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Taylor Swift doled out some gigantic bonuses to her employees on The Eras Tour with reports of her handing out $197 million. The tour, which consisted of 149 shows over 21 months, reportedly set a record with over $2 billion in tickets sold.
According to a report published by E! News on Monday, the $197 million in bonuses was divvied up between the truck drivers, caterers, merchandise team, production staff, carpenters, dancers, band, security, choreographers, hair and make-up team, wardrobe team, physical therapists, video team, and others.
Based on the $2 billion in tickets sold to The Eras Tour, that means Taylor Swift gave back around 10 percent of those earnings to the people who worked on the shows.
“We have toured the entire world with this tour, we have had so many adventures,” Swift told the audience at BC Place Stadium during the final concert on the tour on Sunday.. “It has been the most exciting, powerful, electrifying, intense, most challenging thing I’ve ever done in my entire life.”
Those bonuses come on top of the generous pay that some on the tour were already receiving. In August of 2023, near the completion of the U.S. portion of the tour, Swift reportedly gifted every one of her truck drivers a $100,000 bonus. All in all, it was reported, Taylor Swift gave out $55 million in bonuses to those who worked on that portion of The Eras Tour.
That $2 billion in ticket sales that Taylor Swift earned for The Eras Tour is twice what the previous record for a concert tour had been. Coldplay owned the previous top mark with $1 billion in ticket sales for its 156 date Music of the Spheres World Tour.
The New York Times reports that The Eras Tour saw 10,168,008 people attended the concerts, which adds up to an average ticket price of $204.
96,006 of those people attended Swift’s Feb. 16, 2024 concert in Melbourne, Australia – the biggest crowd of the entire tour.
“My band, my crew, all my fellow performers,” Taylor Swift said during one of the last stops on her tour in Toronto, “we have put so much of our lives into this, and you put so much of your lives into being with us tonight and to giving us that moment that we will never forget.”