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Casting Networks vs Backstage vs Actors Access
Three boards, three pictures of one industry. What 55,398 listings show about pay disclosure, deadlines, union labels and the kind of work each one carries.
Casting Networks, Backstage, Actors Access
Check all three boards on the same Tuesday and you come away with three different accounts of what the industry is doing this week. Not because the work is different. Because the forms are.
We collected 55,398 casting calls between May 17 and August 30, 2026: 22,018 from Actors Access, 19,676 from Casting Networks, 13,704 from Backstage, at a median of 585 new roles a day. The differences between them are structural, they are consistent, and once you know them the boards stop competing in your head and start dividing the labor.
Volume is the least useful number
Every board counts roles. One production casting a lead, two supporting parts and four day players is one project and seven listings. So the totals are real and they are not what people assume they are.
| Platform | Roles per project, mean | Roles per project, median |
|---|---|---|
| Actors Access | 5.93 | 4 |
| Casting Networks | 3.91 | 2 |
| Backstage | 2.62 | 3 |
Across the corpus, a headline count of roles overstates the number of distinct productions by roughly four times. That is not a criticism of anyone's arithmetic. It is a reason not to feel behind when a board says four hundred new roles today, and a reason to stop comparing boards by total volume, since Actors Access posts more roles per project than Backstage does by more than double.
Pay: one board asks, one board mostly does not
of Casting Networks listings state a pay figure
of Actors Access listings state no pay figure at all
Same market, opposite norms. Casting Networks makes the rate hard to skip, Actors Access lets it live on the detail page or nowhere. If you sort by money, you are effectively working one board and calling it three.
The useful conclusion is not that one platform is more honest. It is that a pay filter behaves completely differently depending on which board it is pointed at, and applying the same rule across all three quietly deletes most of the largest one.
Deadlines: one board publishes them, two do not
of Casting Networks listings carry a structured deadline
Actors Access publishes zero. Backstage publishes zero. Free text mentions a closing date on under 1% of listings on either. This is the single biggest workflow difference between the three, and it decides how you have to work each one.
On Casting Networks you can triage. The board tells you what closes tonight and what is open until Friday, so a listing can wait without the wait being a gamble. On the other two, nothing on the card distinguishes a role that closed an hour ago from one that stays open for a week. The only defense against that is frequency, which is a much more expensive defense.
Union status: two publish it, one leaves it blank
| Platform | Union | Non-union |
|---|---|---|
| Casting Networks | 18.7% | 80.2% |
| Actors Access | 28.1% | 70.6% |
| Backstage | Field blank on 86.4% of listings |
Backstage does not put union status on the listing card. That is a fact about the card and not about the work, and it should not be read as a claim that its listings skew either way. Across the two boards that do publish it, 77.8% of roles are non-union.
The boards do not show you the same kind of job
This is the difference that surprises people most, because it is invisible until you count. Casting Networks classifies 60.6% of its roles as principal tier and 35.7% as background and extra work: 5,230 background, 728 featured background, 818 stand-in, 170 photo double. Backstage, in its own role field, reads Lead on 49.6% and background or extra on 4.0%. Actors Access stores no role type at all.
So an actor who works one board and forms an impression of the market is forming it from a filtered sample. Spend a month on Casting Networks and background work looks like a third of the industry. Spend the same month on Backstage and it looks like a rounding error. Neither board is lying. They are indexing different things.
What the project mix on Actors Access is telling you
Actors Access does classify projects, and its distribution across all 22,018 listings is the most interesting single table in the corpus.
| Project type | Listings |
|---|---|
| Feature Film | 3,810 |
| Short | 3,669 |
| Vertical Short Form | 3,660 |
| Theatre | 2,774 |
| Commercial | 1,349 |
| Episodic | 1,331 |
| Student Film | 1,195 |
of Actors Access listings are vertical short form microdrama
Vertical short form is now essentially tied with feature film and short film for the top of that board, and it arrived inside a single quarter. Whatever anyone thinks of the format, it is not a curiosity any more. It is one role in six on the largest board we measured, and an actor who filters it out is filtering out a sixth of the market.
The fields only one board has
Casting Networks is the only platform in the corpus with an ethnicity field. Of the 15,614 listings that populate it, 3,404 say Any Ethnic Appearance and 5,101 list every appearance available, which is functionally the same answer typed a different way. The remaining 7,109 name a specific set.
Gender is stated more widely: 92.1% on Casting Networks, 71.8% on Backstage, 71.2% on Actors Access. If you rely on demographic fields to decide what to submit to, you are relying on one board considerably more than you probably realize.
No board wins
Casting Networks is the most machine-readable of the three: it names the rate, publishes the deadline, labels the union status, and covers background work in volume. Actors Access is the largest, posts the most roles per project, and is where the format shift is showing up first. Backstage skews toward leads on its own labelling and is the thinnest on structured metadata, which makes it the one you cannot triage and have to read.
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