Nine people were credited in the first season. The counts have not been near that since the seventies.
Nine, then seven, then twenty-five
There is only one honest way to count a cast from this data, and it is blunt: for any year, count the runs that cover it. A person belongs to every year from the season they arrived to the season they left, and anyone still on the show belongs to every year up to now. Do that across the whole roster and the show's size stops being an impression and becomes a line you can read.
The line starts at nine. Nine people were credited in 1975, and two of them, George Coe and Michael O'Donoghue, were gone by the end of that year, each with a single season to their name. What carried into 1976 was seven, and seven is where the count stayed for 1976, 1977 and 1978. That is the smallest the show has ever been, and those are the only three years it has ever spent at that figure. Everything the show is now was made by seven people in a room.
Then it moves, and it moves fast. Five arrivals in 1979 (Tom Davis, Al Franken, Don Novello, Paul Shaffer and Harry Shearer) take the count to twelve. The following year it hits twenty-five. Two years after the smallest cast in the show's history it recorded the largest, and twenty-five has never been beaten since: it is still the all-time maximum, and only one other year has ever matched it.
The rest of the line is less dramatic and more interesting. Eighteen in 1981, eleven in 1982, nine in 1983, and nine again in 1987, which is the last time the count came back down to the first season's figure. It has never been that low since. In between there are two more peaks that nobody talks about as peaks: twenty-two in 1985 and twenty-three in 1995, both within touching distance of 1980 and neither remembered as a crowded year. The whole shape is drawn on the cast-size chart on the roster page, and it is worth looking at, because the eye reads a slope where the numbers record a series of hard steps.
The modern half of the line is flatter, higher and steadier. Averaged by decade, the credited count runs 8.4 in the seventies, 15.0 in the eighties, 17.0 in the nineties, 15.5 in the 2000s, 17.8 in the 2010s and 21.2 across the six completed seasons of the 2020s. Since 2008 it has not once dropped below fourteen. What it has not done is settle. The 2020s in order are 20, 23, 25, 17, 20, 22 and 18, which is high by any historical standard but is not a plateau: the fall from 2022 to 2023 is eight people in a single year, the sharpest drop the show has had this century. Five of the seven years reach twenty, and the last of the seven is 2026, season 52, whose premiere was set for 26 September 2026. Its figure of eighteen is the cast announced for it plus Chloe Fineman, whose run ends in 2026, and it should be read as a provisional count rather than a result.
One caveat governs every number above, and it is not a small one. This counts anyone credited at any point in a season, not the people who were there all year. A season with heavy mid-year churn therefore counts people who were never on screen together at all. The first season is the clearest demonstration: it counts nine, but the seven who saw the year out are the seven everybody actually remembers. Keep that in your pocket, because the rest of this piece depends on it.
Two ways to have twenty-five people
Twenty-five is the record, and two years hold it jointly: 1980 and 2022. Read off a chart, they are the same event. Read off the roster, they are opposites, and the thing that separates them is not the size at all. It is how much of the size was new.
In 1980, fifteen of the twenty-five credited people had arrived that year. Sixty per cent of the cast was in its first season. Twelve of those fifteen arrivals never appeared in a second one: Charles Rocket, Gilbert Gottfried and Denny Dillon are the names still recognised from that group, and each of them has exactly one season in the record. Only three of the fifteen went further, and only two of those went far, Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo with four seasons each. In the same year fifteen runs ended, which is still the largest exit the data contains. A cast that takes in fifteen and loses fifteen in one year is not a company of twenty-five. It is a doorway that twenty-five people walked through, some of whom were never in the building at the same time. That is the caveat from the first half doing real work: the 1980 figure is substantially an artifact of how the counting handles churn.
In 2022 the same twenty-five contains four new arrivals: Marcello Hernández, Molly Kearney, Michael Longfellow and Devon Walker. Sixteen per cent, against 1980's sixty. The other twenty-one were carried over from a 2021 cast of twenty-three, which had itself carried over every one of 2020's twenty, a year in which nobody left at all. Nobody decided to have a twenty-five-person cast in 2022. It accumulated, two or three hires a year, while hardly anyone left, and the peak is the arithmetic result of a decade of low turnover rather than a decision about size.
The tidy version of that contrast would be that 1980 was chaos and 2022 was calm, and the data does not support it. Nine runs ended in 2022, including Kate McKinnon and Cecily Strong at eleven seasons each, Aidy Bryant at ten, Kyle Mooney at nine and Pete Davidson at eight. That is a large exit by any measure, though not a record: 1980 lost fifteen, 1995 lost twelve, and 1981, 1985 and 1986 lost ten apiece, which puts 2022 sixth on the list. So both record years ended in a clear-out, and the concession worth making is that a cast of twenty-five looks unstable in either regime. What changes is when the instability arrives. In 1980 the churn is inside the year, and it is what produces the number. In 2022 the number is produced first, by people staying, and the exit comes at the end of it, which is why 2023 falls to seventeen.
What a cast that size costs is the part the data cannot measure and can only frame. Nothing in the roster records airtime, and this site will not pretend otherwise. But the show is a fixed length, and twenty-five people is three and a half times seven. Whatever a performer's share of a night was in 1977, the arithmetic of a twenty-five-person cast divides it into a fraction of that. A big cast buys range, insurance against a departure, and enough bodies to staff an ensemble sketch without borrowing. It sells the thing that made the first cast famous, which was that seven people were on screen often enough that an audience learned all of them inside a year. Both of those are real, and the trade is a choice rather than a mistake.
The practical use of all this is a test you can apply to any spike. When the count jumps, ask what share of it is new. If most of the cast arrived this year, the number is measuring turnover, and the show is in trouble. If almost none of it did, the number is measuring retention, and the show is merely crowded. 1980 and 2022 give the same reading on the chart and fail that test in opposite directions, which is a good reason to distrust the chart on its own. The individual biographies and the statistics page hold the underlying runs if you want to check the working, the history of the show covers the same years in prose, 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.