Lee Majors Net Worth 2026: The $15M Bionic Fortune

Lee Majors‘s net worth is estimated at $15 million as of November 2026. The figure comes from a career that television has rarely matched: two hit series built entirely around him, a per-episode salary that made him one of the best-paid actors on American television in the 1970s, a second fortune as the singing stuntman of The Fall Guy, and a decision in 1986 to walk away from a reported $24 million rather than film a sixth season. He is 87, still working, and still collecting residuals from shows that have never really left the air.

Early Life and Background

Lee Majors was born Harvey Lee Yeary on April 23, 1939, in Wyandotte, Michigan, a Detroit suburb on the Detroit River. His start in life was marked by loss on a scale that would have sunk plenty of people. His father, Carl Yeary, died in a work accident before Lee was born. His mother, Alice Yeary, died in a car accident when Lee was about a year old. He never knew either parent.

He was taken in by his aunt and uncle, who raised him in Middlesboro, Kentucky, a small coal town in the Appalachian foothills near the Tennessee border. Middlesboro in the 1940s and 1950s was a working-class town, and the Yeary household was not a wealthy one. Majors has spoken in interviews about a childhood built around school, church, and sport rather than money, and the plain-spoken manner that later became his screen trademark traces directly to those Kentucky years. He took his stage surname from his football coach at Middlesboro High School — the name “Majors” was a nod to the coach, and it stuck for the next six decades.

Sport was his first way out. He was a strong high school football player, fast and physical, and the game gave him something the classroom never quite did: a visible path to a bigger life. That path ran through a football scholarship, and for a time it looked as if athletics, not acting, would be his profession. The injury that ended that plan is one of the great sliding-doors moments in television history — without a damaged back, there is no Steve Austin, no Colt Seavers, and no $15 million fortune built on two of the most durable series of the broadcast era.

Education

Majors attended Middlesboro High School in Kentucky, where he played football well enough to earn a scholarship to Indiana University. He enrolled at Indiana, but his time there was short. He transferred to Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Kentucky, where he continued to play football and studied history and physical education.

At Eastern Kentucky, a back injury during a football game ended his playing career. The injury closed the door on professional football and forced a rethink. He finished his studies and, in 1964, headed for Los Angeles with acting in mind — a move that looks reckless on paper and turned out to be the best decision of his life. He had no industry connections and no money to fall back on. What he had was a look the camera liked and a willingness to take any work that kept him in the city.

He studied acting after arriving in California, picking up small parts while he learned the craft. The education that mattered most to his earnings, though, came on sets: three years on a western, three years on a legal drama, and then the kind of on-the-job training only a hit series provides. By the time The Six Million Dollar Man arrived, he had a decade of professional acting behind him.

Career Journey

Majors’ first screen work came in 1964, the year he arrived in Los Angeles. His earliest credits were small film parts, including an uncredited appearance in the William Castle thriller Strait-Jacket (1964) starring Joan Crawford. It was the sort of anonymous day-player work that pays rent and teaches a newcomer how a set runs — and it was also the year his luck changed. He was spotted and signed, and within a year he had the role that made him a working television actor.

The Big Valley ran on ABC from 1965 to 1969, and Majors played Heath Barkley, the illegitimate son of the Barkley family patriarch, across 112 episodes. The cast was heavyweight — Barbara Stanwyck as Victoria Barkley, Linda Evans as Audra — and the show gave Majors four seasons of steady network money and a national audience. Heath Barkley was the role that taught him to carry a series: tough, quiet, and physical, a template he would refine for the next twenty years. The show also gave him his first taste of merchandising and fan-mail fame, though the money in those days was a fraction of what was coming.

After The Big Valley ended, Majors worked steadily rather than spectacularly. He appeared in films including Will Penny (1968) with Charlton Heston and the western The Ballad of Andy Crocker (1969), and he took guest roles across the episodic television of the era. From 1971 to 1974 he was a regular on Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law, playing Jess Brandon opposite Arthur Hill. The legal drama ran three seasons and kept him visible on ABC — the same network that would hand him the role of his life in 1973.

That role arrived as a television movie. The Six Million Dollar Man aired on ABC in March 1973, with Majors as Colonel Steve Austin, a former astronaut rebuilt with bionic limbs after a catastrophic test-flight crash. The movie drew strong ratings, two follow-up movies followed the same year, and in January 1974 ABC turned it into a weekly series. It ran for five seasons and 99 episodes, plus the original movies and three reunion telefilms in 1987, 1989 and 1994. Majors also crossed over as Steve Austin into The Bionic Woman, the spin-off starring Lindsay Wagner, which extended the character’s reach and his paycheck.

When the series ended in 1978, Majors did not fade. He returned to ABC in 1981 with The Fall Guy, playing Colt Seavers, a Hollywood stuntman who moonlighted as a bounty hunter. The show ran five seasons and 112 episodes, ending in 1986, and it gave him a second signature role — plus a singing career of sorts, since he performed the show’s theme song, “The Unknown Stuntman.” He headlined the short-lived series Raven in 1992, took film roles through the 1990s and 2000s, and built a long second act as a guest star: Will & Grace, Cold Case, According to Jim, Grey’s Anatomy, Human Target and Magnum P.I. among them. In 2016 he joined Ash vs Evil Dead as Brock Williams, the father of Bruce Campbell’s Ash, a part that introduced him to a new generation of genre fans and earned him a Saturn Award nomination.

His most recent screen moment came in 2024, when he made a cameo in the film version of The Fall Guy starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt — a passing-of-the-torch appearance that played as a tribute to the series he had carried forty years earlier. Listings for 2026 credit him with the western Florida Wild and narration of the documentary River of Angels, about the 2025 Kerr County flood in Texas. At 87, he has been acting for more than sixty years, and the work has never fully stopped.

Rise to Fame

The rise was not overnight; it was a ten-year climb that ended in a sprint. The Big Valley made him a familiar face in American living rooms, Owen Marshall kept him employed and credible, and then The Six Million Dollar Man made him a global star in a single season. The show aired in more than 70 countries, according to The Famous People, and in some markets the dubbed Steve Austin was bigger than the American original. The slow-motion bionic run, the electronic sound effect, the “we can rebuild him” opening narration — all of it became pop-culture shorthand within months.

The fame had a commercial engine behind it. Kenner’s Six Million Dollar Man action figures were among the best-selling toys of the mid-1970s, and the character’s face appeared on lunchboxes, posters, puzzles and trading cards. Majors was not merely the star of a hit show; he was the face of a merchandising wave, and the licensing income that came with it was the part of his fortune that most net-worth roundups undercount. The show’s premise also gave him a nickname that followed him for life: the Six Million Dollar Man himself.

There is a neat symmetry in the numbers. The show’s title put a $6 million price on rebuilding Steve Austin, and Majors himself has said that roughly $6 million was the fortune he had made from the series by the time it ended — a remark he made in an interview with the fan site leemajors.co.uk. Adjusted for inflation, that $6 million from the 1970s is worth roughly $41 million in 2026 money, which puts the scale of his peak earnings in perspective: the fortune he built in his thirties and forties was far larger in real terms than the $15 million he is estimated to hold today, after four marriages, decades of living costs, and the long slow spend-down that follows a performer’s peak years.

The second wave of fame arrived with The Fall Guy. Colt Seavers was a different kind of hero — a working stuntman, not a superhuman — and the show’s lighter tone and its theme song, sung by Majors himself, made it a hit in its own right. Two series, ten seasons between them, both built around one man: that is the foundation of the fortune, and it is also why his net worth has proved so durable. Few actors get one franchise-defining role. Majors got two.

Main Sources of Income

Lee Majors’ money comes from five streams, and the balance between them has shifted with each decade of his career. The first and largest is television salaries: four seasons of The Big Valley, three of Owen Marshall, five of The Six Million Dollar Man and five of The Fall Guy — seventeen seasons as a series regular on network television, most of them as the lead. In the 1970s, a lead actor on a hit ABC series was among the best-paid performers in the country, and Majors held that position twice.

The second stream is residuals and syndication. Both of his signature series have been in reruns more or less continuously since they ended: broadcast syndication in the 1980s and 1990s, cable reruns, DVD box sets, and now streaming. The Six Million Dollar Man and The Fall Guy still air on retro-television channels, and every rerun cycle generates residual payments to the cast under Screen Actors Guild rules. The per-payment amounts are modest — residuals on decades-old episodes are a fraction of the original fee — but across two series, hundreds of episodes and nearly fifty years, they add up to a meaningful annuity. This is the income stream that keeps his fortune from shrinking the way a retired actor’s normally would.

The third stream is film and guest work. Majors never stopped taking roles: films through the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, a steady run of guest spots on hit series, voice work, and the 2016 Ash vs Evil Dead run. None of these paid anything like his series salaries, but they kept cash coming in during the years between his two big shows and long after the second one ended.

The fourth stream is merchandising and licensing. The Six Million Dollar Man toy line was a phenomenon — Kenner’s action figures, vehicles and playsets sold in the millions — and Majors’ likeness was the product. Licensing royalties from that era were far less generous to actors than modern deals are, and the exact split has never been disclosed, but the merchandise kept his name in front of a generation of children who grew up to watch the reruns. The 2024 Fall Guy film gave the licensing stream a fresh jolt: a new audience met Colt Seavers, and the original series found new viewers on streaming.

The fifth stream is personal appearances and voice work. Majors appears at fan conventions and nostalgia events, where autograph and appearance fees for a star of his stature run into four figures per day, and he has done voice work for animation and video games, including the bionic-themed roles that trade directly on his most famous character. None of this is fortune-scale money on its own. Together, the five streams explain how a man whose peak paydays came in the 1970s still holds an estimated $15 million in 2026.

Salary and Earnings

The salary numbers attached to Lee Majors are the most-quoted — and the least documented — part of his financial story. No studio payroll sheet for either series has ever been published, so every figure below is a reported figure, not a verified one. That distinction matters, and it is why the honest version of this section is shorter than the one on the list sites that state these numbers as fact.

For The Six Million Dollar Man, multiple secondary sources report that Majors earned about $50,000 per episode at the height of the series. The figure appears in fan-site biographies and net-worth roundups alike, and it is consistent with what a top ABC lead earned in the mid-1970s. Across 99 episodes, that rate implies roughly $5 million in episodic pay alone — before the three original TV movies, the reunion films, the Bionic Woman crossovers, and the merchandising. Adjusted for inflation, $50,000 per episode in 1976 is worth roughly $280,000 per episode in 2026 money. The number is plausible; it is not proven. Treat it as the best available estimate, not a fact from a contract.

For The Fall Guy, secondary sources report a higher rate of around $75,000 per episode by the early 1980s. That figure is thinner — it circulates mainly on net-worth list sites without a named primary source — so it should be read with more caution than the Six Million Dollar Man figure. What is certain is that his pay rose between the two series, as it did for every successful lead who returned to network television after a hit. Across 112 episodes, even a conservative estimate puts his Fall Guy episodic earnings in the several-million-dollar range.

The most revealing salary story in his career is not what he earned but what he refused. In an interview with CBR, Majors said that after five seasons of The Fall Guy he was burned out and turned down a sixth season — walking away from a reported $24 million offer. “I rejected $24 million — and my representative and business manager have now been sobbing ever since,” he told CBR, in remarks quoted by BusinessINC. The figure is his own account, not a studio document, but it is the clearest window into the scale of money on the table in 1986: a sixth season of a hit series was worth roughly $24 million to its star, and he left it there. He has said he needed the break — five years of stunt-heavy production had left him exhausted — and the decision is the single most expensive one of his career.

Put the peak years together and the shape of the fortune is clear. Between 1974 and 1986, Majors earned the great majority of the money he would ever make: two long-running leads, rising per-episode rates, and a merchandising wave. His own remark that he had made about $6 million from The Six Million Dollar Man fits that picture. The fortune then spent the next forty years being drawn down by living costs, four marriages and two divorces with property settlements, and the simple fact that guest spots and residuals pay a fraction of a lead salary. The $15 million estimate for 2026 is not the peak of his wealth. It is what remains of it — and what remains is still a substantial sum for a man whose last series-regular payday came in 1986.

One more number belongs here because it explains the gap between peak and present. The $6 million he made from The Six Million Dollar Man in the 1970s would be worth about $41 million in 2026 dollars. His peak-era fortune, in today’s money, was nearly three times his current estimated net worth. That is not a story of failure. It is the normal arithmetic of a long life lived largely out of the spotlight: money earned young, spent over decades, and never replaced at the same rate.

Businesses and Investments

Lee Majors was never a businessman in the way some of his contemporaries were. There is no production company empire, no restaurant chain, no tequila brand, no real-estate portfolio assembled deal by deal in the press. His career was built on acting, and his money was made the old-fashioned way for a television star: salary, residuals, and a famous face.

That said, he did take a producer’s role on some of his own projects, including the later Six Million Dollar Man reunion telefilms, which gave him a share of the backend on productions he starred in. Producing credits on reunion movies are modest money next to a series salary, but they show a performer who understood that owning a piece of the work beats renting out the face. He also directed episodes of The Fall Guy, adding a director’s fee to his acting pay on his own show — a common arrangement for a star of his standing, and one more small stream feeding the total.

On investments, the public record is thin, and the honest thing is to say so. No property portfolio, stock holding or business stake of his has ever been reported in the business press, and no filing ties him to a company. The low-quality net-worth sites that credit him with “business ventures” and a “production company” as current income sources offer no names, no dates and no figures — those claims should be treated as filler, not fact. What the record does support is a conservative financial life: a working actor who earned large sums young, lived through two expensive divorces, and kept working rather than betting the fortune on ventures outside his field.

The one investment that is documented is the least financial and the most human: his time. After The Fall Guy ended, he stepped back from the grind of series television for a decade, living in Florida and choosing guest work over another weekly commitment. He traded income for rest, and the $24 million he turned down is the price tag on that trade. It is the opposite of a business decision, and it is the decision that defines his financial story more than any deal he ever signed.

Brand Deals and Sponsorships

Majors’ career predates the modern endorsement economy, and his brand-deal record reflects that. In the 1970s, a television star’s commercial work was mostly print and television advertising rather than the social-media sponsorships of today, and Majors’ most valuable commercial asset was never a brand contract — it was his own likeness, licensed through the Six Million Dollar Man merchandise line. Kenner’s toys, the lunchboxes, the posters: those were the endorsements that paid, and they paid through royalties rather than a flat fee.

He appeared in commercials during and after his peak years, as most working television actors did, but no major long-term brand ambassadorship is documented in the press, and no endorsement fee of his has ever been reported. The net-worth sites that list “endorsements” among his income sources do so without naming a single brand, which is a tell: where a real deal exists, somebody usually names it. Readers should treat endorsement income as a minor, unquantified part of his fortune rather than a pillar of it.

The closest thing to a modern brand deal in his later career is the convention circuit, where his name and image are the product. Appearance fees, autograph sales and photo sessions at fan events are a real income stream for legacy television stars, and Majors’ two iconic roles make him a draw. It is steady, low-volume money — a few thousand dollars per event rather than a contract — and it keeps him connected to the audience that built his fortune in the first place.

Houses, Cars and Other Assets

The most famous house in Lee Majors’ life is one he gave away. During his marriage to Farrah Fawcett, the couple lived in a French-style house in Bel Air, Los Angeles, a home Fawcett had decorated extensively. When the marriage ended, the house was the main point of contention. Majors has said he told his lawyers to give it to her — he had bought it, but he wanted to move on and start again. The house was valued at around £1.2 million at the time, with Fawcett’s decoration work reported to have cost a further £1.7 million, according to the interview published on leemajors.co.uk. Walking away from a Bel Air property to end a divorce quickly is the kind of decision that shows up years later in a net-worth figure.

After The Fall Guy ended, Majors moved to Florida, stepping out of Los Angeles and into a quieter life for roughly a decade. He later settled in Houston, Texas, with his wife Faith, where he has lived in recent years according to Wealthy Persons and other biographical roundups. Houston suits the shape of his later life: far from the studio system, close to family, and a long way from the Bel Air years. No current property listing or purchase price for his Texas home has been reported in the press, and no reliable source puts a value on it — so we do not invent one.

One low-quality roundup credits him with a 3,000-square-foot, five-bedroom Malibu home worth $19.25 million. That claim appears on a single site, Wealthy Persons, without a property record, a listing or an address, and it sits next to a net-worth figure that disagrees with the consensus. A $19.25 million house would by itself exceed his entire estimated net worth, which is a useful check: the claim fails on its own arithmetic, and we do not repeat it as fact. His real-estate story, as far as the record shows, is a Bel Air house surrendered in a divorce, a Florida retreat, and a Texas home — not a portfolio.

On cars, the record is similarly quiet. Majors is not known as a collector, and no classic-car purchase or sale of his has been reported. The vehicles most associated with him are fictional ones: the GMC pickup Colt Seavers drove on The Fall Guy, which became an icon in its own right and still draws collectors at auction — though those auctions benefit the show’s legacy, not Majors’ bank account. His own assets, as best the public record shows, are his homes, his residuals, and the value of a name that still sells tickets at fan conventions.

Awards and Achievements

Lee Majors’ trophy shelf is thinner than his fame would suggest, and that gap is itself part of his story. He was a popular star rather than a critics’ darling, and the awards system of 1970s television rewarded a different kind of performance than the one he gave. His most significant recognition came in 1977, when he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Television Series – Drama for The Six Million Dollar Man. He did not win, but the nomination put him in the same conversation as the dramatic leads of the era, and it remains the highest-profile acting nomination of his career.

He won a TV Land Award for Superest Super Hero for The Six Million Dollar Man, a fan-voted nostalgia honor that captures his legacy better than any industry prize: the award was for the character, not the performance, and the character is what endures. Decades later, in 2016, he was nominated for a Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor on Television for his role as Brock Williams in Ash vs Evil Dead — a nomination that arrived forty years after his Golden Globe nod and proved that a new generation of genre voters knew exactly who he was.

He was also honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6933 Hollywood Boulevard, a permanent marker of a career that the industry formally recognized even when the awards voters passed him by. The star sits in the television category, which is fitting: whatever else he did in film, Majors’ legacy is a television one, built in living rooms rather than cinemas.

The achievements that matter most to his net worth are not trophies but numbers: 112 episodes of The Big Valley, 99 episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man, 112 episodes of The Fall Guy, a series broadcast in more than 70 countries, and a career that has run continuously from 1964 to 2026. Those are the figures that explain $15 million far better than any award could.

Net Worth Growth Over the Years

Lee Majors’ fortune follows the classic arc of a television star who peaked early and lived long: a steep climb in the 1970s, a second peak in the 1980s, then a long, slow plateau as the big salaries stopped and the residuals took over. The table below is our reconstruction from the reported figures in this article — the early years are estimates based on his known salaries, and the later years track the published consensus.

Two things stand out in that table. The first is how early the money was made: by 1978, at 39 years old, he had already earned the bulk of what would become his lifetime fortune. The second is how flat the line has been since: roughly $15 million for more than a decade, with the estimate barely moving. That flatness is the signature of a fortune built on residuals rather than new income — the money coming in roughly matches the money going out, and the total holds steady.

It is also worth naming the figure that does not belong in the table. Several low-quality list sites publish a growth series that climbs from $20 million in 2022 to $28 million in 2026, crediting “business ventures” and a “production company” that no other source can name. Those numbers contradict every established tracker, they come with no sourcing, and they would require Majors to have nearly doubled his fortune in his eighties without a hit series, a sale or a deal on the record. We treat them as unreliable and do not use them. The honest growth story is the flat one: a fortune made young, held carefully, and still worth $15 million at 87.

For readers comparing him with other television action stars of his era, the peer picture is instructive. Chuck Norris, whose long-running Walker, Texas Ranger followed a similar path, is carried at about $70 million by Celebrity Net Worth — a larger fortune built on a longer second act in film and a famous exercise-equipment endorsement. William Shatner, another actor defined by a single iconic television role, sits near $100 million on the same tracker, helped by a long career as a pitchman and author. David Hasselhoff, whose Knight Rider and Baywatch years overlapped with Majors’ second act, is listed at about $10 million — a reminder that two hit series do not guarantee a fortune, and that Majors’ $15 million sits comfortably in the middle of his generation’s range. All four figures are estimates from the same source, and all four are subject to the same uncertainty as Majors’ own.

Social Media Presence

Lee Majors keeps a minimal footprint online, which is unsurprising for an actor who became famous twenty years before the internet existed. Biographical roundups describe him as not active on social media in the conventional sense — no verified, regularly updated personal accounts on the major platforms, and no influencer-style presence. Fan accounts and tribute pages carry his name across Instagram, Facebook and X, but most are run by admirers rather than by Majors himself, and follower counts on those pages say more about nostalgia for the 1970s than about his current activity.

What does surface online is the occasional personal post that gets picked up by the press. In April 2025, a birthday message marking his 86th year circulated widely — “the calendar might say 86, I like to think of it more as 68 with a few bonus chapters,” he joked, in remarks quoted by Hello Magazine — and fans filled the replies with the same affection they have shown him for fifty years. It was a reminder that his audience never went away; it simply moved from the living room to the timeline.

For his net worth, the absence of a social-media operation is a small but real factor. A modern television star with 87 years of life and two iconic roles could monetize a following in the millions; Majors has never built one, and the endorsement and sponsorship income that flows to younger celebrities does not flow to him. His money comes from the work itself — the episodes, the reruns, the residuals — rather than from the audience he could assemble online. That is a choice, and it is consistent with everything else about his later career: he works when he wants to, lives where he wants to, and leaves the self-promotion to others.

Personal Life

Majors has been married four times, and the arc of those marriages maps closely onto the arc of his career. His first marriage, to Kathy Robinson, began in 1961 when he was 22 and still in Kentucky, and ended in divorce in 1964, the year he moved to Los Angeles. They had one son, Lee Majors II, who was born during the marriage and has worked in the entertainment industry himself.

His second marriage is the famous one. He met Farrah Fawcett in 1968, when she was a young unknown from Texas and he was already a working actor; they married on July 28, 1973, at the Hotel Bel-Air, the same year The Six Million Dollar Man launched. For a few years they were one of the most photographed couples in America — he the bionic man, she the rising star of Charlie’s Angels. The marriage strained under two careers pulling in opposite directions and long separations, and they separated in 1979. Fawcett announced the split while promoting her film Sunburn, and the divorce was finalized in 1982. They had no children together. Majors has said the divorce broke his heart and that he believed until late in the process that they might reconcile; he also said he gave her the Bel Air house to end the dispute and move on. Fawcett went on to a long relationship with Ryan O’Neal, and when she died in June 2009 at 62, her will left $100,000 to Majors — a final gesture that surprised many and that neither family has ever publicly explained.

His third marriage, to former Playboy model Karen Velez, ran from 1988 to 1994 and produced three children: Nikki, and twins Dane and Trey. The marriage ended amicably, and Majors has remained close to his children from it. His fourth marriage, to model and actress Faith Noelle Cross, began in November 2002 and is his longest — more than two decades, and the one he credits with bringing stability to his life. They live in Houston, Texas, far from the Hollywood machinery that defined his first three marriages.

He has four children in total — Lee Jr. from his first marriage and Nikki, Dane and Trey from his third — and the family picture in his eighties is a settled one. In 2003 he underwent heart bypass surgery, a health event he has discussed openly and recovered from fully. He has spoken about aging with humor rather than complaint: 68 with a few bonus chapters, as he put it on his 86th birthday. The man who played a rebuilt superhuman has grown old the ordinary way, and he seems content with the exchange.

Sources & Reporting

Frequently Asked Questions

Published on November 5, 2026. Last reviewed November 2026. Found an error? See our corrections policy.