Since the day Taylor Swift released her first single "Tim McGraw" in 2006, the singer/songwriter has mustered up a downright cult following. Her nearly two-decade career has brought masses from all over the world to her concerts, cementing her status as among the most famous (maybe she's the most famous?), well-liked pop singers ever. And thanks to her wildly successful, record-breaking Eras Tour, as of October 2024, she also became the wealthiest female musician ever.
From Swift's enormously successful music to her tour earnings and real estate portfolio, here's everything you need to know about the "Look What You Made Me Do" singer's ginormous net worth.
As of December 2024, Swift has an astonishing net worth of $1.6 billion, according to Forbes. While she hit billionaire status during the first leg of her Eras Tour in 2023, her net worth has only continued to grow. Her fortune comes from her wildly successful tours, extensive music output, brand deals, and hefty real estate portfolio, among other dizzying revenue streams.
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Though Swift started out as a small-town singer performing at local coffee shops and state fairs, she always knew she wanted to be a pop star. When she was just nine years old, she started taking vocal and acting lessons in New York City, where she learned she wanted to focus on country music.
At 11, her mom Andrea took her to Nashville to visit record labels and submit demo tapes of her covers of famous female country stars' tunes. While she received rejections from all the labels at first, according to her mom, she was determined from the very start—the barrage of "no" and rejections only fueled her desire to do better and stand out from the rest.
"She came back from that trip to Nashville and realized she needed to be different, and part of that would be to learn the guitar," her mom told Entertainment Weekly. "Now, at 12, she saw a 12-string guitar and thought it was the coolest thing. And of course, we immediately said, 'Oh no, absolutely not, your fingers are too small—not till you're much older will you be able to play the 12-string guitar.' Well, that was all it took. Don't ever say never or can't do to Taylor. She started playing it four hours a day—six on the weekends. She would get calluses on her fingers and they would crack and bleed, and we would tape them up and she'd just keep on playing."
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In 2003, when Swift was around 13 years old, she began working with the talent manager Dan Dymtrow, who got her a job modeling for Abercrombie & Fitch. That same year she performed multiple original songs at an RCA Records showcase before her family moved to Nashville so she could further her career.
When she moved to Nashville, she started working with some local singer/songwriters before ultimately signing with Big Machine Records, an independent record label started by Scott Borchetta.
Just a year after signing with the record label, Swift released her first studio album, Taylor Swift, which peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard 200 chart, and stayed on the chart for 157 weeks. She put out four hit singles in "Teardrops on My Guitar," "Our Song," "Picture to Burn," and "Should've Said No."
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In 2008, Swift released her second studio album, Fearless, which spent 11 weeks at the No. 1 spot on the Billboard 200 chart. The album's songs "Love Story" and "You Belong with Me" quickly became chart toppers and could be heard on almost every country and pop radio station in the country. Over the next two years, the singer released three other top singles—"White Horse," "Fifteen," and "Fearless." A year after her second album was released, she headed out on her first tour.
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From 2010 to 2014, Swift released two more albums: Speak Now and Red, a genre-spanning album that also opened at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. Red's lead single, "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together," was Swift's first No. 1 on the all-genre Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Though her younger years as a country artist helped kickstart her enormous net worth, it wasn't until she moved into full-on pop that she really made it into the industry's highest echelon. On October 27, 2014, she released 1989, her first "official pop album," in her words.
"This album was made completely and solely on my terms, with no one else’s opinion factoring in, no one else’s agenda factoring in," she told Billboard in 2014. "I didn’t feel that I was having to think too hard about the musical direction. In the past, I’ve always tried to make sure that I was maintaining a stronghold on two different genres, and this time I just had to think about one, which was creatively a relief. It was nice to be honest about what I was making."
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After the release of the blockbuster album, she went on The 1989 World Tour, which was the highest-grossing tour of the year, bringing in $250 million in total.
From 2014 to 2017, Swift continued to write music and coproduce with other artists like Calvin Harris, former One Direction artist Zayn Malik, and country band Little Big Town. In 2018, she began her Reputation Stadium Tour, which became the highest-earning North American concert tour in history. This tour, lasting six months, grossed more than $340 million.
In 2019, she released Lover, which became the best-selling album in the U.S. at the time. Later in the year, after a lengthy and very public debate with talent manager Scooter Braun (then working with Justin Bieber) following his acquisition of her recording catalogue, Swift began recording her old albums anew, as the original master recordings had been sold. A year later, she released two sister albums amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Folklore and Evermore, which despite a more laid-back sound, became fast favorites of her fans.
Not to let music hold back her other ambitions, Swift is known for a vast real estate portfolio, which has included homes in Rhode Island, New York City, Nashville, and L.A. You've also undoubtedly spotted some of her brand deals, like those omnipresent Capital One ads, and probably some tour merch worn by her Swifties, too.
Getty Images/John Shearer
On the music front, since 2021, Swift has continued to release new versions of her six original studio albums (she's currently signed to Republic Records). In 2022, she released the all-new Midnights, her fifth to open atop the Billboard 200. One year later, she embarked on the Eras Tour, which covered both the newer songs and redone versions of her previous studio albums. The tour lasted 632 days with 149 shows in over 50 cities across 5 different continents. Due to its length and popularity, the record-breaking tour became the highest-grossing tour in history, earning more than $2 billion.
"We have toured the entire world with this tour, we have had so many adventures,” Swift said at the sold-out show at BC Place Stadium in Vancouver, British Columbia. “It has been the most exciting, powerful, electrifying, intense, most challenging thing I’ve ever done in my entire life."
