UGC Roster Research · Q3 2026
The UGC Rates Report
What brands budget, what creators list, and what contracts actually settle at. Anonymized aggregates from the Roster marketplace: 167 campaigns, 20,551 applications, 115 contracts, and 1,685 imported public creator rate cards.
Published August 30, 2026 · All figures USD · Every stat carries its sample size · Free to cite with attribution to UGC Roster
01 · The negotiation gap
Creators list $195. Brands budget $200. Contracts settle at $140.
The listed rate and the budget are almost identical. The signature is not. Across signed contracts on Roster, the median contracted rate lands at $140 n=32, roughly 28% below the median creator listed rate of $195 n=368 and 30% below the median per-creator campaign budget of $200 n=71. The money is there at the start of the negotiation. It thins out on the way to the signature.
Median rate at each stage of the deal (USD)
Listed rates from imported public creator rate cards. Budgets parsed from campaign postings. Contract amounts from signed contracts, midpointed when quoted as a range.
02 · The going rate
A UGC video contracts for $100 to $250. Median $140.
Half of all signed contracts on Roster land between $100 p25, n=32 and $200 p75, n=32. The top decile clears $570, and the highest signed contract observed was $1,500. Campaign budgets tell the same story from the brand side: median $200, with a p75 of $525 n=71.
Signed contract amounts by percentile (USD, n=32)
Brand budgets per creator by percentile (USD, n=71)
03 · Followers vs price
Followers barely move the price.
A creator with under 1,000 followers lists a median $167.50 per package n=80. A creator with 10,000 to 50,000 followers lists $200 n=61. That is up to a 50x audience difference for roughly 20% more money. In UGC, brands buy the content, not the reach, and listed rates reflect it.
Median listed rate by follower tier (USD)
Follower tiers from creators' primary platform at import time. Tiers above 50k did not clear the n>=30 reporting bar and are omitted.
04 · Competition
The median campaign draws 97 applications. One hire takes 65.
Applications per campaign: median 96.5, with a 75th percentile of 183 and a 90th percentile of 385 campaigns, n=134. The most applied-to campaign drew 1,239 applications. Platform-wide, 20,551 applications sit against 316 hire records, about 65 applications for every creator added to a brand roster.
Applications per campaign by percentile (n=134 campaigns)
Hiring volume is climbing on the platform: 164 hires in August 2026 against 73 in May hires, n=316, though platform growth confounds that trend, so read it as Roster demand, not the market.
05 · The gifted economy
Only 42% of campaigns guarantee cash.
Of 156 labeled campaigns, 65 are paid-only (42%) n=156. The rest offer gifted product only (21%), gifted plus a fee (8%), or tie compensation to commission and affiliate performance (24%). Signed contracts show the same shape: 28% of all contracts are gifted-only and 14% are affiliate-only n=115.
Campaign compensation mix (share of labeled campaigns, n=156)
Contract pay structures (share of all contracts, n=115)
Rev-share combines 50-50 and 33-67 splits. Five contracts had no readable structure and are shown as unknown.
Put differently: more than half of UGC deals do not guarantee a dollar. Creators pricing their work should treat gifted and commission offers as a separate market from cash contracts. Browse the cash side on the live opportunities board.
06 · Rates by niche
Business pays. Beauty is saturated.
Business and B2B content carries the highest median listed rate at $220, with a 90th percentile of $920 n=89. Beauty sits below the market median at $180 n=317 while being the second most crowded category on the platform: 1,358 of 1,685 imported creators list Beauty on their rate card. Heavy supply, ordinary prices.
Median listed rate by category (USD)
Creators can list multiple categories, so category samples overlap. Only categories with n>=30 priced packages are shown.
07 · Platform parity
The TikTok premium is dead. $150 on both.
Median listed rate for an Instagram package: $150 n=186. For a TikTok package: $150 n=107. The distributions separate only at the top, where TikTok's mean runs slightly higher ($281 vs $245). Packages tagged to other or multi-platform bundles command more: median $250 n=66. YouTube did not clear the n>=30 bar and is omitted.
Listed rates by platform (USD)
08 · Usage rights
68% of contracts are organic-usage only.
Of 110 contracts with a stated video use, 75 cover organic posting only (68%), 19 cover paid ads (17%), 14 cover both (13%), and 2 include whitelisting (2%) n=110. Paid usage is where content earns its keep for brands, and it remains the exception at signature, which suggests usage rights are still an underpriced line item on both sides of the deal.
Contracted video usage (share of typed contracts, n=110)
09 · Pricing opacity
Two in five rate card lines hide the price.
Across 811 pricing line items on imported public creator rate cards, 333 read contact for pricing (41%) and only 368 carry a number items, n=811. Opacity is itself a market feature: when nobody publishes prices, nobody anchors them. Among the packages that do publish, the top decile clears $550 and the highest listed package is $4,000 n=368.
Creators who publish a number make it easier for brands to shortlist them. If you are building a rate card, start from the medians in this report and browse how other creators present theirs in the creator directory.
10 · Methodology
How these numbers were made.
Data window and source
All figures are read-only aggregates from the UGC Roster production platform, computed August 30, 2026 for the Q3 2026 report, covering all-time platform data through that date. Aggregates only: no creator names, brand names, emails, or ids were used or retained.
What each number measures
This report covers listed rates and contracted rates, never earnings. Creator listed rates come from imported public creator rate cards (1,685 creators, 811 pricing line items, of which 368 carry a usable number). Brand budgets come from campaign postings. Contract amounts come from contracts created on the platform (n=115, of which 41 had parseable amounts and 32 were signed with parseable amounts). No payout ledger backs this report, so no claims are made about what creators earn.
Free-text parsing
Budgets and contract amounts are free-text fields. 71 of 167 campaign budgets and 41 of 115 contract amounts parsed to a usable dollar figure. Amounts quoted as a range were midpointed. Unparseable entries were excluded, not imputed.
Currency
All amounts are assumed USD. No non-USD symbols appeared in budget or contract fields; one GBP mention was observed in application free text and did not affect any reported figure.
Sample-size rule
Every statistic displays its sample size (n). Nothing is published with n below 30 unless flagged as context. Percentiles use linear interpolation. YouTube platform splits and follower tiers above 50k fell under the bar and are omitted.
Known limits
Hire records are not linked to individual applications, so time-to-hire is not computable this quarter. The hiring trend reflects Roster platform growth as well as market demand. Listed rates are asks, not clearing prices; the negotiation-gap section exists precisely because the two differ.
Citing this report: attribute figures to UGC Roster, UGC Rates Report Q3 2026, and link to this page. For press inquiries or the underlying aggregate tables, reach us via the contact page.