What this is
SNL Roster is a reference site about the people who have been in the cast of Saturday Night Live. It lists all 174 of them, from the nine credited in the show's first season in 1975 to the seventeen performing now, and it lets you sort and filter that list by when someone joined, how long they lasted, and what they did there: repertory player, featured player, Weekend Update anchor, writer.
Alongside the roster there are three charts that answer questions a table cannot: a timeline of every performer's run, the size of the cast in each season, and how experienced the cast was on average over the show's fifty-two seasons, counting the current one. There are also written pages, among them a history of the show told through its cast, a short biography of all 174 people, and a page of statistics and a quiz.
It exists because the information was scattered. Wikipedia has the underlying facts, but as a table you cannot sort and a prose article you cannot filter, and the interesting questions (who lasted longest, which year the cast emptied out, whether the show hires younger than it used to) need the data in a shape nobody had put it in.
Where the data comes from
The cast list is derived from Wikipedia's list of Saturday Night Live cast members, used under CC BY-SA 4.0. It was last retrieved on 21 September 2026. Nothing is typed in by hand: a script parses that article's tables into the single JSON file the whole site is built from, which is why the roster, the charts and the statistics can never quietly disagree with one another.
Every number stated anywhere on this site is computed from that file rather than repeated from somewhere else. That is a deliberate rule and it has already caught mistakes: four of them in pages that had gone live, including one false superlative that was sitting on two different pages at the same time. The methodology page names all four and explains what the counting can and cannot settle.
The photographs come from Wikimedia Commons and are used under their own individual licenses, which vary. Each one is credited to its photographer on the card it appears in, and all of them are listed together on the image credits page.
The cast-news page is different: its entries are written by the site itself from press reports and reference works, not copied from them. Every entry is dated by when the event happened, not by when it was written up. The history compiled at launch is marked as such, and every entry added afterwards carries the day it went on the site.
How current it is
Cast changes are announced between seasons, so the data is refreshed when the company changes rather than on a fixed schedule, typically at the start of a season and again if someone leaves mid-year. The retrieval date above is the honest answer to how fresh the list is at any given moment, and it is updated by the same script that updates the data, so it cannot fall out of step with it.
A performer whose run is still going shows an end year of present rather than a guess.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, please say so. Email info@snlroster.com and it will be fixed. Corrections to the underlying facts are worth making at the Wikipedia article as well, since that is where this site will read them from next time.
What this site is not
Saturday Night Live and SNL are trademarks of NBCUniversal. This site is not affiliated with NBCUniversal, with Saturday Night Live, or with anybody who has worked on the show. It is an independent reference project and has no inside knowledge of anything.
It also has no accounts, no sign-in and no newsletter, and it never asks you for your name or your email address. It does carry advertising, and it does measure how it is used. What that involves, what is shared and how to opt out are all set out on the privacy and ads page.
Contact
One address reaches the site for everything, whether that is corrections, licensing questions about a photograph, advertising, privacy requests, or anything else:
Email is the only channel; there is no contact form, because a form would mean collecting and storing what you typed into it, and this site is built not to hold anything about its visitors.