YouTube money calculator

What RPM really is

RPM is what you keep per thousand views, after YouTube has taken its share. It is not what advertisers paid, and it is not CPM.

YouTube publishes the split. On ordinary watch-page videos it pays the creator 55% of net ad revenue. On Shorts the figure is 45% of the amount allocated from the creator pool. Both only apply once you have accepted the matching module in YouTube Studio.

The reason no honest calculator can give you an RPM is that it moves with the subject, the country your viewers are in, the time of year and the length of the video. A finance channel watched in the United States in December and a gaming channel watched in the middle of the year are not comparable numbers. Anybody showing you one figure for “YouTube” is guessing.

Revenue share figures from YouTube’s own page on how it calculates revenue. If you already have a channel, use the real RPM from your Studio and ignore every estimate, including ours.

Why it may say you are paid nothing

Because until a channel is accepted into the YouTube Partner Program, its views earn exactly zero. That is the part most calculators quietly skip, and it is the part that decides whether the first year is worth starting.

Today the doors are:

• 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 qualified public watch hours in the last 12 months, or
• 1,000 subscribers and 10 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days.

This calculator checks the first door, because it is the one most channels go through. Watch hours are estimated from your views and your average view duration, which is why that field matters more than it looks: a hundred thousand views at forty seconds each is a channel going nowhere, and the same views at six minutes each is a channel that qualifies.

YouTube has said the Partner Program changes on February 1, 2027. It has not published the new thresholds on its eligibility page, so this tool uses today’s and will be updated when there is something real to update it to.

The months that pay nothing

The figure most people want from a calculator like this is the monthly one. The figure that actually decides whether to start is how long it pays nothing at all.

A channel earns zero until it is in the Partner Program, and eligibility is measured over twelve months of watch time. Most channels that stop, stop somewhere inside that gap — not because the numbers were bad, but because there were no numbers yet and nothing told them how far off they were. That is what the line above is for.

There is a real cost in that gap too, and it is deliberately not on this page. Subtracting a production bill from an income of zero only ever produces a large negative number. It tells you nothing you did not already know, and it turns arithmetic into an argument. What videos cost to make is a separate question, answered on the Starter Pilot page and in the automation guide.

The useful way to hold both: this page tells you what a channel would be worth. Those pages tell you what it costs to get there. Neither one should be asked to answer the other’s question.

What this cannot tell you

• It cannot predict your views. Nothing can. Put in a number you have reason to believe, not the one you want.
• It ignores everything except ads. Memberships, sponsorship and affiliate income are none of them here — and on a channel under about ten thousand subscribers, one sponsor is usually worth more than a month of ads.
• It assumes every view is monetized. Some are not — ad blockers, unsuitable content, viewers too young for ads.
• It is arithmetic, not a forecast. It multiplies what you typed. The value is in seeing the shape of the thing, not the total.

If the honest version of these numbers is discouraging, that is the tool working. Better to see it now than in month nine.