What brands actually pay influencers
Almost every influencer rate guide is guesswork, or a survey where creators report what they wish they charged. This one is not. It is every paid brand deal our founder Liz Dean (@lizdean on Instagram) booked between 2018 and 2025: 441 campaigns, 342 brands, $542,419, taken straight from her own books.
What a typical brand deal pays
The median campaign paid $1,000. Half of all deals landed between $500 and $1,500. The full range ran from $20 to $8,000, so the outliers exist in both directions, but the middle is tighter than most rate guides suggest.
Rates by category
Category matters more than almost anything else. Beauty and tech paid roughly double what toys and apparel paid for comparable work. Categories with fewer than five deals are left out, because a handful of campaigns is not a benchmark.
| Category | Deals | Median | Middle 50% |
|---|---|---|---|
| Food and beverage | 89 | $1,000 | $750 to $1,500 |
| Home and cleaning | 81 | $1,200 | $600 to $1,500 |
| Health and wellness | 49 | $1,000 | $650 to $1,500 |
| Toys and games | 39 | $600 | $500 to $1,300 |
| Tech and electronics | 37 | $1,500 | $800 to $2,200 |
| Apparel and shoes | 34 | $600 | $500 to $1,300 |
| Baby and kids | 33 | $1,000 | $700 to $1,500 |
| Beauty and personal care | 29 | $1,500 | $800 to $2,100 |
| Everything else | 18 | $500 | $325 to $800 |
| Pet | 11 | $500 | $295 to $850 |
| Travel and experiences | 7 | $2,000 | $650 to $3,000 |
| Finance and gift cards | 6 | $2,000 | $1,775 to $2,750 |
| Fitness | 5 | $500 | $400 to $500 |
Pitching direct pays the same as going through an agency
Of 441 paid campaigns, 313 came from pitching the brand directly and 115 came through an agency or influencer network. Direct pitching produced $385,294, or 71% of all revenue.
The part worth sitting with is the median. Direct deals paid $1,000. Agency deals paid $1,000. The rates were the same either way, so whatever the agency took came out of the creator's side, not the brand's budget.
Pitching yourself did not pay less. It just meant nobody else was taking a cut of it.
The real money is in the second deal
56 brands booked more than once. That is 16% of all brands, and they produced $197,890, or 36% of total revenue.
A brand that already paid you once is the cheapest deal you will ever land. That is the whole argument for tracking relationships instead of blasting a list: most creators lose a repeat booking simply because nobody followed up at the right moment.
How rates moved from 2018 to 2025
Rates climbed through 2021, which was the strongest year at $139,025 across 85 deals, then softened. By 2025 the median campaign had dropped to $500. Volume matters more than it used to.
Audience size is the other half of this. The Instagram account behind these deals was at 102,466 in November 2020 and about 93,000 in September 2026, so read the rates as what a creator in that range was paid, not what any audience size commands. A full year-by-year follower history is not published here because we will not estimate it.
| Year | Deals | Total paid | Median deal |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 17 | $12,920 | $800 |
| 2019 | 75 | $86,655 | $800 |
| 2020 | 70 | $76,850 | $1,000 |
| 2021 | 85 | $139,025 | $1,400 |
| 2022 | 68 | $109,715 | $1,500 |
| 2023 | 42 | $42,874 | $625 |
| 2024 | 50 | $45,200 | $650 |
| 2025 | 29 | $20,540 | $500 |
How many brands you have to pitch
840 brands were pitched over this period. At least 72 of them turned into paid work, which is a floor of about 9%.
Treat that as a floor rather than a conversion rate. The outcome of most pitches was never written down, so the true number is higher. Even at the floor, the shape of the job is clear: landing roughly ten paid brand deals a year means putting a pitch in front of a few hundred brands, which is the part nobody wants to do by hand.
How this data was put together
- Every figure comes from the campaign records of one creator, Liz Dean (@lizdean), 2018 to 2025. Nothing is modelled, surveyed, or estimated.
- Only campaigns that were actually paid in cash are counted. Gifted product, unpaid exchanges, and invoices that were never settled are excluded.
- Figures are per campaign, not per post. A campaign may include several deliverables across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
- No brand is named next to a fee anywhere on this page or in the underlying data. Rates appear only as category aggregates covering many brands.
- This is one creator in the family, home, and lifestyle space, posting mainly to Instagram as @lizdean. Your category, audience size, and market will move these numbers.
- Figures were last recompiled from those records on 2026-09-22.
The pitching is the job. Let the butler do it.
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