Hiring is not a trickle. In eight of the show's first fifty-two years nobody joined the cast at all, and in one year fifteen people did.
Fifteen in one year, none in eight others
Count an arrival as the start of a run rather than as a person and the roster yields 179 arrivals across 174 people, because four of them have more than one run in the record. Spread those 179 over the fifty-two years of hiring the file covers and you get an average of about three and a half hires a year, which is a number that describes almost nothing. Hardly any year looks like it. The series is a set of spikes with long flat stretches between them, and the average hides both.
The spikes first. The largest single intake is 1980, with fifteen runs beginning. Then 1985 with twelve, 1975 and 1995 with nine each, and 1981 with eight. Behind those five there is a tie: 1986 and 1991 both took in seven. That is the whole top of the distribution, and every year in it falls in the show's first two decades. Only five years have ever seen an intake of eight or more, and the most recent of the five is 1995.
Now the flat parts. In eight years the show hired nobody at all: 1976, 1978, 1987, 1992, 1997, 2006, 2007 and 2011. Three of those eight (1978, 1987 and 2011) saw no departures either, so the cast that finished one year began the next one unchanged, person for person. The newest year, 2026, took in two, Saidah Belo-Osagie and Grace Reiter, so it does not join the eight.
The two halves of the show's life hire at visibly different rates. From 1975 to 1995 there were 98 arrivals in twenty-one seasons, an average of 4.7 a year. From 1996 to 2026 there were 81 in thirty-one seasons, an average of 2.6. The largest intake of the past thirty years is six people, in 2013, which would not have made the top seven of the earlier era. Something changed around the middle of the nineties, and it was not that the show got smaller: the credited cast is larger now than it was in the eighties, which you can see on the cast-size chart on the roster page. A bigger cast refilled less often means one thing arithmetically: people are staying. Of the eleven who ever reached ten seasons, nine were hired in 2001 or later.
What the lumpiness implies is the part worth arguing about. A show that replaced people one at a time as they left would produce a flat series with small numbers in most years. This one does not. It produces years in which a third of the credited cast is new and years in which nobody is, which is the signature of hiring done as an act of restaffing rather than as maintenance. The unit of change here is not the individual. It is the group.
They arrive in the year they are needed, not the year after
Set the departures alongside the arrivals and the same shape appears. The largest exits are 1980 with fifteen runs ending, 1995 with twelve, then 1981, 1985 and 1986 with ten each, 2022 with nine, and 2014 and 2025 with six apiece. All five of the largest exit years are also among the seven largest intake years. That is the fact the rest of this piece is about.
The obvious story is that the show loses people and then hires replacements the following season. It is wrong. Correlate the intake in a year against the exits in the same year, over 1976 to 2025, and the coefficient is 0.83. Correlate it against the previous year's exits and it collapses to 0.18. There is no lag to find. Arrivals and departures are contemporaneous. 1980 is the extreme case and not the only one: fifteen in and fifteen out, in one year.
Be careful about what that coefficient is allowed to mean. An annual series cannot tell you when inside the year anything happened, so a start and an end sharing a year is equally consistent with a cast hired at the top of a season and shed at the end of it as it is with people being fired and replaced mid-season. It cannot show that the arrivals were replacements for the departures either; that is a cause, and this is a correlation. The figure is also carried by its outliers, which is worth admitting rather than burying: drop 1980 alone and it falls to 0.77, and on ranks rather than counts it is 0.71. The claim that survives all three tests is the modest one, that the show's big arrival years and its big departure years are the same years.
The relation that does point forward is weaker and more interesting. Intake in a year against the next year's exits gives 0.46. A big hire tends to be followed by a bigger than usual clear-out. Across the nine years with an intake of six or more, the average exit in the following year is 5.2 runs, against an average of 3.2 for all years from 1976 to 2025. The honest caveat is that nine observations is not many, and that 1980 into 1981 and 1985 into 1986 do a lot of the work. Not every wave behaves: 1991 took in seven and the next year lost three, and 1975 took in nine and the next year lost one. Call it a tendency, not a law. What it suggests is that a large intake does not settle. The people brought in together are, more often than chance, gone together.
Which invites the tidier claim, and the tidier claim does not survive. If cohorts arrive together, they should age together, and the show should empty out periodically because everyone hired in a wave hits ten years in a wave. The trouble is that reaching ten years is vanishingly rare: eleven people out of 174 have ever done it. Overwhelmingly, cohorts do not age into long careers, because almost nobody does.
Test it on the group the story fits best and it turns into a different finding. The 2012 intake was four people: Aidy Bryant with ten seasons on the record, Kate McKinnon with eleven, Cecily Strong with eleven, and Tim Robinson with one. Three of the eleven ten-season careers in the show's history came out of that one intake of four. The following year hired six: Beck Bennett with eight seasons and Kyle Mooney with nine, then John Milhiser, Mike O'Brien, Noël Wells and Brooks Wheelan with one each. Not one of the six reached ten. The year after that hired five and produced two more long careers, Michael Che with thirteen seasons and Colin Jost with fourteen, both of whom are still there. So two adjacent cohorts, hired a year apart into the same show, had opposite fates, and a third adjacent to those two looks like the first. Nothing in this dataset explains why, and it would be easy and dishonest to invent a reason.
The half of the cohort idea that does hold up is the leaving. Of the fifteen runs that began in 2012, 2013 and 2014, five ended in the same year, 2022: Bryant, McKinnon, Strong, Mooney and Pete Davidson. Those five are more than half of that year's nine departures. Four others from the same three intakes ended in 2014, and two of the fifteen are still on the show. A group hired across three seasons therefore left in two clusters rather than steadily, which is the pattern the arrival series shows in reverse. The revised claim is narrower than the one it replaces and it is the one the numbers support, on the one window where it can be tested: cohorts leave together more reliably than they last together.
One caveat governs everything above. This counts runs, not people, so a cast member who came back is counted in each year they started. Four people are affected. Al Franken, who has three runs in the record, is counted three times, in 1979, in 1986 and in 1988; Brian Doyle-Murray, Don Novello and Harry Shearer are counted twice each. That is 179 starts against 174 people, and whether a returning cast member should count as an arrival at all is a real question rather than a rounding error. It is the subject of the next piece. For this one the choice is deliberate: bringing somebody back is still restaffing, which is what the intake series is meant to record. The individual runs behind every figure here are in the biographies and the sortable roster, and there is more counting of this kind on the articles page.
Cast dates and tenures on this site come from Wikipedia; the counting and the reading of it above are our own. More of these are on the articles page, and corrections are welcome at info@snlroster.com.