If you really think about it, The Traitors puts its cast through a lot. In their physical challenges, the cast members are forced to go trekking through muddy forests and diving into murky Scottish lochs… and that’s on top of all the lying and backstabbing that goes on between Traitors and Faithfuls. It’s kind of like the very worst parts of high school gym class turned up to the millionth degree. So, after going through all that, you’d think that the winner (or winners) of the season get a hefty prize at the end. Well, not so much.
I mean, they definitely don’t get nothing. But the prize money for The Traitors is actually not quite as large a sum as you might think, especially when you consider the fact they might have to share it among multiple winners.
There’s a lot about The Traitors that isn’t quite as glamorous as you might think for a show that has the aesthetics of an international murder mystery party full of fancy socialites. For example, the fancy castle where they film most of the show? Host Alan Cumming revealed that they don’t actually sleep there, despite what the show will have you believe.
“None of us stayed in the castle. None of us,” Alan told The Daily Beast. “They all stayed in the airport hotel in the Inverness airport. How glamorous — you come to Scotland, and you stay in the Inverness airport hotel.”
So not only does The Traitors cast have to go through the whole competition and everything it entails, but they have to sleep in an airport hotel while doing it. I feel like they deserve a huge prize after all that. So let’s get into how much The Traitors winners actually get.
How Much Does The Traitors Winner Get?
Before we dig into the prize money, let’s recap how the game works. The cast is divided into groups of Traitors and Faithfuls, and the Faithfuls try to weed out the Traitors before they “murder” everybody. If the Faithfuls make it to the finale, they split the prize money among themselves. But if a Traitor makes it to the end, they get the whole pot to themselves.
What ends up happening by the end is even if all the Traitors have been rooted out, some Faithfuls start to get a little greedy and try to cut other Faithfuls out of the prize money. That’s how it went down at the end of season 2 of The Traitors, when CT Tamburello and Trishelle Cannatella voted MJ Javid out — even though she was a Faithful, too — and got to split the prize money just between the two of them.
So how much is that prize money? Well, it depends. There’s the opportunity to win up to $250,000, but the cast needs to earn it. Each physical challenge brings the opportunity to add money to the pot, so the grand sum is all dependent upon how well the cast does throughout the season. In season 1, winner Cirie Fields took home the full $250,000 as the sole Traitor remaining. In Season 2, CT and Trishelle split their prize of $208,100.
Going into the finale, the season 3 prize money was substantially lower than the pot in previous seasons: $166,800. Like I said, it seems like this cast has earned a little bit more.
