How much do influencers make? The median creator with brand deals earns $3,900 a year (2026 study)

Most influencers make nothing from brand deals. We counted every disclosed sponsored post that 49,185 Instagram creators published over about a year and priced each post at the published rate for the creator's follower count. 83% of them posted no sponsored content at all. The 8,201 who did ran a median of 4 sponsored posts a year, which comes to about $3,900 a year at published rates. The top 1% of creators with deals start at $253,000 a year.

That figure is an estimate from public posts at published prices, not a payroll record. We do not know what any creator was paid. Priced at the lowest and the highest published tables, the same median lands between $1,400 and $9,800, so treat $3,900 as the middle of a wide band. Stories, YouTube, affiliate sales and the creator's own products are not in it.

The pages that rank for "how much do influencers make" print a price per post by follower tier, add the earnings of Cristiano Ronaldo or MrBeast, and send you to a calculator. None of them count how many paid posts creators publish in a year, so none can say what a year adds up to, or how many creators earn nothing. This study counts them.

How much do influencers make a year? The full distribution

For each creator we read a median of seven months of posts, counted the sponsored ones and scaled the count to a year. A creator with 2 sponsored posts in 6 months counts as 4 a year. Each sponsored post gets the published price for that creator's follower count, from $107 for a creator with 4,000 followers to $12,900 for one with 1.5 million.

Read the first column as "what does a creator with 1,000+ followers make from sponsored posts". The answer is nothing for most of them. Only from the 90th percentile up does the figure clear $2,000 a year. 816 of the 49,185 creators, 1.7%, clear $50,000, and 0.75% clear $100,000.

Among creators who do take deals, a third publish 3 to 5 sponsored posts a year and another quarter publish 1 or 2. Only 8% publish 24 or more, two a month. For the median creator with deals, 1 post in 22 is sponsored.

The money is concentrated. The top 1% of Instagram creators take 54% of all estimated sponsorship income and the top 5% take 90%. The other 90% of creators share 1.5%. On TikTok the top 1% take 73%.

How much do Instagram influencers make by follower count?

Creators of every size publish about the same number of sponsored posts: a median of 3 to 5 a year. What changes with size is the share of creators who get deals at all, and the price of each post.

The last three columns cover creators with at least one deal. A nano creator with deals earns about $300 a year from them. A micro creator earns about $2,400. Sponsored posts become a real income from about 100,000 followers: a fifth of mid-tier creators with deals clear $50,000 a year, and so do 60% of creators with more than a million followers.

How much do TikTok influencers make?

Fewer TikTok creators disclose brand deals. Only 4.8% of the 46,620 TikTok creators had a sponsored video, against 16.7% on Instagram. Those who did posted a median of 3.6 sponsored videos a year.

Tier for tier, a TikTok creator with deals earns less than an Instagram creator: published TikTok rates are lower for large accounts and TikTok creators post fewer sponsored videos. Across all tiers the median TikTok creator with deals earns $11,142 a year, more than on Instagram, only because the TikTok creators who disclose deals are bigger: a quarter of them have over a million followers.

Two things are left out. TikTok's own Creator Rewards payouts are not brand deals and are not counted. And TikTok captions often carry #PaidPartnership for TikTok's LIVE incentive program, which is not a brand deal; we removed those tags, as in our sponsored post engagement study.

Six creators, counted post by post

These six creators were in our data for about a full year, so their counts are measured, not scaled. We checked each profile and one sponsored post on Instagram on October 3, 2026. Prices are the published rate for their follower count; none of them told us their fees.

Tom Daley (@tomdaley, 4 million followers), the Olympic diving champion, posted 15 sponsored posts in the 11 months we read, 12 with Instagram's paid partnership label: Rimmel London mascara and concealer, a Renault 5 he fills with knitting, Air Wick, Quaker Oats with Team GB, Tesco Mobile, Bupa and a Movember campaign. Scaled to a year at the $22,700 table price for his size, that is $375,000. His sponsored reels got a median of 290,000 views, under half his usual 627,000, so at $22 per 1,000 views they would be worth $106,000.

Josh & Matt (@joshandmatt, 3 million), a UK couple who post home and interiors, published 34 sponsored posts in a year, 33 with the label, for Hilton, Marimekko, La Roche-Posay, Porsche and Reece Bathrooms. That is $612,000 at table prices.

Amelia Dimoldenberg (@ameliadimz, 3 million), the host of Chicken Shop Date, posted 24 sponsored posts, most of them for Passenger Princess, a series made "in paid partnership between @dimzinc and @f1" in which Formula 1 drivers give her driving lessons. At table prices that is $475,000. Her sponsored reels got a median of 4.7 million views, more than her usual 3.2 million, so priced by the view they would be worth $2.5 million. The tables underprice creators whose sponsored posts beat their usual ones.

Mishka Murphy (@mishkamakesfood, 474,000), a US food creator, posted 28 sponsored recipe reels for brands such as Authentic Royal basmati rice, Président cheese and FAGE: $237,000 at table prices.

Katie (@scrantonmom, 44,000), who posts Pennsylvania family day trips, published 33 sponsored posts, all labeled, for Kalahari Resorts, Sheetz, Dorney Park and PA Preferred. At the $749 table price that is $24,700. Her sponsored reels got a median of 6,100 views, so by the view they would be worth $4,400.

Issy Crowe (@platedbyissy, 2,936), a food creator in Australia, posted 25 labeled sponsored posts in a year, 11 of them for Pizzini Wines and others for Harris Farm Markets and Sur Direct. At the $78 table price for her size, a year of steady brand work comes to about $2,000. That is the nano tier: regular deals and a small income.

By category

Two numbers decide a category: how many of its creators get deals, and how big they are. Food, parenting, home and fashion creators get deals most often, 29% to 39% of them. Comedy creators earn the second most per creator with deals, but mostly because they are bigger: their median is 127,000 followers. Musicians and artists rarely post sponsored content, 4% and 5%.

By country

Korean creators stand out. Half of them have deals, and those who do publish a median of 13 sponsored posts a year, three times the rate elsewhere. Korea's Fair Trade Commission requires paid posts to be marked, almost always with #광고, so Korean deals are easy to count. Korean price tables are also the cheapest we found, so at Korean prices these creators earn less than the global table says. Brazil and India rank high because the creators with deals there are larger. Every country here is priced with one global table; a local price would move the dollar figures, not the counts.

How sure is $3,900?

The price is the largest source of error. Published tables for the same tier differ up to 50x, and we take the middle. At the lowest table prices the median creator with deals makes $1,400 a year, at the highest $9,800. Pricing each creator by the views of their own sponsored posts at $22 per 1,000, the middle of what per-view deals pay, gives $2,200. What creators get paid is often below the tables: Collabstr reports that nearly 80% of the 21,000 collaborations on its marketplace cost under $300.

The count has smaller errors that pull both ways.

• We miss deals. Stories, which disappear after a day, are not in our data, and many deals include them. Some creators do not disclose: in a hand check for our sponsored post study, 5 to 8 of 100 normal posts looked like unmarked brand promotion. Both push the true income up.
• We count a few posts that are not paid deals: a #pr that means Puerto Rico, a gifted product tagged #ad, a joke about ads. About 8% of caption-tagged posts were wrong in our hand checks. That pushes our figure down by a few percent once removed.
• We scale each creator's count to 12 months. On 14,023 Instagram creators that we read for a full year, scaling their last 120 days to a year gave 13% more sponsored posts than they really published. The creators we read for a full year post less often than the rest, so their median, $2,000, is a low estimate.
• Marketplace affiliate posts are left out. 2,581 Instagram and 1,920 TikTok posts tagged #ad or #publi were SHEIN, Temu, Shopee or Mercado Livre coupon posts, which pay by commission or free products. Counting them at table prices would add income these creators do not get.

Put together, the median Instagram creator with brand deals most likely earns between $2,000 and $10,000 a year from sponsored feed posts and reels, with $3,900 as our central estimate.

What this means

For creators

• Followers alone do not bring deals. 79% of creators with 10,000 to 100,000 followers had no sponsored post in the period we read. A creator with deals publishes 4 a year. Creators who clear $50,000 a year publish a median of 18.
• Price from your views. The table price for your follower count is a starting point. Our influencer rates study shows what published rates cost per 1,000 views, and the Instagram engagement rate calculator and TikTok engagement rate calculator show your median post.
• Keep a record of your sponsored posts and how they did. Brands check, and our sponsored post engagement study found sponsored posts get 0.69x the likes and comments of the same creator's normal post.

For brands

• Most creators have never run a paid post. A creator with a history of brand work is a minority even among accounts with 100,000 followers, and that history is visible in their feed.
• Virev creator search shows each creator's recent posts with views, so you can see who has run sponsored posts and how those posts did before you send an offer. To keep a copy of a creator's past posts for review, the Instagram downloader saves a public post or reel.

How we measured

• Data: Virev's crawl of public Instagram and TikTok, exported from our production database on October 2, 2026 (read-only). Accounts with 1,000+ followers, read between August 18 and October 1, 2026, that Virev's profile model labels as individual creators. Posts from August 2025 to September 2026.
• Creators: at least 6 posts and at least 60 days of posts in our data. We read each creator's posts back from the newest; when the posts we hold have a gap of more than 60 days and more than 8 times the creator's usual gap, we stop at the gap. The median creator was read for 223 days on Instagram and 151 on TikTok.
• Sponsored post: on Instagram, the paid partnership label (69% of sponsored posts) or an ad tag in the caption: #ad, #sponsored, #paidpartnership, #publi, #publicidad, #werbung, #anzeige, #광고, #広告, #PR and similar. On TikTok, caption tags only, without TikTok LIVE program tags. Giveaways and marketplace coupon posts are excluded. Pinned posts are excluded.
• Count a year: sponsored posts in the period read, times 365, divided by the days read.
• Price: the published price for the creator's follower count, from 56 Instagram and 37 TikTok price ranges in our influencer rates study: the median low and median high of each tier, with the creator placed inside the tier by follower count on a log scale. Feed price for every format.
• Income: count a year times price. It covers disclosed sponsored feed posts and reels only.

Hand checks, by a person reading the full caption of randomly drawn posts from this sample:

Download the data

All tables in this article are in one CSV: influencer-income-2026.csv. It has one row per tier, category and country, with creators, the share with deals, sponsored posts a year, the price per post, the income percentiles, the income at the lowest and highest table prices and at $22 per 1,000 views, plus the income percentiles for all creators. Please cite "Virev, October 2026" and link this page.