Heather Cox Richardson makes an estimated $12 million a year writing a daily history newsletter on Substack. Lenny Rachitsky clears more than $2 million from a product-management newsletter. The platform’s top 10 authors pull in roughly $40 million between them. These are the numbers every “how much do Substack writers make” article leads with, and they’re all true.
They’re also close to useless if you’re trying to figure out what you’d make.
Here’s the number nobody front-loads: the median Substack newsletter earns $0. Roughly 90% never turn on paid subscriptions at all, and among the ones that do, most take home under $1,000 a month. The gap between the headline and the median is the whole story, and almost no page-one result shows you the arithmetic that lives inside it. This piece does. We’ll walk the full fee stack, build a subscriber-count-to-take-home table you can read your own numbers off of, and work out what it actually takes to replace a salary.
Last updated: July 2026
Quick answers
How much do Substack writers make? Most Substack writers with paid subscriptions earn under $1,000 a month, and the median newsletter earns nothing because roughly 90% never charge. A small top cohort of a few thousand writers earns six or seven figures, which drags every “average” upward and hides the real distribution.
What does Substack keep? Substack takes 10% of paid subscription revenue. Stripe adds about 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction, and a 0.7% recurring-billing fee on newer subscriptions. On an $8/month plan that’s roughly a 17% total cut, leaving you about $6.61.
How many subscribers to make a living? Around 750 paid subscribers at $8/month nets about $5,000 a month before taxes, enough to replace a modest salary. Fewer than 150 paid subscribers, where most paying newsletters sit, is side-hustle money.
So how much do Substack writers actually make?
The honest answer: a handful get rich, a few thousand earn a real living, and the vast majority make little or nothing. Substack’s own reported figures make the shape clear. The platform disclosed $450 million in gross writer earnings for 2025, up from $370 million in 2024, and passed 8.4 million paid subscriptions in early 2026, a 68% jump from the 5 million it reported in March 2025. Spread across nearly 100,000 publications that earn money globally, that revenue is anything but evenly distributed.
Independent surveys of the creator base put median annual earnings around $4,000, with the top quartile clearing roughly $16,000 a year. Those numbers already exclude the 90% of newsletters that never switch on paid subscriptions. Include them, and the true median is zero. That single fact invalidates most of the “average Substack income” claims floating around page one, because an average that ignores the silent majority isn’t measuring what a new writer would experience.
The concentration at the top is extreme. Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American is estimated above $12 million a year. Lenny Rachitsky’s product newsletter runs past $2 million. The top 10 authors together account for about $40 million annually. When Backlinko or a dozen statistics roundups quote a big “writers earned $450 million” number, remember that a rounding error’s worth of accounts captured a meaningful slice of it. Your outcome is set by your subscriber count and your fee math, not by the platform-wide total.
What percentage does Substack take?
Substack takes 10% of your paid subscription revenue, a rate it has held since 2017. But the 10% is only the first bite. Every subscription also runs through Stripe, which charges about 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction, and Substack applies an additional 0.7% billing fee on subscriptions created after mid-2024. Stack those together and the real cost of collecting a payment lands closer to 13% to 19%, depending on your price point.
The flat $0.30 is the part that quietly punishes cheaper plans. On an $8/month subscription the fees break down as $0.80 to Substack, plus roughly $0.59 to Stripe once you add the 2.9%, the $0.30, and the 0.7% surcharge. You keep about $6.61. That’s a 17% effective cut, not 10%. Drop your price to $5/month and the effective cut climbs to nearly 20%, because that fixed $0.30 is a bigger share of a smaller charge.
Annual billing flips the math in your favor. Charge $80 for a yearly plan and the $0.30 gets amortized across a single larger transaction, dropping the effective cut to about 14%. This is why experienced writers push annual plans hard: on identical list revenue, annual subscribers hand you a few percentage points more take-home and churn less month to month. The fee stack rewards fewer, larger transactions.
What your subscriber count actually pays you
Your income on Substack is a simple function of paid subscribers times price minus the fee stack. The table below assumes an $8/month price and the roughly $6.61 net per subscriber worked out above. It shows gross list revenue, monthly take-home, and annualized take-home before churn, refunds, and the discount most annual subscribers get.
| Paid subscribers | Gross / month | Net / month | Net / year | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 250 | $2,000 | $1,653 | $19,830 | Serious side income |
| 500 | $4,000 | $3,305 | $39,660 | Part-time salary |
| 1,000 | $8,000 | $6,610 | $79,320 | Full-time replacement |
| 2,500 | $20,000 | $16,525 | $198,300 | Small business |
| 5,000 | $40,000 | $33,050 | $396,600 | Top ~1% of paid writers |
| 10,000 | $80,000 | $66,100 | $793,200 | Full media business |
Two caveats keep these figures honest. First, the annual column assumes every subscriber pays every month with none leaving, which never happens. Real take-home runs lower once churn and refunds bite. Second, at a $10 price point every row scales up by roughly 26%: 1,000 subscribers nets about $8,340 a month instead of $6,610. Price matters more than most new writers assume, because it multiplies against your entire list every single month.
How many paid subscribers do you need to make a living?
To clear $5,000 a month in take-home pay at an $8 price, you need roughly 750 paid subscribers. That’s the arithmetic: $5,000 divided by the $6.61 you net per subscriber lands at 757. Want to replace a $75,000 salary, closer to $6,250 a month? Budget for about 950 paid subscribers. At a $10 price those targets drop to roughly 600 and 750 respectively.
Now the reality check. Most paying newsletters sit under 150 paid subscribers, which is why “most earn under $1,000 a month” keeps showing up in the data. Getting to 750 paid subscribers usually means a free list several times larger, because free-to-paid conversion on Substack typically runs in the low single digits to around 10% for strong niches. A 5% conversion rate implies a free list of 15,000 to land 750 paying readers.
Churn is the tax nobody budgets for. Paid newsletters commonly lose 3% to 5% of subscribers a month. At 4% monthly churn, a 1,000-subscriber list sheds about 40 paying readers every month, so you need more than 40 new paid signups just to stay flat. This is why the honest timeline to a full-time newsletter is two to four years, not two to four months. The subscriber count is reachable. The compounding required to hold it is what filters most people out.
Substack vs Patreon, Ghost, and beehiiv on take-home
Per dollar collected, Substack and Patreon are the expensive options, and Ghost and beehiiv are the cheap ones. Substack and Patreon both take 10% on top of Stripe. Ghost and beehiiv take 0% commission and charge a flat monthly hosting fee instead. The table compares take-home on a $10/month subscription, before each platform’s fixed costs.
| Platform | Platform fee | Net per $10/mo | Fixed cost | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Substack | 10% + Stripe | ~$8.34 | $0 | Discovery and network effects |
| Patreon | ~10% + Stripe | ~$8.34 | $0 | Tiered memberships, video |
| Ghost | 0% + Stripe | ~$9.34 | From $18/mo | Owning your stack |
| beehiiv | 0% + Stripe | ~$9.34 | From $49/mo | Growth tooling and ads |
The crossover point is pure arithmetic. Ghost’s $18/month plan equals Substack’s 10% cut at about $180 in monthly revenue, roughly 23 subscribers at $8. Above that, Ghost keeps more of your money. beehiiv’s $49 tier breaks even around $490 a month, about 61 subscribers. So on paper, almost any monetizing writer keeps more on a flat-fee platform. What you give up is Substack’s recommendation network, which drives a large share of new signups for writers who haven’t built their own audience. That network is the product you’re paying 10% for.
When a newsletter stops being a side hustle
A newsletter becomes a business at the point where the take-home covers your living costs and the growth engine runs without you burning out. In practice that’s the 500-to-1,000 paid subscriber band in the table above, $40,000 to $80,000 a year net at an $8 price. Below it, you’re running a paid side project. Above it, you’re running a media company with production, retention, and growth as three separate jobs.
The founders who cross that line treat it like a business from the start. They price for annual plans to blunt churn, they track free-to-paid conversion weekly, and they reinvest in the top of the funnel instead of assuming the list will grow itself. If you conclude the newsletter math is too slow, the same audience-building skill transfers: writers who’ve hit a wall on subscriptions often pivot to selling Notion templates or faceless UGC, where revenue per fan runs higher. Substack is one monetization path among several, and the honest version of “how much do Substack writers make” is that the platform sets the fee stack while you set almost everything else.
For a wider view of how these income streams stack up, our breakdowns of how creators make money in 2026 and what X actually pays creators put newsletter earnings next to the alternatives. Substack’s numbers look better on take-home per subscriber than most ad-based platforms, and worse on speed. Which matters more depends on whether you’re building an audience or already have one.
