A pay gap between The View's highest and lowest-paid co-hosts reveals that Whoopi Goldberg pulls in a mid-seven-figure salary while Alyssa Farah Griffin reportedly earns a mid-six-figure sum, a disparity that sits awkwardly beside Goldberg's public complaints about money.
Salary figures first reported by Page Six and detailed by the Daily Mail show that Goldberg, the 70-year-old EGOT winner and lead moderator, commands the top paycheck on ABC's long-running daytime talk show. Farah Griffin, the panel's conservative voice and a former Trump White House staffer, sits at the bottom of the pay scale. The gap between "mid-seven-figure" and "mid-six-figure" could mean Goldberg earns roughly ten times what her youngest colleague takes home.
The numbers land at a strong moment for the show. The View just posted its most-watched second quarter in six years, averaging 2.6 million viewers. An interview with Vice President JD Vance last month drew 3.331 million, the biggest audience since the post-election episode in November 2024. The show is in its 29th season. Ratings are up, ad revenue presumably follows, and yet the woman ABC installed as its token right-of-center panelist appears to earn a sliver of what the moderator collects.
Goldberg's salary becomes harder to square with her own public statements. Last year, she compared her financial situation to that of everyday Americans struggling with costs.
"I appreciate that people are having a hard time, me too!"
She followed that up in an interview with Entertainment Tonight, where she suggested retirement was out of the question.
"Who can afford to do that? If you don't marry well, you've gotta keep working!"
On another occasion, she put it more bluntly: "I work for a living. If I had all the money in the world, I would not be here."
Those remarks might land differently if Goldberg were a schoolteacher or a nurse. She is one of only 28 entertainers in history to hold EGOT status, an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony. Her real estate portfolio includes an eight-bedroom mansion in New Jersey purchased in 2009 for $2.8 million and a vacation home in Sardinia, Italy. She previously owned a property in Pacific Palisades that she sold in 2018 for $8.8 million.
A mid-seven-figure annual salary, a multimillion-dollar real estate footprint, and a career spanning decades of Hollywood and television work, and the public message is "me too" to Americans worried about groceries. The disconnect speaks for itself.
Farah Griffin's alleged mid-six-figure salary raises a different question. She joined The View as the panel's conservative counterweight, a role that, by design, generates friction and keeps segments interesting. In a media landscape where conflict drives ratings, the person ABC pays the least may be the one doing the most to earn the audience's attention.
She has not been shy about that role. Farah Griffin has publicly confronted her co-hosts on air over their political positions, creating the kind of moments that clip well and travel across social media. Whether ABC values that work at the contract table is another matter.
The salary figures for the remaining co-hosts, Joy Behar, Sara Haines, Sunny Hostin, and Ana Navarro, were not disclosed. Behar, an original co-host who has appeared on 27 of the show's 29 seasons, left the show in 2013 during a major cast shakeup and returned in 2015. She earns less than Goldberg, but her exact figure remains unknown. Behar herself has generated no shortage of headlines; she once claimed on air that "we're all going to die" during a clash with co-hosts over a Trump administration policy.
The current salary gap echoes a pattern that former co-hosts have described publicly. Sherri Shepherd, who sat on the panel from 2007 to 2014, told Vulture that she was originally offered $400,000 to join the show and eventually worked her way up to $1 million. Shepherd also said that Rosie O'Donnell earned $2 million per season during her time on the program.
Those figures suggest a clear hierarchy: the bigger the name, the bigger the check. Goldberg's status as an Oscar-winning actress and cultural figure gives her leverage that a political commentator like Farah Griffin simply does not have, regardless of how much editorial energy each brings to the table. ABC has not publicly responded to the salary reports. The Daily Mail said it contacted both the network and Goldberg for comment, but no responses were included in the reporting.
The show itself has faced scrutiny beyond pay. The FCC opened a probe into whether The View's programming ran afoul of equal-time rules, and ABC invoked a First Amendment shield in response. Separately, a controversy erupted after a co-host labeled a political candidate an antisemite on air, prompting a confrontation between a candidate's aide and ABC executives.
None of those episodes dented the ratings. The Vance interview alone pulled 3.331 million viewers, and the show's second-quarter average of 2.6 million marks a six-year high. The View remains a profit center for ABC. The question is how that profit gets divided, and whether the co-host hired specifically to offer a different viewpoint deserves more than table scraps.
When a multimillionaire tells working Americans "me too" from behind a mid-seven-figure salary and a vacation home in Sardinia, the problem isn't the paycheck, it's the pretense.