How Much Money Did Mad Men’s Don Draper Make?

The best part of watching a period-piece TV show is pulling out the old inflation calculator anytime someone mentions money. Take for instance that scene in “Mad Men” season 4 where Peggy hustles $400 out of Roger: it’s a great Peggy moment regardless, but it gets better when you realize she just haggled her way into a surprise $4,000 bonus, and even crazier when you realize that Roger casually carries $4k cash with him wherever he goes. 

Advertisement

When it comes to being up front about money, “Mad Men” is much better than most, because a lot of TV shows (contemporary or otherwise) want to keep their characters vaguely, relatably middle-class. So for a scene where someone’s offered a new salary, shows will often only give us the character’s reaction to the number to work with, not the number itself. “How I Met Your Mother,” for instance, will have the gang talk excitedly about getting “a big fat check,” or they’ll have Barney talk about spending several “craploads” a year on suits. The writers for “HIMYM” don’t want to focus on class, so these details are brushed aside. 

But “Mad Men” is all about class. It’s a show about rich people getting richer; the show wants you to have a decent understanding of how loaded Don is at any point, for further emphasis on how wealth is wasted on the rich. The result is that, for those who like to keep track of this stuff, “Mad Men” offers a relatively thorough accounting of Don’s finances throughout the ’60s. The decade for Don may have been filled with ups and downs, but that number in his bank account only ever went up. (Well, divorces notwithstanding.)

Advertisement

In season 1, Don’s salary is rumored (by a jealous Pete Campbell) to be about $30,000 a year, which would come out to a $325,000 in 2025. Assuming that Pete was exaggerating the number a bit out of anger, let’s bring this down to $300k to be safe. That’s enough to enjoy the comfortable life we see from him: he’s got a wife and kids in a nice house in Ossining, a nice car, a hidden stash of cash, and plenty of spare change for his many affairs. It’s worth noting, however, that this is not quite “f**k you” money. He can’t afford to make some of the more extravagant decisions of his in later seasons. 

Advertisement

At the end of season 2, we see a weekly paycheck of Don’s where he’s making $947 a week, which comes out to an annual salary of around $500k in today’s money. That sounds great, but it gets better: after Roger’s heart attacks in season 1, Don is made a partner of the firm and given a 12% stake. So by season 2, Don’s got a net worth of several million dollars on top of his $500k salary. That money turns into cash when PPL buys out the company in season 2, effectively making Don a multi-millionaire (in 1960s money) overnight. 

At the end of season 3, when Don and the others start their new advertising company, Don is easily able to use his money to cover his share of the start-up costs. He’s also easily able to spare $50k for Pete’s share, which tells you a lot about how rich he is at this point. Making things more comfortable for Don is that his wife Betty comes from wealth, and because she leaves for another rich guy, she’s uninterested in taking any money from him in the divorce. 

Advertisement

So, by season 4, Don is already rich beyond most of our wildest dreams, and we’re still only in 1965 at this point. (The show ends in 1971.) As his new company grows, his net worth balloons, and when the company is bought by McCann in season 7, he receives what fans have estimated to be about $3,250,000 upfront, or $1.6-$1.7 million after taxes. (Equivalent to $14 million in 2025.)

Although most viewers understood that Don was rich, it’s easy in the later seasons to be surprised by exactly how rich he’s gotten. Not only has he raked in major one-time deals thanks to multiple business mergers throughout the show, but his impressive season 2 salary has certainly continued to rise on top of that. By season 7, Don is so rich that even if he skips work for weeks to go on a drunken bender across the country, giving away his expensive car on a whim halfway through, he’s still at zero risk of ever being poor. 

Advertisement

The biggest indicator of just how much Don has “made it” throughout the show is in his divorce settlement with Megan (Jessica Paré), where he writes her a check for $1 million just to get the divorce over with. Megan herself struggles to believe he’s serious, and so did the fans: $1 million is around $8 million in today’s money. We knew Don could cover that amount, but could he afford the risk of giving away that much money that quickly? Turns out, yes: this was a few episodes after the company was sold to McCann, so Don would still have at least $600,000 from that merger left over. 

What’s worth remembering is that Don Draper is considered a marketing genius on this show, especially in the earlier seasons. His season 1 salary (of $300k in today’s money) is significantly higher than the average creative director for an advertising firm at the time, because Don Draper is simply that cool and talented. Financially speaking, Don is a uniquely successful person throughout the entirety of the show; by season 7, he can afford to be as reckless with his cash as he wants. By the time we reached the series finale, Don could buy anything in the world except his peace of mind. 

Advertisement