Taylor Swift’s long-standing reputation for generosity toward her tour crew is once again in the spotlight in her new Disney+ docuseries, The End of an Era.
The second episode of the series, which premiered on Friday, December 12, shows the Grammy-winning artist personally preparing bonus envelopes for her dancers during The Eras Tour. Swift reveals that she handwrote individual notes to every employee and sealed each envelope with wax — a process that took her several weeks.
TAYLOR SWIFT HANDS
OUT $197 MILLION IN BONUSES TO HER ERAS TOUR TEAM pic.twitter.com/0aGo4PqU4g— Kosh Media (@koshmedia_) December 13, 2025
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“Bonus day is so important,” Swift says in the episode. “Setting a precedent with The Eras Tour really matters to me. When the tour grosses more, the people who work on the road get more. These people work so hard, and they’re the best at what they do.”
She added that writing the notes was one of the most meaningful parts of the process. “It’s fun to think about the lives they’re going back to, the kids they haven’t seen for months, and making that time away worthwhile,” Swift said. “It feels like Christmas morning when you finally get to say thank you.”
While the docuseries does not disclose the exact bonus amounts, multiple reports have previously stated that Swift distributed tens of millions of dollars in bonuses to tour staff over the course of the nearly two-year run.
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The Eras Tour itself was a historic financial success. According to The New York Times, the 149-date tour grossed more than $2 billion in ticket sales alone — a figure that does not include merchandise revenue, profits from the Eras Tour book, or earnings from her 2023 concert film, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, which grossed $261 million worldwide.
The tour’s unprecedented success helped push Swift into billionaire status. Forbes reported last year that she crossed the milestone, and as of 2025, estimates her net worth at $1.6 billion.
Earlier this week, Swift joked during an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert that she used proceeds from The Eras Tour to buy back her master recordings. Billboard reported that she paid $360 million to acquire them from venture capital firm Shamrock Holdings.
Although exact figures for dancer salaries have not been made public, industry standards from Dancers Alliance list preferred rates of $465 for eight hours of rehearsal and a minimum of $2,730 per week while on tour. Swift has long been praised for exceeding industry norms, with former collaborator Ben Clark previously noting that she paid her musicians a salary early in her career — a rarity for emerging artists.
“As a new artist, to offer a salary is almost unheard of,” Clark said in 2024. “That’s how they ran their business and how they took care of us.”
Source: People