How Much Do Redbubble Artists Make in 2026?

Redbubble works differently from Amazon Merch and Etsy, so its earnings work differently too. Instead of a fixed royalty or a fee-and-base-cost split, Redbubble pays you a margin you set yourself — which sounds generous until you see how it interacts with the platform's pricing and the size of the marketplace.

How Redbubble actually pays you

Redbubble sets a base price for each product (the blank item plus printing and fulfillment). You add an artist margin on top — the default is 20%, and you can change it. Your margin is applied to the base price, and base + margin = the retail price the customer pays.

Redbubble's own worked example makes it concrete: a Classic Tee with a US base price of $20, at the default 20% margin, earns you $4 and retails for $24 (before any account-level fees). Base prices for other products — stickers, mugs — are only shown once you're logged in and adding an item, so Redbubble doesn't publish a public list.

One catch to know: raising your margin raises the customer's price in a marketplace full of cheaper near-identical designs, so there's a real ceiling before sales dry up. Redbubble also added an Excess Markup Fee in August 2025 that can claw back part of your margin when you set it very high — so cranking the percentage isn't a free lever.

So how much do artists earn?

There is no reliable, named survey of Redbubble artist income, and the "average artist earns $X" numbers online have no study behind them, so I'm not repeating one.

What's true is structural, and it's the same shape as the rest of print-on-demand: a small number of artists with large, distinctive catalogs and outside traffic earn most of the money, and the typical artist earns very little. Three things set your ceiling on Redbubble: the margin you set (limited by what the market bears and the Excess Markup Fee), Redbubble's base price (which you don't control), and volume, which on a saturated platform depends on standing out. For the documented cross-platform picture, see the hub.

Making the designs

Whatever marketplace you sell on, the real work is the design itself — and in a flooded market, distinct work is the only thing that surfaces. A design tool like Kittl speeds up producing original, on-trend artwork to test.

The risks worth knowing

You don't control the base price or the margin ceiling — Redbubble sets base prices, and the Excess Markup Fee plus market pricing cap how high your margin realistically goes.
Saturation is severe. Redbubble is one of the most flooded print-on-demand marketplaces, which is why generic designs earn close to nothing.
Platform dependency — your shop lives on Redbubble, on Redbubble's terms.

My take (separate from the data above)

Redbubble is the lowest-friction way to start — free, no integrations, upload and go — and the lowest-margin way to earn. It's a reasonable place to test whether your designs resonate at all, but for income, the per-sale economics on Amazon Merch (after the royalty change) or a margin-controlled Etsy shop (fee math here) generally give you more to work with.