How much money do stars make from Christmas songs in 2025? From Mariah Carey to Wham!

Even in 2025, a single seasonal hit can still deliver a dependable December payday.

For some artists, the income from songwriting royalties alone is enough to live on, a premise neatly illustrated by Hugh Grant’s Will Freeman in About a Boy. And for others whose chart fortunes have faded since their moment of festive glory, Christmas remains the gift that keeps on giving.

The money flows from multiple streams: compilation albums, streaming platforms, physical sales, advertising syncs, film and TV placements and, crucially, cover versions that bring old songs back into circulation each year.

Mariah Carey’s 1994 hit All I Want for Christmas Is You has become less a Christmas song than an annual event, reliably soundtracking shop floors, office playlists and December parties alike.

Three decades on, the record remains a financial juggernaut. Carey is estimated to earn between £1.8 million and £2.24 million in royalties from the song each year, according to figures from Forbes and The Economist. By 2017, it had generated more than £44.8million in royalties since its release, with co-writer Walter Afanasieff also receiving a substantial share.

Its dominance is cultural as well as commercial. The track is the most-streamed holiday song of all time, the highest-charting festive single by a solo artist on the Billboard Hot 100 and returns to charts across dozens of countries every December with metronomic precision.

In 2021, it made history once again, becoming the first — and so far only — holiday song to receive the RIAA’s Diamond Award, recognising 10 million sales and streaming units in the US.

Slade’s Merry Christmas Everyone may have first topped the charts in 1973, but its earning power shows no sign of seasonal fatigue.

Written by frontman Noddy Holder alongside bandmate Jim Lea, the song has long since graduated from festive hit to cultural fixture — one that resurfaces every December to soundtrack office parties, supermarket aisles and family gatherings.

The financial upside is just as enduring. As of 2024, the track is estimated to generate around £1 million a year in royalties, with the sharpest spike arriving, predictably, in December. Over the decades, that annual windfall has added up to a reported £50 million in total earnings from the song alone according to The Sun.

Remarkably, the two most famous British Christmas songs were released on the same day in 1973.

Merry Christmas Everyone went up against I Wish it Could be Christmas Everyday for the first time 51 years ago and they are both still regular fixtures in the top 40.

Wizzard came off second best that time but the song has charted every year in the UK since 2007 and has already reached the top 40 in 2025.

It earns songwriter Roy Wood a reported £180,00 a year.

Welsh singer Michael Barratt, better known as Shakin’ Stevens, scored a Christmas number one in 1985 with Merry Christmas Everyone (not to be confused with Slade’s near-identical festive staple).

But while the song continues to pay out handsomely, Stevens himself receives only a modest slice of the annual takings. The bulk of the royalties flow to the songwriter: according to The Sun in 2024, the track brings in around £140,000 a year, of which Stevens pockets roughly £10,000.

However, the lion’s share, an estimated £130,000 annually, goes to lyricist Bob Heatlie, a reminder that when it comes to Christmas classics, the real money is often in the writing.

Wham!’s Last Christmas remains one of the most-played seasonal songs in the world.

Written by George Michael in his childhood bedroom, the 1984 single was famously denied the Christmas number one spot by Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? — a record Michael also appeared on. At the time, Wham! donated all proceeds from Last Christmas to the Ethiopian famine appeal.

Four decades on, the song has become one of the most lucrative hits in British pop history. Industry estimates long cited by The Independent put its annual royalties at around £300,000 — a figure still widely regarded as the benchmark, despite exact numbers being kept confidential by PRS, the Performing Right Society.

That level of income places Last Christmas among the top five highest-earning Christmas songs of all time in the UK. Following Michael’s death on Christmas Day in 2016, aged 53, his estate has continued the tradition he began, with the song’s full royalty income donated to charity each year.

When The Darkness released Christmas Time (Don’t Let the Bells End), they weren’t aiming to create a festive fixture. It was a tongue-in-cheek rock song, recorded at Abbey Road, written quickly and delivered with a wink.

Yet the track surged to number two on the UK singles chart in December 2003, narrowly missing the Christmas number one spot to Michael Andrews and Gary Jules’ cover of Mad World. At the height of the band’s fame and in the era of peak CD sales, it reportedly pulled in around £1 million in its first month alone.

More than 20 years on, the song still resurfaces every December. But frontman Justin Hawkins has been clear that its annual payday is far more modest than fans might assume. Christmas royalties, he has explained, are driven less by how often a song is heard and more by publishing deals and licensing.

He said: “If somebody uses your song in say, a movie, then you get a bump of cash. There really are so few hard copy sales these days that royalties from that are extremely small.”

Rather than festive excess, Hawkins jokes that the song’s yearly return inspires only a small upgrade in his weekly shop. “When you can hear our Christmas song from mid-November I do hear the sound of a small pound coin entering a piggy bank in my head,” he said. “Then I think, ‘Ah yes, I will buy the Tesco Finest range instead of economy’.”

The song was written by Hawkins alongside bandmates Frankie Poullain, Ed Graham and Dan Hawkins, meaning royalties are split between them. It sold 385,000 copies in the UK during the 2003 festive season alone and has since racked up tens of millions of streams worldwide — more than 46 million on Spotify.