Few space stories have drawn more attention than the one surrounding Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore — two NASA astronauts who flew aboard Boeing Starliner’s first crewed flight to the International Space Station in June 2024. What should have been a week-long trip quickly turned into months when NASA made the decision not to risk the crew’s lives by returning them to Earth aboard Starliner, leaving the astronauts stranded on the ISS for over half a year. When they finally made it home in March 2025, they revealed that the whole fiasco was even worse than NASA made it seem.
Beyond the headlines, the saga put a practical question on people’s minds — what happened when the astronauts had to spend more time than intended in space? Did they get paid overtime? The short answer is no, but the story doesn’t completely end there. There’s the philosophical side of things, especially as going to space for many of these astronauts is kind of a reward itself. But pride doesn’t really help pay the bills, nor does it address the health issues that might arise after time spent in space — which can actually change the shape of an astronaut’s brain.
So, what do the astronauts get paid while they’re in space?
Being an astronaut is a tough job. It entails putting your body through a lot of intense training just for the opportunity to possibly go to space one day, not to mention the other health risks at play like bone density loss in space. Because of the build-up required and the fact that being on the job doesn’t just happen when you’re up in space, astronauts receive an approximate annual salary of $152,258. Additionally, there isn’t any kind of overtime pay calculated into that if their missions run longer, as their compensation doesn’t directly reflect them having to go into space to get paid.
On top of the federal salary they receive, Jimi Russell, a spokesperson for NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, told The New York Times that the government employees receive a per diem fee for travel to any location. It seems this amount is not set in stone, as Williams and Wilmore were allotted $5 each day, while an astronaut who was stationed aboard the International Space Station for 152 days in 2007 reportedly only made around $1.20 each day.
While this allotment is usually meant to help cover any kind of “incidentals,” the astronauts really don’t have to worry about those kinds of things in space. Hopefully they got to pocket most of the money, and if they did, then that means they would have accrued an extra $1,430 for the 286 days they were stuck aboard the International Space Station. Still, it’s not every day you get to say you went to space, so hopefully that and their normal annual salary made the trip more than worth it.
