How much does MrBeast make a year? The published figure, and what his views actually pay
Forbes puts MrBeast at $300 million for 2025-26. What that figure counts, where the money comes from, and what his YouTube views pay at measured rates.
Published September 30, 2026
The short version
- Forbes estimates $300 million in gross earnings between March 2025 and March 2026, up from $85 million the year before. It is an estimate, it is gross, and it counts earnings, not the value of his company.
- Most of that money is not YouTube ads. Investor documents reported by Fortune in March 2025 put Feastables at about $250 million in 2024 sales and more than $20 million in profit, while the media business made similar sales and lost almost $80 million.
- What his views pay, measured. His 16 latest long-form videos, published March to September 2026, have 1.78 billion views. At the RPM ranges measured for entertainment, that is $1.6 million to $8.9 million in YouTube revenue, not hundreds of millions.
- His 37 Shorts over the same months have 9 billion views, five times more, and still earn less at measured Shorts rates: $0.6 million to $1.8 million.
- He says he has "negative money". He owns more than half of a company valued at $5 billion in its last funding round, and reinvests nearly everything.
Search how much MrBeast makes and you get a single number, usually a year out of date, presented as if it were a salary. It is not a salary, and the most-quoted figures do not measure the same thing.
This article separates three different questions: what Forbes estimates he earned, what his company actually reported in documents shown to investors, and what his YouTube views pay, which we can measure ourselves because we track his channels.
Every figure below is dated. They change every year, and a number without a date is how most pages on this topic end up wrong.
The published number: $300 million, and what Forbes counts
Forbes publishes a Top Creators list every June. MrBeast has been number one for five consecutive years.
- 2026 edition: $300 million, gross earnings between March 2025 and March 2026.
- 2025 edition: $85 million, gross earnings between April 2024 and April 2025.
Forbes' methodology is short and worth reading word for word: it estimates each creator's gross earnings over the period, and it counts earnings, not equity held in public or private companies. Three consequences follow:
- Gross, not profit. Forbes counts income before costs. For a creator who spends millions per video, the gap between the two is the whole story.
- Not the company's value. His stake in Beast Industries is not in the figure at all.
- An estimate. Forbes does not publish a per-creator breakdown, so the jump from $85 million to $300 million cannot be attributed line by line from the outside. Forbes' own entry points to the expansion of the business: two food brands, a licensing business, the Viewstats analytics product, the second season of Beast Games on Prime Video, and the acquisition of the finance app Step in February 2026.
For scale: the whole Top 50 earned $1.02 billion combined in the 2026 edition, the first time the list crossed a billion. MrBeast alone is almost 30% of it, and the number two creator, Dhar Mann, is estimated at $65 million.
Two $300 million figures that are not the same thing
A second "$300 million" circulates, and it is easy to confuse with the first.
In March 2025, Fortune reported that Beast Industries, according to documents sent to potential investors, was forecasting a profit of about $300 million for 2026. That is a company forecast for a calendar year, made in early 2025.
The Forbes figure is an estimate of one person's gross earnings over March 2025 to March 2026. Same digits, different subject, different period, different nature. If you see the two merged into "MrBeast makes $300 million profit", the sentence is wrong on at least two counts.
Where the money actually comes from
The most detailed financial picture comes from investor documents first obtained by Bloomberg and reported by Fortune and Entrepreneur in March 2025. They covered the first three quarters of 2024 with estimates for the fourth.
| 2024, per investor documents | Sales | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Feastables (chocolate) | about $250 million | more than $20 million profit |
| Media (YouTube, Beast Games) | similar to Feastables | almost $80 million loss |
| Beast Industries overall | almost $60 million loss, the third losing year in a row |
That table is the answer most articles miss. The chocolate brand was more profitable than the channel that made him famous. The videos are the engine of attention; the products are where the margin is.
The same documents show why investors did not mind: Beast Industries raised more than $450 million over four years, and a $300 million Series C led by Alpha Wave valued it at about $5 billion, up from roughly $1.5 billion a few months earlier. The new management announced about $100 million in cost cuts.
Two cautions on this table. These are figures from documents written to raise money, not audited public accounts. And they describe 2024: we found no published actual results for 2025 at the time of writing, only forecasts and partial indicators.
What his YouTube views actually pay
This is the part we can measure rather than quote. VideoTrends tracks MrBeast's main channel and MrBeast Gaming, and re-reads their view counts on a schedule. On the main channel, as of 28 September 2026:
- 16 long-form videos published between 10 March and 19 September 2026: 1.78 billion views so far, 111 million for the median video.
- 37 Shorts published between 17 March and 27 September 2026: 9.0 billion views so far.
Shorts make up 83% of those views. Here is what each format pays at the rates measured by AIR Media-Tech on 300 channels: the P25 to P75 range for entertainment on long-form ($0.88 to $5.02 per 1,000 views), and the typical Shorts RPM ($0.07 to $0.20).
Five times the views on Shorts, and still less ad money than long-form. These are estimates at measured rates, not his earnings.
Read those ranges for what they are. We do not know his actual RPM: his audience is global, which pulls it down, and very large in the United States, which pulls it up. The ranges say something robust anyway. Six months of uploads on the biggest channel on YouTube pay single-digit millions in ad share, against a Forbes estimate of $300 million. YouTube ads are a small line in his income, not the main one.
MrBeast Gaming tells the same story at a smaller scale: 25 long-form videos in the last 12 months, 1.2 billion views, a median of 51 million per video.
The Shorts line is the lesson every creator can reuse. Nine billion views sound like the bigger business. At measured Shorts rates, a Short earns only 3 to 14% of what the same views pay on long-form, which is exactly the gap we describe in how much YouTube pays per view.
How much does MrBeast make per video?
Take his median long-form video: 111 million views. At the entertainment median RPM of $2.43, its YouTube revenue is about $271,000. Across the measured range, $98,000 to $559,000.
That is real money, and it still did not stop the media business from losing money in 2024: the investor documents put its costs above its sales, and MrBeast says he reinvests nearly everything. A video that earns a quarter of a million dollars in ad share can still lose money if it cost more to make, and pay for itself in attention for Feastables, Beast Games and everything else.
For the median creator the arithmetic is very different, starting with how rarely a video reaches a million views at all: we measured it in how much YouTube pays for 1 million views.
Rich on paper, "negative money" in the bank
MrBeast has said he owns more than half of Beast Industries, which was valued at $5 billion in its latest funding round. On paper, that makes him a billionaire.
In cash, he says the opposite. In a Wall Street Journal video interview published in early January 2026, reported by Business Insider: "I have negative money right now. I'm borrowing money right now." The previous summer, he had said he borrowed money from his mother for his wedding and had "very little money" because he tries to "reinvest everything."
Both statements can be true at once. A stake in a private company is not cash, and a company that reinvests its revenue does not pay large dividends. That is also why "MrBeast's net worth" figures vary so wildly between sites: they are guesses at the value of a private stake, not a bank balance.
What this means if you are not MrBeast
The useful lesson is not the size of the numbers. It is their shape.
Ad revenue is the smallest line in the biggest creator business on the platform. That is not unique to him: YouTube's own 2024 data shows that among Partner Program channels earning five figures or more, over half made money from sources other than ads and Premium. We go through those sources in how much YouTubers make.
Views and money are not the same metric. His Shorts bring five times his long-form views and less ad revenue. If you are choosing between formats, the 2027 changes to Shorts revenue sharing make that gap even more important.
The format decides, not the channel size. Even on his channel, the best and weakest long-form videos of the period are almost a factor of ten apart: 200 million views against 21 million. Measuring every video against the median of its own channel is how you spot the format that breaks out, which is what our country rankings do market by market. To test your own numbers, our revenue calculator runs on the measured RPM ranges used above.
FAQ
How much does MrBeast make a year?
Forbes estimates $300 million in gross earnings between March 2025 and March 2026, up from $85 million between April 2024 and April 2025. The figure is an estimate of gross earnings before costs, and it excludes the value of his stake in Beast Industries.
How much does MrBeast make per video from YouTube ads?
His median long-form video published between March and September 2026 has about 111 million views. At the entertainment RPMs measured by AIR Media-Tech, its YouTube revenue is roughly $98,000 to $559,000, about $271,000 at the median. His actual RPM is not public.
How much does MrBeast make from YouTube ads in total?
He does not publish it. At measured entertainment rates, the 16 long-form videos he published on his main channel between March and September 2026 are worth an estimated $1.6 million to $8.9 million in YouTube revenue so far, and his 37 Shorts over the same period $0.6 million to $1.8 million. That is a small part of the $300 million Forbes estimates.
Is MrBeast a billionaire?
On paper, yes: he has said he owns more than half of Beast Industries, valued at $5 billion in its latest funding round. In cash, no: he said in January 2026 that he had "negative money" and was borrowing, because he reinvests nearly everything.
How much does Feastables make?
According to investor documents reported by Fortune in March 2025, Feastables made about $250 million in sales and more than $20 million in profit in 2024, more profit than his media business, which lost almost $80 million on similar sales.
Why did the Forbes estimate jump from $85 million to $300 million?
Forbes does not publish a line-by-line breakdown, so the jump cannot be attributed precisely from outside. Its 2026 entry points to the growth of the business: Feastables and Lunchly, licensing, Viewstats, the second season of Beast Games on Prime Video, and the purchase of the finance app Step in February 2026.
Useful sources
- Forbes Top Creators 2026 (Forbes, published 23 June 2026), for the $300 million estimate, the March 2025 to March 2026 period, the methodology, and the $1.02 billion Top 50 total.
- Forbes Top Creators 2025 (Forbes, June 2025), for the $85 million estimate and its April 2024 to April 2025 period.
- YouTube's biggest star MrBeast makes more money from chocolate than videos (Fortune, 11 March 2025), for the investor-document figures: Feastables, the media loss, the 2024 loss, the $5 billion valuation and the 2026 profit forecast.
- MrBeast makes more money from his side hustle than YouTube (Entrepreneur, 11 March 2025), for the $251 million Feastables sales figure.
- MrBeast says he actually has "negative money" in the bank (Business Insider, 12 January 2026), for his statements on cash, reinvestment and ownership.
- How much do YouTubers with 1M subscribers make (AIR Media-Tech), for the measured RPM ranges by niche and for Shorts. Method: 300 channels, 3,595 channel-months.
- Our own measurements of MrBeast and MrBeast Gaming, read on 28 September 2026.
The biggest channel on YouTube makes most of its money off YouTube, and its most-watched format pays the least. Both facts are invisible if you only look at subscriber counts and view totals.
VideoTrends looks at the ratio instead: every video against the median of its own channel, so the format that breaks out shows up the day it does, on MrBeast's channel or on anyone else's.