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It’s not every week that you finally get the answer to a question that you’ve been asked for years and years.
Before I get even more cryptic, let’s back up a bit and provide context. What’s this burning question that I’ve been asked so incessantly?
That part’s simple: how much do creators make?
I truly can’t count the number of times over the past several years that I’ve fielded this question, with inquiries coming from all over the map: brands, teammates here at CreatorIQ, creators themselves, my mom. Everybody has heard crazy figures being thrown around, and everybody wants to establish a baseline for an enticing, often mysterious field. We know that there’s a lot of money in the creator economy, but how much of that money is flowing to creators?
What’s not so simple is finding an answer. Until now.
See, our Research & Insights Manager Cherline Bazile—the same powerhouse behind our State of Creator Marketing report series—is back with another banger: the State of Creator Compensation. You can imagine my excitement when I heard that Cher was taking on this topic. At last, answers were nigh!
Well, you don’t have to imagine my excitement: you can feel your own instead! Download our State of Creator Compensation report here, and we can all bask in the answers together.
But since you’re already here in this blog post, I might as well walk you through some of my favorite findings.
First, a word on our methodology. CreatorIQ partnered with Sapio Research—you might remember our friends at Sapio from the State of Creator Marketing report, or from the time they took Cher and me to look at a pirate ship (true story)—to survey 300 creators in late 2025. Then, we looked at a subset of brands and agencies who sent creators flat payments via CreatorIQ in 2025. Double the datasets, double the insights!
In fact, without further ado, here are the answers I’ve so long been craving:
Annual Creator Income, 2025
Among our survey respondents, the average creator reported earning $44,293 over the past year. Only 11% of creator respondents secured a 6-figure annual income. Meanwhile, across payments using CreatorIQ software, creators earned an average of $11.4k, while the median creator earned $3.0k.
So there you have it. Final answer next time anyone comes to me asking about how much creators earn: either $44,293, or $11,400, or $3,000 per year. No need for more context.
Okay, obviously there’s a need for more context, with that main bit of context being this: much like the regular economy, the creator economy is kind of lopsided.
Sorry to get all Bernie on you: usually I stay away from politics in this newsletter. However, numbers are numbers, and we’ve got a number of numbers to prove it. It turns out that a small percentage of creators capture a disproportionate share of total compensation from brands, while a vast majority of creators tend to earn at lower levels. Again, stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
To further quantify things: the top 10% of creators received 62% of the total volume of creator payments, a disparity that’s—sorry to beat a dead horse with all these comparisons to reality—increasing with time. That’s up from 60% in 2024, and 53% in 2023. Meanwhile, the top 1% of creators have seen their share of total payments rise from 15% to 18% to 21% over the same time period.
This disparity becomes even more apparent when you invoke the Illuminati and bust out the Great Pyramid as a visualization technique:
Creator Payment Distribution, 2025
*Full-on Bernie voice* 90% of the creators are earning just 38% of the wealth, while the top 1% of creators earn 21% of the wealth! What we’re witnessing is a stratification of the economy, and a vanishing of the middle-class.
For creators, I mean. Definitely just talking about creators.
Much like, say, a record-breaking stock market, these processes are taking place amid a general expansion of the creator economy at large. Our research showed that in 2025, total dollars paid to creators increased by 59% year-over-year, while the number of creators participating in campaigns within CreatorIQ’s platform grew by 183%. In other words, creator marketing is scaling faster than these gains in compensation flowing across the broader creator ecosystem.
2025’s notable surge in total payment volume aligned with our findings from the general State of Creator Marketing report, with brands reporting dramatically upscaled investments in creator marketing.
For all my economic populism, average creator compensation did grow in 2025, which is excellent for all of our hard-working creators. However, a closer look at the numbers tells a more complex story.
Average vs. Median Creator Earnings, 2023 - 2025
Payment Size Distribution, 2025
Though average payments are up, median earnings are stagnant compared to 2023, implying that those average payments are actually being inflated by payments to top earners, rather than a more even distribution across the playing field.
Still, small-scale payments are up significantly, with a ‘barbell’ structure—both more small payouts and more large payouts—indicating continued investment in high-value creator partnerships.
Those are a lot more answers than I anticipated, and I didn’t even take you through the full report. In addition to more details on creator compensation, there’s an analysis of owned versus earned media for Fortune 100 brands in the U.S., as well as survey questions with creators about what they want more of from brands (hint: it’s not just money). Plus, given that this is a report being published in the year 2026, we’ve got plenty of insights into creators’ thoughts on AI. Cher truly outdid herself, and I cannot recommend this awesome report highly enough.
To close, what do all these figures mean for creators, and the brands who pay them? Well, I couldn’t put it any better than Cher herself. I’ll let her have the final word:
“Creators are revenue catalysts and innovation partners. To the brands that treat creators like vendors instead of value-drivers, this is your wake-up call. Stop undervaluing creators–your growth depends on it.”
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