YouTube earnings calculator

01

How YouTube pays you

YouTube's own terms set three revenue shares. On long videos you keep 55% of the net ad revenue from your watch page. On Shorts, ad revenue from the feed goes into a pool and you keep 45% of what's allocated to you. Memberships, Super Chat, Super Stickers and Super Thanks pay 70%.

What lands in your account per 1,000 views is your RPM. It's lower than the CPM advertisers pay, for two reasons: YouTube's share, and the views that show no ad at all. MilX's data on more than 3,000 channels puts RPM at 35–55% of CPM. That spread is the range the calculator shows.

02

Your viewers' country matters more than your own

Advertisers pay for the audience, not the creator. In MilX's 2026 data, US viewers bring an average CPM of $14.67, UK viewers $8.91, Brazil $1.64 and India $0.74. The same 100,000 views can earn twenty times more in one market than in another.

For markets MilX doesn't publish, the calculator uses RevenueLab's 80-country table, calibrated against MilX on the twelve markets the two have in common. Those rows are marked in the breakdown. If YouTube Studio shows you a real RPM, enter it under the advanced options. It always beats a benchmark.

03

Shorts: a shared pool, paid on engaged views

Shorts ads run between videos, not inside yours. So YouTube adds up each country's Shorts ad revenue, sets aside the music licensing cost and splits the rest among monetizing creators by their share of engaged views in that country. Your niche doesn't change your Shorts RPM. Using music doesn't cut your own share either; it shrinks the pool for everyone.

Since March 31, 2025 the public Shorts view count includes every play and replay. Payouts and YPP eligibility still use engaged views, the old way of counting. Enter that number, or your earnings will look higher than they are. Shorts RPM in the US runs about $0.10–$0.32, and much lower elsewhere.

04

Niche is the second lever, for long videos

Finance and business audiences attract advertisers with high customer value. Their CPM runs about twice the average, while gaming sits near a third of it. The calculator's niche multipliers come from two published CPM tables, normalized to each table's own average. That's a direction, not a promise: within a niche, your topic and your viewers' buying intent move the number further.

05

US tax withholding outside the US

If you live outside the US, Google withholds US tax on what you earn from US viewers, ads, Premium, memberships and Super Chat. With a tax treaty the rate is between 0% and 30%. YouTube applies the treaty's “other copyright royalties” rate, which is 0% for the UK, Germany and France, 15% for India and 30% where no treaty exists. Without tax info in AdSense, 24% of your worldwide earnings is withheld.

Hungary is a common surprise. The US terminated its tax treaty with Hungary, and since January 1, 2024 the full 30% applies to US-viewer earnings. The calculator uses the IRS treaty table; check your own rate in AdSense, and talk to a tax adviser about how it offsets your local income tax.

06

When you start earning

Ad revenue needs the YouTube Partner Program: 1,000 subscribers plus either 4,000 public watch hours in the last 12 months or 10 million engaged Shorts views in the last 90 days.