The Short Answer
Forbes released its Highest-Paid Podcasters of 2026 list on July 30, and the numbers are staggering even by celebrity-earnings standards. Joe Rogan tops the list with an estimated $82 million in podcast earnings for “The Joe Rogan Experience,” covering June 2025 through June 2026. Behind him: the relatively new AI-focused show TBPN at $70 million, Steven Bartlett’s “Diary of a CEO” at $45 million, and true-crime juggernaut “Crime Junkie” at $42 million. Lower down the list, two of the biggest names in sports and pop culture crossover content — Travis and Jason Kelce’s “New Heights” and Alex Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy” — both landed in the top ten, at $35 million and $32 million respectively.
How Forbes Actually Calculates These Numbers
Before getting into who made the list, it’s worth understanding exactly what these figures represent, because the methodology matters more than most coverage has explained. Forbes describes its estimates as reflecting money “earned by talent and/or their corporate entities through minimum guarantees, revenue sharing, platform fees, and live events” across a twelve-month window running from June 2025 to June 2026. Those estimates were built through interviews with agents, lawyers, managers, executives, and other industry sources rather than pulled from public filings, since most podcast earnings deals are private.
Crucially, Forbes’ numbers represent pretax earnings specifically tied to podcast work — they don’t include the often-substantial additional income many of these same people earn from movies, television, radio, endorsement deals, entrepreneurial ventures, live appearances, or investments. They also don’t subtract fees paid to agents, managers, or lawyers. That distinction matters because some competing rankings and social media posts have circulated inflated figures — most notably a widely shared claim that Joe Rogan earns $120 million, a number that reportedly reflects contract ceilings and gross show revenue rather than his actual talent earnings, which Forbes puts closer to $82 million.
The Top of the List: Joe Rogan’s Enormous Lead
Joe Rogan’s $82 million in estimated earnings puts him well clear of the rest of the field — more than $10 million ahead of the second-place finisher, and well over double what several other major names on the list brought in. “The Joe Rogan Experience” has remained the dominant force in podcasting for years running, built on Rogan’s massive Spotify deal and a format built around long-form, unscripted conversation that’s proven durable across a wide range of guests spanning politics, science, comedy, and combat sports.
In second place is a newer name to most casual observers: TBPN, hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, reportedly bringing in $70 million. TBPN has built its audience specifically around Silicon Valley and AI industry coverage, reflecting just how much earning power has flowed into podcasts covering the tech and AI boom over the past two years — a genre that barely registered on lists like this one even a few years ago.
Rounding out the top five: Steven Bartlett’s “Diary of a CEO” at $45 million, Ashley Flowers’ true-crime powerhouse “Crime Junkie” at $42 million, and “SmartLess” — the show hosted by Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, and Sean Hayes — at $37 million. SmartLess’s inclusion is a notable long-term success story in its own right: the show started in 2020 as what its hosts have described as essentially a pandemic-era experiment, and has since grown into one of the most consistently monetized shows in the entire medium.
Where the Kelce Brothers and Alex Cooper Landed
Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and his brother, retired Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce, placed seventh on the list with their show “New Heights,” pulling in an estimated $35 million together. The show’s rise has been remarkably fast by podcasting standards: built initially around the brothers’ shared NFL background and easy on-air chemistry, “New Heights” grew quickly enough to land a three-year, $100 million deal with Amazon’s Wondery in August 2024 — a landmark contract that covers both hosts, global distribution rights, and their entire back catalog of episodes. That deal, along with a steady stream of high-profile celebrity guests over time, helped push the show toward the top tier of the entire podcast industry, and the brothers now command significant premiums for custom advertising integrated into both full episodes and shorter social media clips.
Just behind the Kelces at number eight: Alex Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy,” estimated at $32 million for the same period. Cooper signed her own blockbuster deal with SiriusXM in August 2024 — a three-year, incentive-laden agreement with a total potential value of up to $125 million, meaning a portion of that ceiling only pays out if specific performance targets are met. At the time of signing, Cooper spoke publicly about feeling the weight of the responsibility that came with a deal of that scale, having built “Call Her Daddy” from an independent, comparatively low-budget show into one of the most commercially significant podcasts hosted by a woman in the industry’s history.
Notably, at least one competing analysis has pointed out that Ashley Flowers of “Crime Junkie,” at $42 million, is technically the highest-paid woman in podcasting overall — a distinction some other rankings and social posts have mistakenly attributed to Cooper, even though Cooper’s $32 million places her below Flowers on Forbes’ own list.
The Rest of the Top 20
Beyond the top eight, several other major names rounded out Forbes’ full top-20 ranking. Mel Robbins, the motivational speaker whose eponymous podcast has become a major SiriusXM property, tied with the Kelce brothers at $35 million. Dax Shepard’s long-running “Armchair Expert” came in at $25 million, followed by Amy Poehler’s newer show “Good Hang” at $24 million and Jay Shetty’s “On Purpose” — a show popular among celebrity guests specifically — at $21 million. Rounding out the list at number 20: Bravo’s “Summer House” stars Hannah Berner and Paige DeSorbo, whose pop-culture-focused show “Giggly Squad” brought in an estimated $18 million.
Why SiriusXM’s Presence on the List Stood Out
One detail that generated its own separate wave of industry coverage: three of the top 20 highest-paid podcasters — SmartLess, Mel Robbins, and Alex Cooper — are all platformed on SiriusXM, with each having signed with the satellite radio company within roughly the past two years, each for deals worth at least $32 million. Industry analysts have pointed to that concentration as clear evidence of SiriusXM’s aggressive, well-funded strategy to lock down top podcasting talent, treating major podcast acquisitions as a direct driver of paid subscription growth in a way traditional satellite radio content has struggled to replicate on its own.
That competitive dynamic extends well beyond SiriusXM. According to reporting on the broader podcast economics behind this year’s list, streaming and distribution platforms have been engaged in an escalating bidding war for top talent — with Netflix, for example, reportedly opening negotiations with smaller offers in the one-to-two-million-dollar range, getting turned down across the board, and eventually returning with offers exceeding $10 million annually in order to pull major shows away from competitors like Spotify, iHeart, and YouTube.
The Chelsea Handler Moment That Added a Fresh Wrinkle
The list’s release didn’t go entirely without friction. Comedian Chelsea Handler responded directly in the comments section of Forbes’ Instagram post revealing the rankings, publicly criticizing Joe Rogan’s $82 million earnings given what she described as his frequently uninformed commentary on serious topics. That kind of direct, public celebrity pushback against a “highest paid” list is itself a fairly common feature of these annual Forbes rankings — previous years’ lists covering actors, athletes, and musicians have similarly generated commentary and criticism from other public figures reacting to where their peers landed, or how much they earned relative to the perceived quality or substance of their work.
Handler’s comment added a fresh news cycle of its own on top of the original list, with multiple entertainment outlets covering her remarks as a standalone story within hours of the original rankings going live — a pattern that’s increasingly common with high-profile “highest paid” list releases, where the list itself generates one wave of coverage and any notable public reactions to it generate a second.
What This List Reveals About the Podcast Industry Broadly
Taken as a whole, the 2026 rankings offer a useful snapshot of just how much money now flows through an industry that, less than a decade ago, was still widely treated as a niche, low-budget medium relative to television or film. The presence of a show like TBPN — built specifically around AI and tech industry coverage — in the number two overall spot reflects how quickly entirely new podcast genres can generate enormous commercial value once they find the right audience at the right moment in a broader cultural conversation.
The list also illustrates a broader trend of major platforms treating top podcast talent acquisition as a direct, strategic lever for subscriber growth, rather than simply licensing existing shows passively. The nine-figure deals behind shows like “New Heights” and “Call Her Daddy” reflect that shift directly: platforms like Amazon’s Wondery and SiriusXM are increasingly willing to make enormous, multi-year financial commitments specifically to secure exclusive access to hosts with proven, large, engaged audiences — treating those hosts less like traditional media personalities and more like anchor investments meant to drive broader platform loyalty.
Joe Rogan’s Deal: How He Got to $82 Million in the First Place
Rogan’s position atop this list isn’t new — he’s topped or near-topped Forbes’ podcast rankings for several years running — but the scale of his earnings still reflects one of the most consequential deals in the medium’s history. Rogan signed an exclusive licensing agreement with Spotify originally reported to be worth over $200 million across multiple years, later expanded in subsequent renegotiations, which moved “The Joe Rogan Experience” from a widely available, multi-platform show into a Spotify-exclusive property (before later returning to a broader multi-platform distribution model). That original deal fundamentally reshaped how the entire industry thought about exclusive podcast licensing, essentially proving that a single show could be valuable enough to function as a subscriber-acquisition tool for an entire streaming platform, the same strategic logic that’s since driven SiriusXM’s aggressive spending on shows like “Call Her Daddy” and “SmartLess.”
What’s kept Rogan at the top isn’t just the original deal size — it’s sustained audience scale. “The Joe Rogan Experience” consistently ranks among the most downloaded and streamed podcasts in the world, across a format built on lengthy, largely unedited conversations that can run two, three, or more hours per episode. That format has proven remarkably resistant to the kind of audience fragmentation that’s affected other forms of media, in part because Rogan’s audience tends to consume full episodes rather than short clips, which drives outsized advertising and platform-fee value per listener compared to shows built around shorter-form content.
TBPN’s Rapid Rise: A Case Study in New-Genre Podcasting
TBPN’s number-two ranking is arguably the most surprising entry on this year’s entire list, given how recently the show entered the podcast conversation compared to legacy names like Rogan or “SmartLess.” Built specifically around covering the technology and artificial intelligence industries — a subject area that’s exploded in both business and cultural relevance over the past two to three years — TBPN, hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, has managed to convert that surging interest into a show valuable enough to command $70 million in estimated annual earnings.
That trajectory illustrates something important about how quickly podcast economics can shift when a show identifies and captures a genuinely underserved, high-value audience early. Tech industry professionals, investors, and executives represent an advertiser-friendly demographic with significant purchasing power, meaning a show that can reliably reach that specific audience commands premium advertising rates even with a comparatively smaller total listener base than a mass-market show like Rogan’s. TBPN’s rise mirrors a broader pattern across the podcast industry in recent years: as AI has become one of the most closely followed business stories of the decade, shows built specifically around covering it in depth have captured outsized commercial value relative to their overall size.
How Live Events and Ad Premiums Factor Into These Numbers
A detail easy to miss in most coverage of the Forbes list: the earnings figures include revenue from live events, not just the podcast episodes themselves. Several shows on this year’s list — including “SmartLess,” “Call Her Daddy,” and “New Heights” — have all expanded into ticketed live tapings and touring events in recent years, turning a purely audio-and-video product into something closer to a full entertainment brand with multiple revenue streams. For hosts like the Kelce brothers, whose “New Heights” already commands premium rates on both full-episode sponsorships and short-form social clips, live shows represent an additional layer of monetization that a purely on-platform podcast wouldn’t otherwise capture.
That diversification matters for understanding why some shows with smaller total audiences than industry giants like Rogan’s can still land solidly in the top ten. A show that successfully converts a portion of its audience into live-event ticket buyers, and separately negotiates strong custom-advertising premiums for its most engaged social clips, can generate substantial additional revenue that a simple download-count comparison between shows wouldn’t reveal on its own.
The Growing Presence of Athletes and Sports Figures on the List
The Kelce brothers’ placement on this year’s list continues a broader trend of professional and former professional athletes successfully transitioning into major podcasting earners, leveraging built-in fame and audience trust from their sports careers into an entirely separate media business. “New Heights” in particular benefited from a specific structural advantage: Travis Kelce’s ongoing NFL career and his high-profile relationship with Taylor Swift have kept the show consistently in the broader pop-culture conversation well beyond a typical sports-podcast audience, pulling in listeners who might never otherwise seek out football-adjacent content.
That crossover appeal is a meaningful part of why “New Heights” was able to command a nine-figure deal from Wondery in the first place — the show’s actual addressable audience extends well past the traditional NFL fan base and into general entertainment and celebrity-culture listeners, giving advertisers a broader and more diverse audience to reach than a standard sports-talk podcast would typically offer.
How This Year’s List Compares to the Broader Podcast Boom
The scale of money represented across this year’s full top-20 list — nearly every single entry earning well into eight figures — reflects just how dramatically the podcast industry’s economics have shifted over the past several years. A decade ago, podcasting was still widely treated by major media companies as a low-cost, experimental medium, valuable mainly for audience building rather than direct, substantial revenue generation. The nine-figure platform deals now routine among top shows — Wondery’s $100 million commitment to the Kelce brothers, SiriusXM’s up-to-$125-million deal with Alex Cooper — represent a fundamentally different competitive landscape, one where major platforms treat top podcast talent acquisition with the same seriousness and financial commitment historically reserved for premium television and film talent.
That shift also reflects changing audience behavior more broadly. Podcast listening has continued to grow steadily as a primary media consumption habit, particularly among younger audiences who increasingly treat long-form audio and video content as a preferred alternative to traditional television and radio programming. As that audience base has grown and matured, advertisers have followed, willing to pay increasingly premium rates to reach podcast audiences that tend to be highly engaged, demonstrate strong brand loyalty toward their favorite hosts, and are more likely to act on host-read advertisements than they are on traditional commercial breaks.
Why This List Generates Fresh Coverage Every Single Year
Forbes’ annual “highest paid” franchise — covering athletes, actors, musicians, and now podcasters — has become a genuinely reliable, recurring news event precisely because it converts private, closely guarded financial information into a single, easily digestible public ranking. Most of the deals referenced in this year’s podcast list were never fully disclosed by the platforms or talent involved at the time they were signed; Forbes’ estimation process, built from industry-source interviews rather than public filings, is often the only time these figures become widely available at all.
That scarcity of hard financial data is part of why the list generates such consistent engagement and debate every year, including moments like Chelsea Handler’s public pushback this time around. Fans, industry watchers, and the hosts themselves all treat the annual release as one of the few genuine windows into an industry that otherwise operates with very little public financial transparency, ensuring the list itself becomes a notable news cycle independent of any single name that appears on it.
Quick Recap
Forbes’ Highest-Paid Podcasters of 2026 list, released July 30, is topped by Joe Rogan at an estimated $82 million, followed by TBPN’s John Coogan and Jordi Hays at $70 million, Steven Bartlett at $45 million, and Ashley Flowers’ “Crime Junkie” at $42 million. Travis and Jason Kelce’s “New Heights” landed at number seven with $35 million, built on a three-year, $100 million Wondery deal, while Alex Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy” came in at number eight with $32 million, tied to a SiriusXM contract worth up to $125 million over three years. The list — covering earnings from June 2025 through June 2026, based on estimates from agents, managers, and industry insiders — also sparked public pushback from comedian Chelsea Handler over Joe Rogan’s earnings, adding a fresh wave of coverage to an already widely discussed release.
This piece reflects reporting through July 31, 2026.