How Much Does YouTube Pay UK?
Drop in your monthly views, choose the niche closest to your channel, and see what you'd realistically earn in GBP. Works for both long-form videos and Shorts (they pay very differently). Nothing stored, no account needed.
Total views on videos over 60 seconds in the past 30 days.
Total views on Shorts (under 60 seconds). Leave blank to skip.
Your niche determines UK RPM rates. Pick the closest match.
How to use this calculator
Head into YouTube Studio and open Analytics. Your total views for the last 28 days is the long-form number you need. If you post Shorts as well, you'll find those broken out under Content → Shorts — pop that figure in separately because the payout structure is night and day compared to regular videos.
Next, pick your niche from the dropdown. This matters more than you'd think: UK advertisers bidding on pension or mortgage keywords pay multiples of what gaming advertisers spend, so a finance channel and a gaming channel with identical view counts end up with totally different earnings. Hit Calculate and you'll get a monthly and yearly range in pounds, plus a full breakdown showing exactly where the numbers come from.
How UK YouTube RPM rates work
RPM — revenue per mille — is what actually lands in your bank account for every 1,000 monetised views. YouTube has already skimmed its 45% off the top by the time you see this number, so it's a true take-home figure rather than a theoretical ad-spend figure.
The UK sits in Google's top pricing tier for ads, which is why British creators tend to outearn channels with similar view counts in most other countries. That said, the spread across niches is enormous. If you're making ISA comparisons or walking people through pension transfers, you're looking at £8–£12 RPM. Tech and software reviewers usually land £4–£8. Lifestyle vloggers and day-in-my-life channels hover around £2–£4, while gaming and comedy creators are down at £1–£3. Same platform, same audience country, but a fivefold difference in what each view is worth.
Let's put real numbers on it. Say you run a 50k-views-a-month gaming channel covering Fortnite and Call of Duty. At the gaming RPM band (£1–£3), that's roughly £50–£150 a month from ads. Now compare that to a personal finance creator doing Monzo-vs-Starling breakdowns who also pulls 50k monthly views — at £8–£12 RPM, they're earning £400–£600 from the exact same view count. The gaming creator needs four to six times the audience to match. If either of them also posts Shorts, those views pay far less — about £0.02–£0.08 per thousand — because Shorts revenue comes from a shared ad pool split across every creator on the feed.
That's the maths this calculator does for you, entirely in your browser. It takes your view count, applies the RPM range for your niche, tacks on Shorts revenue at the pooled rate if you entered any, and spits out a monthly and yearly range with a per-view breakdown. No data gets sent anywhere. If you want to dig deeper into how YouTube's ad auction actually works or what the YPP eligibility rules look like in practice, we've written a longer piece on how much YouTube pays in the UK.
If your numbers are lower than you'd like, the obvious lever is more views and subscribers — here's how to grow your YouTube channel and hit those YPP thresholds faster. Curious how YouTube compares to TikTok for UK creators? Run the same kind of estimate with our TikTok Money Calculator and see the difference side by side.
Frequently asked questions
How much does YouTube pay for 100k views in the UK?
It really depends on what you talk about. A mate of mine runs a credit card comparison channel and pulls £900-odd from 100k views — finance advertisers just pay more. Meanwhile, my gaming clips at 100k views? Closer to £150. Tech and software sits somewhere in the middle, usually £400–£800. One thing worth noting: those figures assume most of your audience is actually in the UK. If half your viewers are watching from countries where ad rates are lower, your RPM drops and so does the total.
How much does YouTube pay for 1 million views?
Anywhere from about £1,000 to £12,000 on long-form, and the niche gap is massive. Someone doing ISA explainers or insurance breakdowns could genuinely see £8k–£12k from a million UK views. Comedy sketch channels? More like £1,000–£3,000 for the same milestone. And if you're counting Shorts views, temper your expectations — a million Shorts views only brings in roughly £20–£80 because of how the pooled revenue pot works.
How many views on YouTube do you need to make £2,000 a month?
Short answer: it varies wildly by niche. If you're in finance pulling £10 RPM, around 200,000 long-form views a month gets you there. A tech reviewer at £6 RPM needs closer to 333,000. Gaming at £2 RPM? You're looking at a million views monthly, which is brutal from ads alone. Realistically, most UK creators hitting £2k combine their AdSense with a couple of brand deals and some affiliate links — that mix makes the target far more achievable.
How much does YouTube pay for 500k views?
Could be £500, could be £5,000 — I know that sounds unhelpful, but niche genuinely makes that much difference. Picture two creators both hitting 500k views last month. One does lifestyle vlogs at £3 RPM and takes home about £1,500. The other reviews pensions and earns £10 RPM from the same view count, pocketing £5,000. Exact same audience size, completely different paydays.
How much do YouTube Shorts pay in the UK?
Not a lot, honestly. You're looking at roughly £0.02–£0.08 per 1,000 views, so even a million Shorts views only translates to about £20–£80. The reason is how Shorts monetisation works: all the ad revenue from the Shorts feed goes into one big pool, then gets split across every creator based on their share of total views. On top of that, music licensing fees get deducted before the split happens. It's a volume play — useful for growing your audience, less useful for paying rent.
How many subscribers do you need to get paid on YouTube UK?
You need 1,000 subscribers plus 4,000 hours of watch time in the last 12 months to join the YouTube Partner Programme and start earning from ads. There's a lower entry point at 500 subs and 3,000 watch hours, but that tier only gives you access to fan-funding bits like Super Chat and channel memberships — not the actual ad revenue share. Most creators I know hit the 1,000-sub mark before the watch hours, so building a loyal audience that actually watches full videos is usually the real bottleneck.