Daytime Emmy Season Begins! Find Out When The Nominations Will Be Announced

One big change this year? In 2024, the Daytime Emmys announced the elimination of the Outstanding Younger Performer category, which capped the age of eligibility at 18 or younger. As of 2025, a new acting category is being introduced. Called Outstanding Emerging Talent in a Daytime Drama Program, the category has no age restriction. However, per the stated rules of eligibility, a potential nominee must have “been on the Daytime Drama Program for two years or less, thereby limiting category eligibility for two years total per performer.” Additionally, the performer must be on their first daytime contract, and anyone with a prior Daytime Emmy nomination and/or win is ineligible. Lastly, in order to be considered for a nomination, an actor “must be onscreen in a speaking role with at least one multi-episode story arc.”

As for who is eligible to judge, according to the call for entries on the awards’ official site, “The Daytime Emmys is moving towards a stated goal of members-only judging for 2026. For this year, administration reserves the right to place otherwise qualified non-members on judging panels as needed but those non-member individuals will be given an alert of the shift to members-only with instructions on how to join the new NATAS national membership and/or the Television Academy.”

NATAS is making a few other judging changes as well. According to its explication of the rules, “NATAS is no longer utilizing a system of ‘parity’ within the Drama acting categories, e.g. programs are no longer guaranteed equal representation on the acting panels. Instead, performers registering to judge will be assigned to three categories each.” The rules go on to state that actors cannot judge the category they themselves have been submitted in for consideration, and actors will judge two drama acting categories and one hosting categories.

NATAS also clarified a rule in the performer categories that prohibits “actors from entering twice for the same program.” Per this clarification, the rule remains that actors who play a dual role (e.g., Jon Lindstrom‘s simultaneous run as both Kevin Collins and Ryan Chamberlain on General Hospital) can submit themselves only once, but their reel can include both characters. However, NATAS states, the rule “has been tweaked to allow for actors to enter multiple times for the same program if they exit as one character and return as a different character, and they are not playing both of those characters simultaneously.” This means that an actor like Emily O’Brien, who wrapped her run on Days of Our Lives as Gwen Rizczech and then assumed the role of Theresa Donovan, could submit herself twice. “In these cases, actors are permitted to enter twice and even if they don’t, they can only enter for the character(s) being played simultaneously on a singular reel,” NATAS went on to explain.