone. Push that day to 16 hours and it is $251.96 — before a single overtime dollar.

For crew, that is the part of the deal that is invisible on a payslip and decisive over a career: hours worked are what fund health eligibility and pension credit, which is why an accurately kept timecard is worth more than it looks.

What is the triple time rule, exactly?

Triple time is triggered after 15 elapsed hours in a workday.

The word doing the work is elapsed. It is measured from call, not from the sum of hours you were actively working, so meal breaks sit inside the count rather than pausing it. A 7:00 a.m. call reaches the 15-hour mark at 10:00 p.m. regardless of how long lunch ran.

This is the provision most likely to surprise a first-time line producer. A day that "only" ran an hour past the twelve is a familiar overtime problem. A day that drifts past fifteen elapsed hours is a different budget line entirely, and it arrives faster than expected on any schedule with a company move in it.

What changed about turnaround penalties?

Rest period violations are now paid as additional double time rather than at straight time, and any invasion of rest under 30 minutes is paid for a minimum of half an hour.

Both changes point the same direction: a breached turnaround used to be a rounding error and now is not. The half-hour floor removes the incentive to shave a rest period by ten minutes and treat it as free, and the double-time basis means the arithmetic of "we'll just pay the penalty" stops working on a crew of forty.

We wrote about why productions breach turnaround without meaning to — almost always because nobody recalculated the next day's call after a long wrap, and turnaround is measured per person rather than per unit. The 2026 penalty structure has not made that mistake less common. It has made it more expensive.

What are the low budget tiers, and which one are you on?

Everything above is the Basic Agreement. Most independent films are not on it — they are on the Low Budget Theatrical Agreement, which is a separate contract with its own tier structure and its own, weaker, rest rules. Conflating the two is the single most common mistake we see in budget conversations.

The 2026–2028 Low Budget Theatrical Agreement runs from 1 January 2026 to 31 December 2028 and has five tiers, set by budgeted production costs:

Above $16.5 million a picture is outside the Low Budget Theatrical Agreement altogether. Which agreement it lands on then depends on region and other factors — often the Basic Agreement, which is why the numbers at the top of this article start to matter to you, but do not assume it. Ask.

There is no "Tier 0", though people search for it constantly. The bottom rung is called Ultra Low Budget, and it carries a condition the other tiers do not: the picture must have at least fifteen days of scheduled principal photography. A twelve-day shoot under $3.3 million does not qualify.

Two provisions matter more than the table itself. The applicable tier is fixed by the date principal photography commences, not by what the budget does afterwards. And no employee's wages, terms or conditions may be reduced because the tier changed — a production that moves up a tier mid-picture cannot claw anything back.

Benefit contributions differ by tier. Effective 1 January 2026 the aggregate rate is $142.00 per day on Ultra Low, Tier 1A and Tier 1B productions, and $144.00 per day on Tier 2 and Tier 3, rising by $5 on each January anniversary through 2028.

How does turnaround work on a low budget picture?

Differently, and this is where crew get caught out. The double-time penalty described above is a Basic Agreement provision. Under the Low Budget Theatrical Agreement the structure is:

• A ten hour rest period from set wrap to set call.
• Fifty-two hours after a five-day week; thirty-two hours after a six-day week.
• If rest is invaded and at least eight hours were provided, invaded hours are paid at the applicable base or overtime rate plus an additional hour of straight time.
• If less than eight hours of rest was provided, that applies to all hours worked until a full ten-hour rest period is given.
• After seven consecutive days, or a sixth day worked on the seventh day of the week, the rest period becomes twelve hours.

The weekend rest period is measured set-to-set, not call-to-call, and invading it is paid as additional straight time for the invaded hours — with a partial hour rounding up to a full hour.

So: on a low budget show a blown turnaround costs straight time plus an hour, not double. It is cheaper to breach than on a Basic Agreement picture, which is precisely why it happens more often on the productions least able to absorb the fatigue.

What else has rolled out since 2025?

Several provisions landed on 1 January 2025 and are now simply how the agreement works:

• Juneteenth became a paid holiday.
• Holiday accrual rose from 4% to 4.583%.
• Sick leave expanded from 48 hours to a maximum of 80 hours, or ten days.
• Travel day hours are now included in benefit calculations, with four- to eight-hour minimums depending on the travel.

The travel-day change is the underrated one. Crew on distant location used to lose benefit hours to days that were unquestionably work but not shoot days. That gap is closed.

One provision cuts the other way: productions qualifying under the lower-budget tiers that started on or after 4 August 2024 pay wages reduced by 3% from standard studio rates. If you are working an indie under a low-budget agreement, your baseline is not the studio scale — check which tier the production is signed under before you quote from a rate card.

What does a production have to change operationally?

Less than it fears, and earlier than it usually does.

The penalty provisions do not require new process. They require the existing process to run at a different hour. A turnaround check is worthless at 7 a.m. and decisive at 9 p.m., because that is when the next day's call is still editable. The same is true of the fifteen-hour threshold: a production that knows at hour eleven that it is heading for hour sixteen can drop a setup, and one that finds out at hour sixteen cannot.

Three concrete changes cover most of it.

Publish the call after the wrap estimate, not before it. A call sheet issued at lunch is a guess about a rest period that has not happened yet. If the day slips, the call sheet is now wrong in the one field that carries a penalty.

Check rest per person, not per unit. A second unit call, a pre-call for the camera department, and a late wrap for grip and electric produce three different turnaround clocks on the same production. Checking the general crew call clears none of them.

Record elapsed hours in the report, not just worked hours. The triple-time threshold is measured in elapsed time. If the daily production report only captures shooting hours, the payroll department is reconstructing the number from memory a week later.

What should crew actually do about this?

Four things, none of them complicated.

1. Read your start paperwork for the tier, not just the rate. Studio scale and low-budget scale are different documents with a 3% gap and different penalty math.
2. Log elapsed time, not worked time. The triple-time threshold and the rest-period clock are both elapsed measures. If your notes only capture the hours you were shooting, you cannot check the penalty.
3. Track your benefit hours yourself. Health eligibility runs on hours reported. Travel days now count; make sure they were reported.
4. Raise turnaround before the call, not after. A next-day call that breaches rest is fixable at 9 p.m. and only payable at 6 a.m.

If you are running the schedule rather than working it, the same list inverts: the software that builds your shooting schedule and the call sheet you send the night before are where a fifteen-hour day and a blown rest period are visible while they are still hypothetical. ScenePaper runs a turnaround check per person against the previous day's wrap for exactly this reason.

The honest caveat

The change schedule at the top is what has been published for the Basic Agreement; the tier thresholds, rest periods and benefit contributions below it are from the 2026-2028 Low Budget Theatrical Agreement itself. What is not here is either agreement's full wage rate card. Local agreements and area standards agreements carry their own rates and their own timing again, and a production shooting under one of those is not covered by any of these numbers. Ask which agreement you are on, then check that agreement's schedule — not a blog post's.

The longer-run story here is not the raise. It is that fatigue has been priced. Penalties that used to be cheap enough to plan around now cost enough to schedule around, which is a slower and better fix than an advisory ever was — and one worth reading alongside what the hours actually do to crew over a career.