McKenna Grace Net Worth 2026: The $2–4M Young-Star Fortune

McKenna Grace‘s net worth is estimated at $2 million to $4 million as of November 2026. The best-anchored number in the public record is $2 million, the figure Celebrity Net Worth has carried for her, and most 2026 outlets cluster at $2 million to $3 million. The top of our range prices in what those flat figures miss: a franchise-lead salary that rose between the two Ghostbusters films, a 2025 romance that cleared $90 million at the box office, two EPs on a real record label, and a 2026 calendar that puts her in three of Hollywood’s biggest franchises at once. She turned 20 in June 2026, and she has already logged more than 60 screen credits — a working life that started at age five in Grapevine, Texas, and now runs through Ghostbusters, Scream, and The Hunger Games in the same year.

Early Life and Background

McKenna Grace Burge was born on June 25, 2006, in Grapevine, Texas, a suburb between Dallas and Fort Worth. Her parents, Ross Burge and Crystal Grace, supported the move into acting early: Grace started auditioning at five and booked her first television work at six. The family later relocated to Los Angeles so she could work steadily, a move that put her within reach of the studio auditions that shaped the next decade of her life.

Her first credits came fast. From 2012 to 2014 she played Jasmine Bernstein on the Disney XD sitcom Crash & Bernstein, and from 2013 to 2015 she played Faith Newman on the CBS soap The Young and the Restless. Soap work is a particular kind of training — long days, pages of dialogue, cameras that do not wait — and Grace did two years of it before her tenth birthday. Those early paychecks were small, and under California’s Coogan Law 15 percent of a child performer’s earnings must go into a blocked trust account the child cannot touch until adulthood. That rule matters to any honest estimate of her wealth: money she earned before June 2024 sat partly locked away, which is one reason her spendable fortune looks smaller than her gross career earnings.

Grapevine itself barely figures in her public story after the move west, but the Texas start does explain one thing about her career: she entered the industry as a working child actor, not a discovery. By the time casting directors saw her in Gifted, she already had five years of set experience, a soap-opera credit, and a Disney sitcom on her résumé.

Education

Grace was educated on set and through tutoring, the standard arrangement for a child actor working full-time in California. She has spoken in interviews about fitting schoolwork around shooting schedules and about writing songs between takes, and her debut EP later turned that in-between time into a second career. No college enrollment has been reported, and no public record ties her to a university — she went from child actor to working adult actor without a gap year in the usual sense, because the work never stopped.

The education that shows up in her earnings is the on-the-job kind. Two years on a daily soap taught her to learn lines overnight. A run of “younger version” roles — young Tonya Harding, young Theo Crain, young Carol Danvers — taught her to study a lead actor’s mannerisms and reproduce them at a child’s scale. That skill is exactly what a franchise lead needs, and it is part of why her pay jumped when she stopped playing younger versions and started carrying films herself.

Career Journey

Grace’s career splits cleanly into three phases, and each one paid differently. Phase one, 2012 to 2016, was television journeyman work: Crash & Bernstein, The Young and the Restless, guest spots, and the recurring role of Penny Kirkman on ABC’s Designated Survivor. The money was modest — day-player and recurring television rates — but the volume was high, and volume is how a child actor builds a reel.

Phase two, 2017 to 2020, was the prestige-film run. Gifted (2017) cast her as Mary Adler, a seven-year-old maths prodigy, opposite Chris Evans; the film grossed about $24 million worldwide on a $7 million budget and earned Grace a Critics’ Choice nomination for Best Young Performer. The same year she played the young Tonya Harding in I, Tonya, a film that went on to an Academy Award for Allison Janney. In 2018 she played the young Theo Crain in Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House and took the title role in Lifetime’s The Bad Seed. In 2019 she played Judy Warren in Annabelle Comes Home, which grossed $231 million worldwide per Box Office Mojo, and the young Carol Danvers in Captain Marvel, which grossed $1.13 billion. She also led the Amazon family film Troop Zero (2019) and voiced the young Daphne Blake in Scoob! (2020).

None of those roles made her rich on its own. What they did was put her face in front of every casting director in town and attach her name to more than $1.5 billion in combined box office before she turned 15. That is the asset that pays in phase three: when a studio needs a young actor who can open a film, Grace’s track record is the pitch. Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) was the first time she carried that pitch as the lead, and everything since — the Handmaid’s Tale Emmy nomination, the second Ghostbusters, the Colleen Hoover romance, Scream 7, and now The Hunger Games — follows from it.

The television thread never stopped either. She recurred as Paige Swanson on Young Sheldon across multiple seasons, a steady network paycheck alongside the film work, and in 2022 she played Jan Broberg in Peacock’s A Friend of the Family, a true-crime limited series that put her in adult dramatic territory two years before she turned 18.

Rise to Fame

If one role marks the turn from working child actor to bankable name, it is Phoebe Spengler in Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Director Jason Reitman built the film around her — a science-obsessed twelve-year-old, granddaughter of Egon Spengler, who inherits the ghost-hunting gear and the franchise. The film grossed $204 million worldwide on a $75 million budget, per Box Office Mojo, and Grace’s performance earned a Critics’ Choice Super Award nomination. She was fifteen when it opened.

The same year, her work as Esther Keyes on Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale earned her a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series — the kind of peer recognition that changes how agents negotiate. An Emmy-nominated teenager who can also open a $200 million film is a rare combination, and her asking price moved with it. The sequel, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024), grossed just over $200 million worldwide, and the one reported salary attached to her name — $320,000 for the sequel, reported by Koimoi citing Showbiz Galore — is the only hard pay figure in her public record. Treat it as reported, not confirmed: studios do not publish individual contracts, and the same outlets that repeat the $320,000 figure also circulate an unverified $500,000 claim for the first film. The direction of travel is clear even if the exact numbers are not — her franchise pay rose from supporting-scale to lead-scale between the two films.

2025 widened her range again. She played Clara Grant in Regretting You, the Colleen Hoover adaptation directed by Josh Boone, opposite Allison Williams, Dave Franco, and her now-boyfriend Mason Thames. The film took in more than $90 million worldwide, per Box Office Mojo, on a romance budget — a strong return that showed she could carry a non-franchise, non-horror film. She also appeared in Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, the sequel to a horror hit that opened to $80 million domestic in 2023 and finished near $300 million worldwide.

2026 is the year the pieces stack. She plays Hannah Thurman in Scream 7, which opened February 27, 2026 with the biggest domestic opening weekend in the franchise’s 30-year history, and she plays Maysilee Donner — plus Maysilee’s twin sister Merrilee — in The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, opening November 20, 2026, with analysts forecasting a $60 million to $70 million domestic opening weekend. She also voices a role in PAW Patrol 3: The Dino Movie and is set to play Daphne in Netflix’s live-action Scooby-Doo: Origins series. A 20-year-old holding lead or featured roles in Ghostbusters, Scream, and The Hunger Games at the same time is not a child star in transition. She is a franchise actor, and franchise actors get paid on a different scale.

Main Sources of Income

Film acting fees are the largest slice of Grace’s income, and the mix inside that slice has changed. Early roles paid child-actor scale. The Ghostbusters films, Regretting You, Scream 7, and Sunrise on the Reaping pay lead and featured-player scale, with the usual add-ons: residuals from theatrical, streaming, and home-video windows, and in the franchise cases, box-office bonuses tied to gross thresholds. The Ghostbusters films alone grossed more than $400 million combined, and Regretting You added more than $90 million — the grosses that trigger those bonuses.

Television is the second stream and the steadiest one. A recurring role on a network hit like Young Sheldon pays per episode across seasons, and prestige streaming work — The Handmaid’s Tale, A Friend of the Family, the coming Scooby-Doo series — pays more per episode than network guest work. Television residuals keep paying long after the shoot ends, and for an actor with credits going back to 2012, that tail is now fourteen years long.

Music is the third stream, and it is real money rather than a hobby line on a résumé. Grace signed with Photo Finish Records in 2020, released her debut single “Haunted House” in 2021 — it plays over the end credits of Ghostbusters: Afterlife — and put out two EPs in 2023, Bittersweet 16 and Autumn Leaves. Her single “Haunted House” passed 15 million global streams and “Do All My Friends Hate Me?” passed 13 million, per reporting around the EP release. Streaming pays fractions of a cent per play, so even 15 million streams is a five-figure sum, not a fortune — but the EPs also created touring and appearance income, including her debut headline show at the Moroccan Lounge in Los Angeles in February 2023, and they keep her name in front of an audience that buys tickets to her films.

Voice acting is a fourth stream, smaller but steady: the young Daphne in Scoob!, and the 2026 PAW Patrol film. Voice sessions pay well for short bookings, and animated films generate long residual tails. Producing is the fifth: she wrote, executive produced, and starred in The Bad Seed Returns (2022) through her company Beautiful Ghosts Productions, and she holds an executive producer credit on What We Hide. Producing fees and backend participation are modest at this stage of her career, but they are the stream with the most room to grow — a producer credit on a hit pays long after the acting fee is spent.

Salary and Earnings

Here is the honest version: almost no salary figure attached to McKenna Grace has ever been confirmed by a studio, a filing, or her representatives. The public record holds one reported number, and everything else is inference from box office and pay norms. The reported number is $320,000 for Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, carried by Koimoi from Showbiz Galore’s cast-salary roundup, which also noted that co-star Paul Rudd took home roughly five times as much. That gap is normal — Rudd is a veteran Marvel lead; Grace was 17 and carrying her second franchise film — and it is also the clearest sign of where she stood in 2024: a young lead paid in the low-to-mid six figures per studio film.

The same corner of the internet circulates a $500,000 figure for Ghostbusters: Afterlife. No trade outlet has confirmed it, and it sits awkwardly against the reported $320,000 sequel figure — sequel pay for a returning lead almost never falls. The likelier reading is that one or both numbers are wrong, or that they measure different things (base salary versus base plus bonuses). We report both, label both as reported, and use neither as a load-bearing fact.

What can be said with confidence is the shape of her pay curve. Child and supporting roles in the 2010s paid scale-plus — tens of thousands per project at most. Gifted and the prestige run raised her quote. The Ghostbusters lead moved her into six figures per film. By 2025–26, with Regretting You, Scream 7, and Sunrise on the Reaping in the same twelve months, her per-film fee is plausibly in the high six figures — an estimate built from industry norms for a 20-year-old with an Emmy nomination and three franchises, not a leaked contract. Her gross career earnings across film, television, music, and voice work likely sit in the $5 million to $7 million range before tax, agents’ commission (typically 10 percent), managers’ commission, and living costs — which is why a $2 million to $4 million net worth is the right shape even though her films have grossed billions. Box office is not salary, and gross earnings are not wealth.

Two structural facts keep her net worth lower than a casual fan might guess. First, taxes and representation take roughly a third to half of gross earnings before she sees a dollar. Second, the Coogan Law trust locked away 15 percent of everything she earned as a minor until she turned 18 in June 2024 — money that is hers now, but money she could not spend or invest while earning it. Both facts cut the other way too: the trust is now released, and the adult-phase paychecks — the ones at franchise-lead scale — are the ones she keeps in full.

Businesses and Investments

Grace runs her producing work through Beautiful Ghosts Productions, the company behind The Bad Seed Returns (2022), which she wrote, executive produced, and starred in at sixteen. A teenager writing and executive-producing a sequel to her own hit is unusual, and it signals the direction of her business thinking: ownership rather than fees alone. She also holds an executive producer credit on What We Hide. Neither project is a large commercial enterprise yet, and no revenue figures for the company are public — but a production company is how actors convert a hot streak into lasting income, and Grace set hers up years before most of her peers.

Her music operation is the other business. The Photo Finish Records deal, signed in 2020, covers recordings; the songwriting is hers, and she has described writing as therapy in interviews around the Bittersweet 16 release. Two EPs in one year — Bittersweet 16 (March 3, 2023, eight tracks) and Autumn Leaves (2023) — plus singles including “Ugly Crier,” “Checkered Vans,” “Buzzkill Baby,” and “Do All My Friends Hate Me?” give her a catalog that earns streaming royalties every month. The sums are modest beside film pay, but catalog income compounds: every new film role sends new listeners to the songs.

On investments, there is nothing verifiable to report — no property record, no startup stake, no fund filing ties her name to an asset. Some net-worth aggregators claim she holds real estate and stock investments; none names a property, a purchase price, or a filing, so we do not repeat the claim as fact. The honest statement is that her wealth is concentrated in her career: future paychecks, residuals, and the production company. For a 20-year-old, that is normal. The diversification story, if it comes, is a 2027 story, not a 2026 one.

Brand Deals and Sponsorships

Grace is not a heavy brand-deal actor, and the public record reflects it. No major endorsement contract — fashion house, beauty line, car brand — has been announced with her name on it, and no brand has ever disclosed paying her. That is a deliberate-looking gap rather than an oversight: she has spent the last three years choosing roles over campaigns, and her public image has been built on work, not products.

What exists is the standard social-media layer. With more than 4 million Instagram followers, she is in the tier where a single sponsored post commands a five-figure fee, and one aggregator has put her Instagram income at $20,000 to $27,000 a month — a figure with no named source behind it, so we treat it as an unverified claim rather than a fact. She does appear at fashion events and premieres in designer looks, the usual in-kind side of a young star’s public life, but the paid endorsement portfolio that defines some of her peers — Sydney Sweeney‘s beauty and fashion deals, for example — has no equivalent in Grace’s public record yet. For net worth purposes, brand income is a small, unconfirmed slice, and the range we publish does not depend on it.

Houses, Cars and Other Assets

No property purchase by McKenna Grace appears in public records, and no home, car, or collection has been reported with a price attached. She lives in Los Angeles, where she has been based since the family move from Texas, but whether she rents or owns, and at what price, is not public information. The same is true of cars: no vehicle has ever been linked to her in reporting. Some aggregator sites describe a real estate portfolio and a car collection for her; none provides an address, a deed, or a model, so those claims do not survive a source check and we do not repeat them.

What can be counted as assets is less photogenic but more valuable: her Coogan trust balance, released when she turned 18 in June 2024; her residuals pipeline from fourteen years of film and television; her music catalog; and her production company. None of those has a public valuation, which is exactly why the net worth is a range. The $2 million floor is the number the most careful tracker in the field, Celebrity Net Worth, stands behind. The $4 million top allows for the trust release, the 2025–26 pay jump, and the music catalog. A house or a car collection would show up in the top of the range if one were ever documented; until then, the honest asset list is a career, not a garage.

Awards and Achievements

The award record is short and strong. Her breakout brought a Critics’ Choice Movie Award nomination for Best Young Performer for Gifted (2017). Her Ghostbusters: Afterlife performance brought a Critics’ Choice Super Award nomination. And her guest arc as Esther Keyes on The Handmaid’s Tale brought a Primetime Emmy nomination in 2022 for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series — the single most valuable line on her résumé for negotiation purposes, because Emmy nominations are voted by the same industry that hires her.

The achievements that pay are not always the ones with trophies. Sixty-plus credits before age 20. Lead roles in three franchises in a single year. A production company at sixteen. Two EPs on a real label. A debut headline show in Los Angeles. Each one is a line a casting director or a studio executive can point to, and together they are why her fee keeps rising even though she has never won a major award. The peer comparison makes the point: Zendaya, at $30 million to $40 million, and Jennifer Lawrence, at $160 million, show what a decade of franchise leads compounds into — and Grace, at 20, is roughly where their curves were at the same age, with the Hunger Games role as her Katniss-scale opportunity.

Net Worth Growth Over the Years

No year-by-year net worth figures for Grace have ever been published by a reliable tracker, so the table below is NetWorthCraft’s modeled estimate — built from her dated credits, the one reported salary, and the box office of the films she carried. Read it as the shape of a career, not a bank statement.

The pattern is a slow climb with a sharp step in 2021 and another one due in 2026. The 2021 step is the Ghostbusters lead and the Emmy nomination arriving together. The 2026 step is three franchise releases in twelve months at adult pay. If Sunrise on the Reaping performs to its $60 million to $70 million opening forecast, the next step — and the next fee negotiation — follows from it.

How does she compare with her peers? The table below uses NetWorthCraft’s own published estimates for the young stars in our profiles, so the numbers are comparable — same method, same date.

The comparison is the story in miniature. Grace sits beside Thames at the start of the curve; Lawrence sits at the far end of the same curve, built on the same franchise. The distance between them is ten years of franchise leads, and Grace has just taken the first of those steps.

Social Media Presence

Grace’s main platform is Instagram, where she has more than 4 million followers, per 2026 reporting. She uses it the way a working actor does — film promotion, music releases, red-carpet looks, and the occasional personal post — rather than as a full-time influencer channel. Her posts around Regretting You and the Sunrise on the Reaping press tour have been her most visible social moments of 2026, and the account’s growth tracks her film calendar: spikes around each release, steady growth between them.

She is also active on TikTok and X, where clips of her music and behind-the-scenes film content circulate, but Instagram is where the audience number is documented. The commercial value of that audience is real but modest beside her acting income: a following of 4 million supports five-figure sponsored posts, not a second career. The more useful measure is what the following does for her films — a built-in audience that studios count when they cast her, and a direct line to the young viewers who buy tickets to Scream and The Hunger Games.

Personal Life

Grace has been in a relationship with actor Mason Thames, her Regretting You co-star, since the pair made it public in February 2026 after a trip to Paris that followed months of speculation. The two have since appeared together on press tours and talked about each other’s work in interviews — Thames about her Hunger Games role, Grace about his. It is the rare young-Hollywood relationship where both halves are at the same career stage, with near-identical net worth estimates and the same franchise-heavy calendar.

In a November 2026 interview with Cosmopolitan, Grace said she does not take roles that require nudity or heavily sexualised material, calling the prospect “terrifying” for her while saying she respects performers who make different choices. She pointed to her Scream 7 role — her character meets a violent end — as proof that she is not avoiding dark or adult material, only drawing a line around sexualisation. The interview matters to her earnings in a practical way: a young actor who states her boundaries clearly gets offered roles that fit them, and avoids the kind of part that can stall a career.

Outside work, music is the personal thread that keeps showing up in her public life — songwriting she has called therapy, a guitar habit, and the EPs that document her teens in her own words. She is 5 feet 3 inches tall, a detail her fans ask about often enough that it appears in nearly every profile of her. She keeps her family life private; her parents, who moved the family to Los Angeles for her career, stay out of the press.

Sources & Reporting

Frequently Asked Questions

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