What YouTube pays creators in 2026: shares, thresholds, payouts
YouTube publishes shares, never rates. The 55% and 45% splits, the $100 payout floor, and the 10M Shorts gate that lands on February 1, 2027.
The Editors · 9 min read · Updated
YouTube publishes the percentages it keeps, and it has never published a rate. On long-form video you get 55% of net watch page ad revenue. On Shorts you get 45% of whatever the pool allocates to you after music licensing is taken out. Channel memberships, Super Chat and Super Thanks pay 70%. YouTube Premium money reaches you through a pool worth 30% of net Premium subscription revenue, or 60% of net Premium Lite revenue. Money leaves AdSense only once your balance clears $100. From February 1, 2027, any channel under 10 million qualified Shorts views per 90 days stops earning ad money on Shorts at all.
The shares, by revenue stream
Every figure here comes from YouTube's own help pages, read September 29, 2026.
| Stream | Creator share | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Channel memberships, Super Chat, Super Stickers, Super Thanks | 70% of net revenues | YouTube partner earnings overview |
| YouTube Premium Lite subscriptions | 60% of net subscription revenue | Changes to the YouTube Partner Program |
| Watch page ads on long-form video | 55% of net revenues | YouTube partner earnings overview |
| Shorts Feed ads | 45% of allocated revenue | How Shorts ad revenue sharing works |
| YouTube Premium subscriptions | 30% of net subscription revenue | Changes to the YouTube Partner Program |
Two of those rows need reading carefully. The Shorts 45% applies to your slice of a pool, and the pool is what remains after music rights are paid. YouTube's own example: a Short using one music track sends half its ad revenue to music licensing and half to the Creator Pool, and you then keep 45% of your share of that half. Upload a Short with no music and the whole amount goes into the pool first. Either way your rate is 45%.
The Premium rows look inverted and are not. Premium Lite carries the higher creator share, 60% against 30% for full Premium, and inside each pool YouTube distributes 55% to long-form and 45% to Shorts. YouTube stated both numbers in its August 10, 2026 announcement.
Nobody can quote you an RPM, including YouTube
Search for what YouTube pays and you will find tables of RPM by niche: finance at $20, gaming at $2. Those come from surveys and calculators, and no rate card sits behind them. YouTube sells ads at auction, so the amount per thousand views is whatever advertisers bid in your country, on your audience, in that month.
What YouTube does define is how to read your own number. Its documentation sets RPM as revenue per 1,000 views after YouTube's share, counting ads, Premium, memberships, Super Chat and Super Stickers together, across all views including the ones where no ad ran. CPM is the other direction: what advertisers pay per 1,000 impressions, before the split.
So the RPM in your YouTube Studio is the only figure that describes your channel, and it already has the 55% and 45% baked in. A table you found online describes someone else's audience.
What the platform total divides into
Alphabet reported $11,055 million of YouTube ads revenue for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, against $9,796 million a year earlier, in its Form 10-Q filed with the SEC. YouTube said on August 10, 2026 that YPP holds over 3 million creators.
Put those together and you get a ceiling. Share 55% of $11,055 million and about $6.08 billion would flow to creators in the quarter. Spread across 3 million channels that is roughly $2,030 a quarter, or about $675 a month.
Treat that as an upper bound estimate, not an earning. Four things push the real figure down:
- The 55% applies to YouTube's net revenues, which are smaller than the gross number Alphabet reports.
- Some of that $11 billion is never shared. YouTube excludes masthead placements, navigational-page ads and Image Posts from the Shorts model, and Shorts ads share at 45% rather than 55%.
- The 3 million figure counts music labels and media companies alongside individual creators.
- The distribution is heavily skewed, so the average sits far above the median channel.
One thing pushes it up: Alphabet books Premium and Music subscriptions under Google subscriptions, platforms and devices, not under YouTube ads, so the Premium pools are not in the $11,055 million at all.
The thresholds, today and from February 1, 2027
| Requirement | Now | From February 1, 2027 |
|---|---|---|
| Subscribers for ad revenue | 1,000 | 1,000 |
| Watch hours, long-form route | 4,000 in 365 days | 8,000 in 365 days |
| Shorts views, Shorts route | 10 million in 90 days | 20 million in 90 days |
| Shorts ad revenue, existing members | no separate bar | 10 million qualified views in 90 days |
Sources: YPP overview and eligibility for the current bar, Changes to the YouTube Partner Program for February 2027.
Watch hours and Shorts views never add together. Private, unlisted and deleted videos, ad campaigns, and Shorts themselves contribute nothing to the watch-hour count. On the Shorts side only public Shorts that appear in the Shorts Feed count, and they count as qualified views rather than the view number on your dashboard.
Existing partners keep their place. YouTube also set an activity floor from February 1, 2027: a channel stays active on 1,000 qualified watch hours in 365 days, 1 million qualified Shorts views in 90 days, or two long-form uploads or five Shorts every 90 days, with a further 90 days to recover if it drops below. Terms have to be accepted in YouTube Studio by January 31, 2027.
The February 2027 change that matters most
The headline everyone repeated in August 2026 was the doubled entry bar. The heavier clause sits underneath it: from February 1, 2027 every channel already in YPP needs 10 million qualified Shorts views per 90 days to keep earning ads and subscription revenue on Shorts.
That is around 111,000 qualified Shorts views a day, sustained. Channels below it stay in YPP and keep long-form ads, memberships and the rest. Their Shorts stop paying from the ad pool. YouTube's answer for those channels is a set of incentive programs: bonuses for YouTube Shopping, incentives for brand deals, boosts for starting trends. Those are discretionary programs rather than a published percentage, which is a different kind of income to plan around. We covered the mechanics of the qualified-view count when the rule landed, in which Shorts views count toward monetization.
When the money actually reaches you
Earnings for a month are finalized in your AdSense account between the 7th and the 12th of the following month, and paid between the 21st and the 26th. Nothing moves until the balance clears your local payment threshold, $100 in the United States. Below it, the balance rolls forward month after month until it clears. If your AdSense and YouTube payments accounts are separate, each has to clear the threshold on its own.
What lands is gross income to you. In the United States the self-employment tax starts at $400 of net earnings and the quarterly dates apply, which we set out in what freelancers owe the IRS in 2026.
What to do with this
Read your own RPM in YouTube Studio and ignore every RPM table on the internet, including the ones that look authoritative. If you are under the monetization bar, decide before February 1, 2027 which route you are on, because the long-form route doubles to 8,000 hours and the Shorts route doubles to 20 million views on that date. If Shorts are your main format and you are not clearing roughly 111,000 qualified views a day, plan on Shorts ad revenue reaching you as an incentive program rather than a percentage. Compare all of it against what X pays creators in 2026, where the thresholds are lower and the pool is much smaller.
What changed
- September 29, 2026. First published. Revenue shares from YouTube Help (partner earnings overview, Shorts ad revenue sharing, Changes to the YouTube Partner Program) and YouTube's August 10, 2026 announcement. Platform revenue from Alphabet's Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026. RPM definition from YouTube Help. Payment mechanics from Google AdSense Help. Thresholds current as of September 2026, with the February 1, 2027 changes as announced.
Sources
- YouTube Help, YouTube partner earnings overview (read September 29, 2026)
- YouTube Help, How Shorts ad revenue sharing works (read September 29, 2026)
- YouTube Help, YouTube Partner Program overview and eligibility (read September 29, 2026)
- YouTube Help, Changes to the YouTube Partner Program (read September 29, 2026)
- YouTube Help, RPM and CPM in YouTube Analytics (read September 29, 2026)
- YouTube Blog, New opportunities to earn and changes to the YouTube Partner Program (August 10, 2026)
- Alphabet Inc., Form 10-Q for the quarterly period ended June 30, 2026 (filed with the SEC, July 2026)
- Google AdSense Help, Payment thresholds and Payment timelines for AdSense (read September 29, 2026)
This is not financial advice.
