How Much Do OnlyFans Models Make?

The arithmetic average is about $104 a month per registered creator account, derived by dividing the $5.80 billion OnlyFans paid to creators in its 2024 financial year by the 4.63 million creator accounts it reported. That average is not what a working creator earns. It includes millions of dormant and abandoned accounts, and no reliable median has ever been published by anyone with access to the data.

Every creator asks this question and almost every page answering it invents a number. So let us be precise about what is known, what is derived, and what is being made up.

What is actually known

OnlyFans is owned by Fenix International Ltd, which files audited accounts with UK Companies House. Those filings are the only authoritative source of platform-wide figures. For the year ended 30 November 2024, published in August 2025, they show the following.

Fenix International Ltd statutory accounts, year ended 30 November 2024. The per-account figures are our arithmetic on those totals.

Why the $104 average is misleading in both directions

It understates and overstates at the same time. It understates because the denominator counts every account ever registered, including the millions opened and abandoned, plus second accounts belonging to creators who run a free page alongside a paid one. Divide by only the creators actively posting and the average rises sharply.

It overstates because it is a mean. Creator income follows a steep power law, where a small number of very large earners pull the average well above what the person in the middle makes. Take those two distortions together and the honest conclusion is that $104 tells you how thinly the payout pool spreads, and nothing at all about your own prospects. See the full OnlyFans revenue and statistics breakdown for the derivation and sources.

Is the median OnlyFans income really $180 a month?

No, or at least nobody knows. That figure, along with "the top 1% earn 33% of the money," comes from a single analysis published in April 2020 by the data scientist Thomas Hollands. It has been repeated by thousands of pages since, which makes it look like consensus. It has never been replicated.

The study sampled around 1,000 accounts. Subscriber counts were estimated from likes per post, which its own author said undercounts. Tips and pay-per-view sales were excluded entirely, though they are the bulk of many creators’ income. Prices were normalized to the $4.99 minimum. And it described a platform that had a small fraction of today’s 4.63 million creator accounts. Treat any page presenting it as current fact as a page that did not check.

What actually drives what a creator earns

Since the platform-wide numbers cannot forecast an individual, the useful question is which levers move income. Four do most of the work.

• Traffic, not talent. OnlyFans has no discovery feed. Every subscriber arrives from Reddit, X or somewhere else you sent them. Promotion is the job, and it is why creators who post daily out-earn better photographers who do not.
• Selling beyond the subscription. Pay-per-view messages, tips and custom content are the majority of income for most established creators. A subscription-only page leaves most of the money on the table.
• Retention. Subscriber lifetime, measured in months, matters more than the sign-up count. Fans stay for a page that posts and a creator who replies.
• The platform fee. The only lever that requires no extra work at all.

How much do OnlyFans models make per subscriber?

Less than the subscription price, always, and usually more than the subscription price. Both are true, which is the part that confuses new creators. The platform takes 20% of the sticker price before it reaches you, so a $9.99 subscription pays you $7.99. But established creators earn the majority of their income from pay-per-view messages, tips and customs rather than the subscription itself, so total revenue per subscriber typically exceeds the monthly fee.

Subscription revenue only, before tips and pay-per-view. Arithmetic, not a projection.

Is that gross or take-home?

Neither column above is take-home. Whatever reaches your payout balance is self-employment income, and in the United States you owe 15.3% self-employment tax on the net profit plus ordinary income tax on top. You are a sole proprietor by default from your first payout, whether or not you ever form a company, and no employer is withholding anything for you.

Set aside roughly 25% to 30% of profit for taxes from the first dollar, and track deductible expenses as you go, because equipment, subscriptions and a home-office share all reduce the bill. The details are in our guides to OnlyFans taxes and whether you need an LLC.

Do the top OnlyFans earners really make millions?

A small number do, and their income is public mostly because they say so, not because the platform confirms it. What the filings do confirm is that $5.80 billion reached creators in one year, so there is unambiguously real money in the system. What no filing tells you is how it was distributed, and creators self-reporting large numbers are a self-selecting sample.

Be equally skeptical of the doom framing. "Most creators make nothing" and "the median is $180" rest on the same shaky 2020 study. The truthful position is that the distribution is steep, unmeasured, and heavily influenced by how hard someone promotes.

What you keep is the number that matters

OnlyFans takes 20% of everything a fan pays you. That is $1 of every $5, deducted before the money reaches your balance, on an audience you found and paid for with your own hours. Across the platform it added up to $1.41 billion in a single year.

HerFans charges a flat 10% and pays out 90%. On $3,000 of monthly fan spending that is $300 more in your account every month, for the same content and the same fans, which is a bigger raise than most promotion campaigns deliver. Our guide on how to make money on OnlyFans breaks down every income stream, the promotion guide covers the traffic side, and you can model your own take-home with the earnings calculator.