Mariah Carey has a net worth of $340 million, accumulated over three decades as one of the best-selling music artists in history. Born on March 27, 1969, in Huntington, New York, Carey is a singer-songwriter, record producer, and actress whose five-octave vocal range and command of the whistle register set her apart from her contemporaries. She has sold over 220 million records worldwide and holds the record for the longest-running number-one song on the Billboard Hot 100 with “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”
Updated March 2026: According to Investopedia, Carey earns an estimated $2.5 million to $3 million annually in royalties from “All I Want for Christmas Is You” alone, based on data from The Economist and Forbes. As of December 2025, the song surpassed 2 billion streams on Spotify, the first holiday song to reach that milestone.
Mariah Carey was born on March 27, 1969, in Huntington, New York, to Alfred Roy Carey, an aeronautical engineer of Afro-Venezuelan and Black American descent, and Patricia Hickey, an Irish-American opera singer and vocal coach. Her parents divorced when she was three years old. Carey grew up primarily on Long Island, New York, and attended Harborfields High School in Greenlawn, where she worked as a hat-check girl and a restaurant hostess while writing songs.
After graduating high school, Carey moved to New York City with little money and a demo tape, working as a waitress, hat-checker, and floor sweeper in a beauty salon while trying to break into the music industry. She met Tommy Mottola, then-president of Sony Music, at a party in 1988, where he heard her demo. Mottola signed her and the two eventually married in 1993, though they separated in 1997.
Carey’s self-titled debut album was released by Columbia Records on June 12, 1990. It produced four consecutive number-one singles — “Vision of Love,” “Love Takes Time,” “Someday,” and “I Don’t Wanna Cry” — making her the only artist to have their first five singles reach number one in the United States (the fifth being “Emotions” from her 1991 second album). She won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance in 1991.
Carey achieved her greatest commercial success with Music Box (1993) and Daydream (1995), each selling over 20 million copies worldwide. Daydream included “Fantasy” and the record-setting duet with Boyz II Men, “One Sweet Day,” which held the Billboard Hot 100 number-one position for a then-record 16 weeks. Her 1994 holiday album Merry Christmas spawned “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” which eventually reached number one on the Hot 100 in 2019 — 25 years after its release — and has since held the top spot for multiple consecutive holiday seasons.
After a public breakdown and career setback in the early 2000s, Carey staged a full commercial comeback with The Emancipation of Mimi (2005), her best-selling album of the 21st century, led by the number-one single “We Belong Together.” Rolling Stone ranked her as the fifth-greatest singer of all time in 2023. She has 19 number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100, the most of any solo artist. She earned the American Music Award for Favorite Pop/Rock Female Artist multiple times and has won five Grammy Awards.
In 2025, Carey won a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Andy Stone and Troy Powers over “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” with the judge ruling the songs were sufficiently different and ordering Stone and Powers to pay a portion of Carey’s court fees, per Parade.
Carey was married to Sony Music chairman Tommy Mottola from 1993 to 1997. She later had a relationship with baseball player Derek Jeter and was briefly married to comedian and actor Nick Cannon from 2008 to 2016. With Cannon, she has twin children: Monroe and Moroccan Scott Cannon, born April 30, 2011. Carey has resided in New York and Malibu, California, and is known for her Christmas-themed personal branding and annual holiday campaign that has become a fixture of pop culture since the mid-1990s.
Carey co-founded Camp Mariah with the Fresh Air Fund in 1994, a free summer camp for New York City youth that continues to operate. She has been vocal about her experiences with bipolar disorder, publicly discussing her diagnosis in 2018 and contributing to broader conversations about mental health in the entertainment industry.
Mariah Carey’s net worth is estimated at $340 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth, as cited by Investopedia. Her total career earnings before taxes and expenses are estimated at over $600 million.
According to calculations from The Economist and Forbes, Carey earns approximately $2.5 to $3 million annually in royalties from the song. Total lifetime royalties from the track had exceeded $60 million by 2017, and that figure has grown substantially since. The song crossed 2 billion streams on Spotify in December 2025, generating an estimated $7.4 million from Spotify alone.
Mariah Carey has 19 number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100, the most of any solo artist. She had 11 consecutive years of number-one singles on US charts, earning her the Billboard designation of Artist of the Decade for the 1990s.
As of March 2026, Mariah Carey is 56 years old. Mariah Carey was born on March 27, 1969 in Huntington, New York, USA.
Mariah Carey stands 5’7″ to 5’9″ tall (170-175 cm).
Mariah Carey has been married twice. Her first marriage was to music executive Tommy Mottola from 1993 to 1998. She then married Nick Cannon in 2008, and they divorced in 2016. Carey and Cannon share twins Monroe and Moroccan.
Yes, Mariah Carey has two children — twins Monroe “Roe” and Moroccan “Roc” Scott Cannon, born on April 30, 2011. She shares custody of the twins with ex-husband Nick Cannon. The twins are 14 years old as of 2026.
Mariah Carey resides in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City. Carey has long been associated with the luxurious lifestyle of Manhattan.
Mariah Carey earns $2.5–3 million annually in royalties from her iconic hit “All I Want for Christmas Is You” alone. She also earned more than $30 million from her Las Vegas residencies.