As of 8/24/16, the Katy Perry net worth figure of $158 million comes from adding income from music sales, concerts, acting, endorsement deals and investments. The pop diva has earned more than twice that amount. Were it not for taxes and expenses, our Katy Perry net worth figure would come in at a much higher $390 million. Perry’s earnings include $7 million from album sales, $12 million from sales of singles and $225 million from concert tours. Also adding to Katy Perry’s net worth are $120 million in endorsements, $26 million from acting and $21 million from investments. Subtracting from Katy Perry net worth calculations are $126 million in taxes and $78 million in expenses.
Katy Perry Net Worth Facts
The Katy Perry net worth sum of $158 million is 1/2 the size of Beyonce’s net worth of $372 million. Miley Cyrus’ net worth of $247 million is almost twice the size of Katy Perry’s net worth. Katy Perry’s net worth is 3.5 times larger than Selena Gomez’s and 3.7 times larger than internet star PewDiePie’s. Compared to Katy Perry’s net worth, Bernie Sanders’ net worth of $528,014 is 300 times smaller. Compared to Bill Gates’ net worth of $80 billion, Katy Perry’s net worth is 505 times smaller. Finally, Katy Perry’s net worth is 2,327 times larger than the median American family’s net worth of $68,000.
Katy Perry Net Worth Over Time
Katy Perry began building her net worth in 2008 with the release of her first big album, One of the Boys. Since that time, the singer has added over $158 million to her net worth.
Katy Perry’s net worth has climbed fairly steadily. While music sales have earned millions for the pop diva, the biggest contribution to Katy Perry’s net worth by has come from concert tours. In the chart above, the two big spikes in Perry’s income (shown in red) come from her two main concert tours, The California Dreams Tour and The Prismatic World Tour. The first tour took in $59 million at the box office and the second pulled a staggering $204 million. According to our sources, big name music stars often get the lion’s share of concert ticket sales. By our estimates, those two tours alone added over $224 million to Katy Perry’s net worth. That’s ten times what the singer earned from music sales. However, it’s not quite twice as much as endorsements have added to the star’s net worth.
Also see: Beyonce Net Worth
Katy Perry Net Worth: Album Sales, Concerts, Endorsements
The factors that make up Katy Perry’s net worth are album sales of $7 million, singles sales of $12 million, concert tours at $225 million, endorsements at $120 million, acting roles at $26 million and investments at $18 million. We estimate total Katy Perry net worth earnings at $391 million. Even so, Katy Perry’s net worth is only $158 million because of $176 million in taxes and $78 million in expenses.
Concert Tours and Katy Perry Net Worth
It’s common for the largest part of a big singer’s net worth to come from concert tour income, and Katy Perry’s net worth is no exception. The artist’s first tour, the Hello Katy Tour, earned her only $1.3 million. That may be because she hadn’t established herself yet as a major talent. Perry’s second tour, The California Dreams Tour, did considerably better, pulling in $50.5 million. The singer’s third tour, The Prismatic World Tour, raked in $204.3 million, a staggering amount for any live performer.
It’s not known exactly how much each tour really added to Katy Perry’s net worth. However, since single artists often get most of the revenue from their concerts, it’s a safe bet Perry earned 85% or more of each show’s revenue. That means concerts probably added over $225 million to Perry’s net worth.
Also see: Selena Gomez Net Worth
Music Sales and Katy Perry Net Worth
Perry has taken in $7 million from album sales and $12 million from sales of hit singles. The star has sold 18 million albums and about 91 million singles, pulling in total revenue of $19 million. We’ve broken out additions to our Katy Perry net worth numbers from album and singles sales below.
Album Sales and Katy Perry Net Worth
Perry’s first album, Katy Hudson in 2001, sold only 200 units and likely earned her about $78. It wasn’t until 2008’s hit One of the Boys that Perry really hit her stride, selling over 7 million units and raking in $2.7 million. Since then, Perry’s albums have had sales and downloads in the millions, including Teenage Dream at $2.2 million for Perry and Prism at $1.5 million. Perry’s smaller albums include a remix and an MTV Unplugged album that added a combined $400,000 to Katy Perry’s net worth.
Industry estimates place a top music star’s earnings from album sales at about 6.6% of total profits. From that figure, we were able to estimate Perry’s earnings from the sale of each album.
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Singles Sales and Katy Perry Net Worth
We estimate Perry’s singles sales at 91 million units. We figured on a unit cost of $1.99 per single. That would place the total revenue from Perry’s singles sales at $181,090,000. We estimated Perry earned 6.6% of the money brought in from each single sale. That would place Perry’s earnings at $11,951,940 from sales of singles. That means music sales added an estimated $19 million to Katy Perry’s net worth.
Perry’s sense of humor is well known. Check it out on display in this 1/11/16 tweet from the Golden Globes:
Found a curly fry in my dress just now. Gonna eat it. Hope that's ok. #goodnightgoldenglobes
— KATY PERRY (@katyperry) January 11, 2016
Katy Perry Net Worth and Endorsements
Like most music superstars, Katy Perry has added to her net worth from endorsements. While it’s not known exactly how much endorsements have contributed to Katy Perry’s net worth, it’s a safe bet the figure is well into the millions. Perry has her own perfume line, including Purr, Meow! and Killer Queen. She also has long standing deals with Walmart and Cover Girl, as well as endorsement deals with Adidas and Pepsi. Based on comparisons to other superstars in both the music and sports industry, we estimate Perry’s endorsements at around $120 million dollars. This is from figuring a round number of $15 million a year in endorsements since the star hit it big in 2008 added to Katy Perry’s net worth.
Acting Roles and Katy Perry Net Worth
Katy Perry’s net worth has tacked on $26 million from acting work for film, TV and video.
Perry has shown her talents as an actress since 2011, when she appeared in an episode of How I Met Your Mother. We estimate the star was paid $30,000 for that performance. Several other video and TV performances in 2011 and 2012 also added to Katy Perry’s net worth, including a one-episode stint on the sitcom Raising Hope. Perry also played the role of Smurfette in 2011’s The Smurfs, which pulled in $563 million at the worldwide box office. Perry reprised the role for The Smurfs 2 in 2013.
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Katy Perry Net Worth and Investments
We estimate Katy Perry grew her net worth by about $18 million from investments. We built our figure by adding 6% to Katy Perry’s net worth each year. 6% is a reasonable estimate for investment income. The only exceptions are 2008, when Perry wouldn’t have had much investment income, and 2009. 2009 is a special case, since the financial crisis of 2008/2009 was causing stock value to shrink. If Perry invested the bulk of her net worth during that time, she would have lost 30% to 40%. That’s about $3 million lost in stock and bond investments in 2009.
Taxes Subtract from Katy Perry Net Worth
Death and taxes are unavoidable for everyone except offshore corporations. Since Perry isn’t one of those, she most likely pays taxes. Lots of them. In fact, Katy Perry’s net worth is drained by $8 million to $10 million per year. In years where her income spiked from concert tour money, Perry likely paid more like $36 million to $52 million in taxes. Katy Perry’s net worth is probably decreased by a total career tax bill of around $175 million.
Perry is in a 39.6% tax bracket, and that’s just federal taxes. Tacking on state and local taxes likely puts the star’s tax chunk up around 40% or higher.
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Katy Perry Net Worth and Expenses
Everyone has expenses, and stars like Katy Perry likely have more expense costs than most people. Apart from cost of living, the star also likely pays music agents, film agents, staff, operating costs, marketing firms and other costs. We estimated that about 20% of Perry’s income went to pay expenses. That would add up a total career expense bill of about $62 million dollars subtracting from Katy Perry’s net worth.
How We Figured Katy Perry’s Net Worth
Putting all our estimates together, we came up with our final Katy Perry net worth figure of $158 million. To get the figure, we totaled up her estimated earnings each year from album sales, singles sales, concert tours, endorsements and acting work. We had hard numbers for her music sales and concert tours. To figure the amount of money Katy Perry actually received for each of these however, we had to rely on industry estimates for the percentages actually paid to singers. Acting was tougher. We know all of Perry’s acting credits, but figuring the amount added to Katy Perry’s net worth from each is not so easy. For that estimate, we looked to publicly released acting payouts for big stars in similar roles.
Endorsements was the toughest part of our Katy Perry net worth calculations. We had to look at endorsement estimates for other big name stars in the music, sports and acting world and go from there. A round figure of $15 million per year for the star since 2008 seems reasonable, though we caution that the star’s endorsement take could be as much as 50% higher or lower than that figure.
Next we subtracted taxes and expenses. Figuring Perry’s taxes wasn’t difficult, because we know she’s in a 39.6% federal tax bracket. Expenses were tougher, because it’s hard to know exactly how much a star spends on agents, cost of living, operating costs and other expenses. We estimated 20% subtracted from Katy Perry’s net worth for expenses.
Finally, we figured Perry has invested most of her net worth each year. Using a conservative estimate of 6% gives us her total investment income of $21 million between 2008 and 2015.
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