Influencer rates 2026: how much influencers charge

Measured on real negotiations, the typical creator ask for one deliverable is $450 at 1K to 10K followers, $500 at 10K to 50K, $1,500 at 50K to 250K and $4,250 above 250K. The typical brand offer at the same tiers is $150, $200, $650 and $3,000, and 73% of settled deals closed at exactly the brand's best offer.

At 10K to 50K followers the typical ask is $500 per deliverable, with the middle half of asks between $350 and $1,300 (422 quotes). Brands at that size offered a median $200. Many micro-influencers also accept gifted product with no fee, which is a different deal rather than a discount.

A creator with 100,000 followers sits in our 50K to 250K tier, where the typical ask is $1,500 per deliverable (middle half $500 to $3,000) and the typical brand offer is $650. Deals mostly settle at the brand's number. How much that creator makes in a month depends on how many deals they land, which this data does not measure.

There is no follower count that guarantees it, because income depends on how many brand deals a creator lands, which we cannot see. As arithmetic only: at the typical brand offer of $200 per deliverable at 10K to 50K followers, $1,000 is five paid deliverables a month; at 50K to 250K ($650) it is two. That counts brand deals only, not platform payouts or affiliate income.

We publish medians rather than averages, because a few large deals drag an average far above what a typical deal costs. The median creator ask runs from $450 at 1K to 10K followers to $4,250 above 250K, and the median brand offer from $150 to $3,000.

Not in the asks. Splitting each follower tier at its own median engagement rate, the more engaged half asks for LESS at 10k to 50k followers and more at 50k and above, and every correlation we measured is weak (-0.15 to +0.24). Engagement tells you whether an ask is good value; it does not predict what the ask will be. Judge the quote in front of you with it, but do not trust a formula that multiplies followers by engagement to produce a price.

We cannot tell you, and we would rather say so. The snapshot stored with each quote carries follower count, engagement, likes, comments, posting cadence and sponsored share, but no country, region or language, so there is no honest way to split these tables by market. Note also that filtering to US dollars is a currency filter and not a country filter: 21% of quotes are in another currency and stored unconverted, and a creator outside the US who quotes in dollars is in these numbers.

For a single one-off deliverable, the typical creator ask is about $450 at 1K to 10K followers, $500 at 10K to 50K, $1,500 at 50K to 250K and $4,250 above 250K. Those are asks, not settled prices. On the same deals, the typical ask is twice what the brand ended up willing to pay, and 73% of deals settled at exactly the brand's own highest number.

Creator fees plus product, shipping and any tooling. As a worked example on our medians, ten creators at 10K to 50K followers paid the typical brand offer of $200 each is $2,000 in fees, against $5,000 if you paid their typical first ask. Gifting-only campaigns replace the fee line with product cost. Add usage rights and exclusivity separately, since creators quote them as their own lines.

Mostly as a flat fee per deliverable (74% of the priced lines creators quoted), paid by bank transfer, PayPal or through the platform the deal ran on, on terms agreed in the deal: part up front and the rest on posting, or an invoice after the content is live. US brands collect a W-9, and for payments made after 2025 a Form 1099-NEC is due once payments to one creator reach $2,000 in the year.

A creator's price list: one line per deliverable (a Reel, a story set, a TikTok video), often a bundle, and add-ons such as paid usage, whitelisting and exclusivity. When reading one as a brand, convert pack prices to a unit price, ask how many frames a story set includes, and treat usage and exclusivity as optional lines rather than part of the fee.

It is a good way to judge value and a poor way to predict a quote. CPM pricing (a cost per thousand views) appears in 10% of the lines creators quoted, concentrated in a handful of brands, and the engagement-based formula undershoots what brands actually pay in every tier we measured.

You can, but expect to be the one proposing it. Only 2% of the priced lines creators sent were commission or affiliate based, against 74% flat fee. Hybrid structures are far more common in advice than in quotes.

We could not confirm it. Lines that explicitly name paid usage price lower than comparable lines that do not, on three of the four formats we could test, which suggests those lines are the add-on priced on its own row rather than a deliverable with usage folded in. What the data does support is that usage is normally quoted as a separate line rather than as a markup, so ask for it itemised.

No. It is what happened on Cheerful. Every figure comes from prices stated in real brand and creator emails that ran through the platform, not from a survey or a published rate card. That makes it narrower than an industry report and considerably more honest: nobody was asked what they would charge, they were observed charging it.

Nobody's in particular, by design. A figure is only published when it comes from at least five different brands with no single brand contributing more than half the sample. That rule exists specifically so a benchmark cannot become one customer's price list read out in public.

Because we measured how well that works and it does not. Predicting a real quote from the median of comparable ones lands within a factor of two between 37% and 75% of the time. Niche, exclusivity and usage rights move a price more than follower count does. A range is true; a point estimate would be wrong more often than it was right.

The highest figure the brand stated on that thread, not the first one. So when the settled price divided by the brand offer comes out at 1.00, it means deals close at the brand's ceiling rather than at its opening number.

Yes, under CC BY 4.0 with a link back to this page. That is the point of publishing them.