Creator pricing benchmarks
What TikTok creators charge, by follower tier
TikTok influencer rates are the fees a brand and creator agree for sponsored content. This guide compares published third-party price bands by audience size and explains what to include in a quote. It covers brand sponsorship fees, not payments from TikTok itself. Use the tables as a starting point: deliverables, recent views, audience fit, production work, and usage rights can change an individual quote. These are not rates measured from Hive campaigns or guaranteed earnings.
TikTok sponsored videos: published rate bands
The nano floor here is the lowest number in any of the three tables, and it is honest: a great deal of TikTok nano collaboration is gifted product or a token fee. The bands rise more gently than Instagram's, and the ceiling at the mega tier is materially lower than Instagram's or YouTube's — a single TikTok video is a shorter-lived, lower-production asset and is priced like one.
| Tier | Followers | Marketplace rate | Agency rate card band |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nano | under 10,000 | $5 – $200 | $50 – $2,000 |
| Micro | 10,000 – 99,999 | $200 – $1,200 | $2,000 – $12,000 |
| Mid | 100,000 – 499,999 | $1,200 – $5,000 | $12,000 – $50,000 |
| Macro | 500,000 – 999,999 | $5,000 – $15,000 | $50,000 – $150,000 |
| Mega | 1,000,000+ | $7,000 – $20,000 | $70,000 – $200,000 |
Marketplace column: Later (2026) and Shopify (2026), citing On Digitals, inBeat and impact.com. These are published vendor benchmark ranges compiled from self-reported deals, not a measurement Hive or anyone else took of the whole market — treat them as an anchor for a negotiation, not a price list. Agency column is NOT a second survey: it is the marketplace band multiplied by 10, the order-of-magnitude gap impact.com's 2025 rate-card data shows between managed programmes and self-serve. It is a scale factor, so it inherits every weakness of the column beside it.
The tier definitions these tables use
Every published benchmark uses tier names, and almost none of them use the same boundaries — one company's "micro" ends where another's begins, which is a large part of why two sources can disagree by a factor of five about the same creator. These are the boundaries used on this page and inside Hive's matching engine, stated so a number can be checked against them. TikTok counts followers for tier purposes.
- Nano: under 10,000 followers
- Micro: 10,000 – 99,999 followers
- Mid: 100,000 – 499,999 followers
- Macro: 500,000 – 999,999 followers
- Mega: 1,000,000+ followers
Why an agency quote is about 10x a marketplace quote
The gap between the two price columns is not a markup on the same thing. An agency rate card prices a managed programme: creator sourcing and vetting, negotiation, contracting, briefing, revisions, legal and disclosure compliance, reporting, and the agency's own margin. A marketplace rate prices the creator's time and audience, with the brand doing the rest. impact.com's 2025 rate-card data puts that gap at roughly an order of magnitude, which is where the 10x factor in the table comes from. It is a single scale factor applied across every tier, so it is a rough instrument — the real gap is wider at the top of the market, where agency involvement is near-universal, and narrower at the bottom, where it is rare. If you are running a TikTok campaign yourself, the marketplace column is your reference; if you have been quoted from the agency column, ask what of that list you are buying.
Median TikTok engagement, and what it is measured against
TikTok's median engagement falls steadily across every tier rather than dropping once and flattening. That decline is real but partly mechanical: the denominator is followers while the distribution is not, so a large account's videos are increasingly served to people who do not follow it, and those views never enter the calculation. The practical reading is that a TikTok engagement rate is a weak signal on large accounts and a much better one on small ones.
| Tier | Followers | Median engagement — (likes + comments + shares) ÷ followers |
|---|---|---|
| Nano | under 10,000 | 10.3% |
| Micro | 10,000 – 99,999 | 8.7% |
| Mid | 100,000 – 499,999 | 6% |
| Macro | 500,000 – 999,999 | 5% |
| Mega | 1,000,000+ | 3.5% |
HypeAuditor, State of Influencer Marketing 2025, 104M TikTok accounts. TikTok's formula counts shares and divides by FOLLOWERS, which is why these percentages are an order of magnitude larger than Instagram's. They are not comparable across platforms — a 10.3% TikTok median and a 2.19% Instagram median are measurements of different quantities.
What changes a TikTok quote most
Follower count moves a TikTok price less than three other things: how many videos are in the deal, whether the brand may run the video as a Spark Ad, and how much of the concept the creator is expected to originate. A creator asked to shoot to a script is doing production work; a creator asked to make something that sounds like them is doing the thing the platform actually rewards, and pricing that as commodity footage is the most common way a brief fails.
- Video count — a three-video series is normally priced below three times a single video
- Spark Ads / paid amplification rights, which let the brand put budget behind the creator's own post
- Whether the brief specifies a script, or a message and a free hand
- Whether the brand may repost to its own account, and for how long
What campaigns are reported to return
The canonical industry figure is $5.78 of earned media value per $1 spent (Influencer Marketing Hub's benchmark report). It is worth knowing because everyone quotes it, and worth distrusting for the same reason: earned media value is a modelled quantity, not money received, and the report is built from survey responses by marketers describing their own results. The tier breakdown below is weaker still — it comes from a single vendor's dataset and Hive's benchmark file flags it as lower-confidence. Both are included here because they are the numbers the industry actually negotiates against, not because they are measurements anyone should treat as settled.
| Tier | Reported return per $1 spent |
|---|---|
| Nano | $6.20 |
| Micro | $5.10 |
| Mid | $4.30 |
| Macro | $3.20 |
| Mega | $2.10 |
LOWER CONFIDENCE — read this table more sceptically than the two above it. These figures are vendor-sourced (Janney AI, 2025, from a stated 10,000+ campaigns) and are flagged as lower-confidence in Hive's own benchmark file. Campaign-return figures are self-reported by the parties with an interest in them, attribution across social campaigns is contested, and the consistent finding that smaller creators return more per dollar is plausible but not independently verified. Do not budget off this table alone.
- Affiliate link click-through, aggregator norm: 3.7% (2025–2026 aggregate figures, vendor-published)
- Typical conversion rate on creator traffic: 1–3%
- Reported micro-creator campaign conversion: 4.1%, versus 2.6% for macro — roughly 1.6x, and self-reported on both sides
- Reference EMV constant: $5.78 per $1, widely cited and widely disputed
Copy this TikTok sponsorship quote template
Copy these fields into a campaign brief or email and fill them in together. Ask for a separate price when the scope changes; a quote for one organic post does not automatically include paid advertising rights.
- Brand, product, target audience, and campaign goal: [fill in]
- Deliverables and format: [number of videos, length, and posting account]
- Schedule: [draft date, feedback deadline, and publication window]
- Creator fee and included expenses: [amount, currency, samples, and shipping]
- Approval process: [reviewer, revision rounds, and response deadlines]
- Usage rights: [organic reposting, paid promotion, platforms, and duration]
- Exclusivity: [competing products and restriction period, if agreed]
- Reporting and payment: [metrics, reporting date, payment timing, and agreed conditions]
Questions people ask
- How much does a TikTok video cost in 2026?
- Published marketplace benchmarks put a nano TikTok video at $5 – $200 and a micro one at $200 – $1,200. Those are vendor-compiled ranges from self-reported deals rather than a measured market price, and the same creator will quote differently depending on usage rights, exclusivity, and how many assets are in the deal.
- Are these numbers Hive's own data?
- No, and that distinction matters. Every figure on this page is a published third-party benchmark — Later, Shopify, impact.com, HypeAuditor, SociaVault, Socialinsider — reproduced with its source and its confidence level. Hive uses these tables to calibrate its matching engine. It has not measured any of them itself, and does not publish figures from its own marketplace here.
- Which of these figures should I trust least?
- The campaign-return table. It is vendor-sourced from a single dataset and is flagged lower-confidence in the file it comes from. Engagement medians are the strongest figures here — they come from the largest samples with stated formulas. The price bands sit in between: real published ranges, but wide, and compiled from self-reported deals.
- Are TikTok sponsorship rates the same as TikTok platform payouts?
- No. A sponsorship fee is paid by a brand under an agreed campaign scope. Platform rewards are a separate source of income with their own eligibility rules and calculations. The tables here describe sponsored-video pricing only.
- Why are TikTok engagement rates so much higher than Instagram's?
- Different formulas, not different quality. TikTok's rate counts likes, comments and shares against followers; Instagram's counts likes and comments against followers. Shares are a large share of TikTok interaction, and TikTok serves videos far beyond an account's follower list while the follower count stays in the denominator. Comparing the two numbers directly is a category error.
- Should I pay a TikTok creator per video or per campaign?
- Per campaign is usually the better structure on TikTok specifically, because a single video's reach is high-variance. Several attempts from one creator, or from several creators, gives the format room to work. The tables here price a single video, so multiply with that variance in mind.
Where these numbers come from
- Later — Influencer Pricing Benchmarks, 2026 guide (marketplace rates)
- Shopify — How much do influencers charge?
- impact.com — influencer rate cards, 2025 (agency band)
- HypeAuditor — State of Influencer Marketing 2025 (104M TikTok accounts)
- Socialinsider — social media benchmarks (engagement formulas)
- Hootsuite — how engagement rate is calculated
Read next
- What Instagram creators charge The same tables for Instagram. The flattest engagement curve, and the widest micro-tier price band.
- What YouTube creators charge The same tables for YouTube. Rates start far higher and engagement is measured against views.
- Hive for brands How to turn a budget into a brief local creators will actually pitch on.
- Hive for creators The other side of the table: how to price yourself against these bands.
Post a TikTok brief with your budget on it Free to post. Creators see the pay before they pitch, so nobody negotiates blind.
Compare: what Instagram creators charge
Read the YouTube sponsorship planning and ROI guide
Hive guides
- What is Hive?
- Work with the real voices people trust.
- Keep your brand deals as AI changes content.
- Plan YouTube sponsorships that fit your brand.
- The Hive app for brands and creators to run paid campaigns.
- Hive marketing for paid influencer partnerships
- Hive connects influencers and brands for paid partnerships
- Influencer marketing done through paid partnerships
- Brand partnerships for creators and brands that match
- Influencer partnership brief template for brands
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