TikTok Creator Fund: What It Pays, Who Can Join (2026)

The TikTok Creator Fund was the first serious attempt by any short-form video platform to pay creators directly for the views their content earned. Launched in 2020 with a $200 million purse that scaled to $1 billion over three years, it set the pace for every other creator payout program that came after it, and remains the yardstick most creators still use when they weigh ways to make money on TikTok against each other. In the United States the Fund itself is no longer accepting new applicants, having been phased out and replaced by the Creator Rewards Program, but it still runs in several European and UK markets, and the historical pay data is useful for anyone deciding whether to lean on view-based payouts at all.

Key Takeaways

What Is the TikTok Creator Fund

The TikTok Creator Fund is a direct-payout program that pays eligible creators based on the engagement their videos generate. Payouts come from a fixed pool TikTok commits to in advance, which means the per-view rate rises and falls with how much total content the Fund serves in a given day.

TikTok announced the Fund in July 2020 with an initial $200 million commitment in the US, then expanded it to the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. In 2021 the company said the fund would scale to $1 billion over three years, and it has since paid out to tens of thousands of creators across those markets. Payment is calculated per 1,000 qualifying video views, with authenticity, engagement, and compliance with Community Guidelines all factored into the per-mille rate.

The important detail most explainers get wrong: this is not an ad-revenue share. YouTube pays Partner Program creators a percentage of the ads shown on their videos. The TikTok Creator Fund paid out of a separate pot that had nothing to do with how much a given video earned in advertising, which is why the per-view rate stayed stubbornly low even as the app grew its ad business.

Is the TikTok Creator Fund Still Available

The answer depends on which country you are posting from. The Fund has one status in the United States and a different status in Europe.

United States: Closed

TikTok shut down the Creator Fund for US creators on December 16, 2023. From that date, new US applicants could no longer join, and existing US Fund participants were moved onto the Creativity Program Beta, which was renamed to the Creator Rewards Program in early 2024. The newer program pays several times more per 1,000 qualified views, but it requires videos to be longer than one minute, which is a hard shift away from short-form native TikTok content.

UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain: Open

The original Creator Fund remains active in these markets as of this writing. Eligible creators can still apply from inside the app and receive payouts under the original terms, which means short-form videos still qualify, and the lower per-view rate still applies. There has been no public roadmap for when (or if) TikTok plans to retire the European Fund.

Creator Fund vs Creator Rewards Program

For US creators the practical comparison is between the old Creator Fund and the newer Creator Rewards Program, since the first is retired and the second is the only remaining direct-payout option on the app. The two programs are structured very differently.

How Much the TikTok Creator Fund Actually Paid

Public creator reports and TikTok’s own statements line up on the same payout range: between $0.02 and $0.04 per 1,000 qualifying video views. That works out to $20 to $40 per million views, which is one to two orders of magnitude lower than the YouTube Partner Program’s typical $1,000 to $5,000 per million views on long-form content.

Real Creator Numbers

Creators who have published their Creator Fund dashboards publicly cluster around the same range. A creator with 1.5 million followers typically reports Fund earnings of roughly $300 to $500 for a month that generated 15 to 20 million views. One widely circulated screenshot from a mid-tier creator showed $0.027 per 1,000 views as the effective rate across a full month, with no single video breaking $0.04.

Comparing the Fund rate against TikTok’s other payout surfaces makes the gap easier to see. Current RPM numbers for what TikTok pays per view across every monetization program cover Rewards Program, Pulse, Series, and Live Gifts alongside the legacy Fund rate, which is the right frame if you are deciding where to put your production time.

Why the Rate Was So Low

Two structural reasons. First, the Fund paid from a fixed pool. If creator submissions doubled in a month, each video received half as much per view, because the pool did not grow with content supply. Second, the Fund was never tied to ad revenue. YouTube can afford $2 to $5 RPMs because advertisers pay directly against each watch. TikTok’s Fund paid out of a marketing budget line, which is bounded by what the company is willing to spend on creator acquisition in a given year rather than by what the content itself earns.

Who Can Join the TikTok Creator Fund

The requirements are identical across every market where the Fund is still open. All four of these have to be true at the moment you apply, and TikTok re-checks eligibility monthly for continuing participants.

• You are 18 years or older. TikTok checks the birthday on the account, not on the device.
• Your account has at least 10,000 authentic followers. Bot or purchased followers that get later purged will push the account below the threshold and freeze payouts.
• You have at least 100,000 video views in the last 30 days. Views on removed or shadow-flagged videos do not count toward the total.
• Your account is based in a supported country. United States applicants can no longer join (the Fund is closed there); UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain accounts remain eligible.
• Your account is in good standing. Active Community Guidelines strikes, duplicated-content flags, or dispute history will block the application until they clear.

How to Join the Creator Fund (Where It Is Still Open)

If you are in the UK or EU and meet the eligibility rules above, the application takes under two minutes from inside the TikTok app. The flow has not changed meaningfully since 2021.

What Happens After Approval

A new Creator Fund dashboard appears under Creator Tools showing estimated earnings per day, lifetime earnings, and a 30-day view count. Payouts arrive about 30 days after the end of each calendar month, which means a video that goes viral in January pays out at the end of February. The payment threshold is £10 or €10, and payments come through PayPal or the Zelle-equivalent in each market.

US Creators: Use the Creator Rewards Program Instead

The Creator Rewards Program lives in the same menu, listed as Creator Rewards Program (or Creativity Program if your app has not updated). Requirements are the same 18+ / 10K followers / 100K views, but videos must be longer than one minute to qualify for payouts. Short-form content under 60 seconds is still searchable and discoverable but earns zero through this program.

Why So Many Creators Quit the Creator Fund

By 2022 the Fund had become a punchline in creator circles. The main complaints were all variations on the same math problem.

Better Ways to Monetize TikTok

The Creator Fund is one of five or six payout surfaces TikTok offers, and it is rarely the biggest line on a creator’s income statement. The three that pay substantially more for most accounts are the Creator Rewards Program, TikTok Shop affiliate commissions, and Live Gifts for creators who go live more than twice a week.

Affiliate payouts in particular have overtaken the Fund for mid-tier creators in beauty, fashion, home, and consumer tech. A single viral product video can earn more in commissions than a month of Creator Fund views, which is why becoming a TikTok Shop affiliate has become a more useful route than any Fund-focused play for most mid-tier accounts.

Brand deals follow a similar pattern. Creators in the 50K to 500K follower range are landing $400 to $2,000 flat fees for a single sponsored video, which almost always clears a month of Fund earnings in one post. Pulse (TikTok’s ad revenue share with top-performing content) and Series (paid-access video packs) round out the surfaces worth testing before any serious effort goes back into the Creator Fund.

Turn Your TikTok Bio Into a Monetised Hub

The single link in your TikTok bio is almost always worth more than the Creator Fund payout line. A dedicated link-in-bio page lets you route the same follower base to a Shopify store, an affiliate shop, a newsletter signup, a Discord community, or a Patreon, all from one URL that TikTok allows you to drop into Profile.

brandID is purpose-built for exactly this use case. The free plan ships with unlimited links, a custom URL at brandid.app/yourname, click analytics for every link, built-in affiliate shop blocks, and a theme editor that matches your TikTok profile picture and bio colors. Creators plug in their TikTok bio URL once and route every subscriber to a hub they fully control, which pays regardless of whether the Fund or the Rewards Program ever changes its RPM again.

Bottom Line

The TikTok Creator Fund paid between two and four cents per 1,000 views for the three and a half years it ran in the US, which is roughly 1 to 2% of what long-form YouTube pays for comparable watch time. US creators now use the Creator Rewards Program instead, which pays substantially more but only on videos longer than one minute. UK and EU creators can still join the original Fund, though the per-view rate has not improved. For every tier of creator, affiliate payouts through TikTok Shop and a monetized link-in-bio page outearn the Fund quickly enough that treating the Fund as a primary income line is a strategic mistake rather than a plan.

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