The 50 most subscribed YouTube channels, checked 15 October 2026

MrBeast is the most subscribed YouTube channel, with 521 million subscribers when we read the YouTube Data API on 15 October 2026. T-Series is second with 316 million, Cocomelon - Nursery Rhymes is third with 203 million and SET India is fourth with 190 million. It takes 68.2 million subscribers to hold 50th place.

This page lists the top 50 with each channel's handle, subscribers, total views, video count and country, all from one reading. It then goes through the top 10 channel by channel, names the most subscribed individual creator, explains how YouTube rounds subscriber counts, and shows why other sites print a different order.

YouTube rounds every public subscriber count before we see it. The API rounds a count down to three significant figures, so a channel listed at 316,000,000 has somewhere from 316.0 to 316.99 million. Where a figure below is our own arithmetic, the text says so.

The 50 most subscribed YouTube channels in October 2026

We started from the channels on Wikipedia's list of most-subscribed YouTube channels, looked each one up by channel ID in the YouTube Data API's channels.list method, and ranked them by the subscriber count the API returned. The lookups ran between 01:17 and 01:18 UTC on 15 October 2026. All 77 lookups returned a result, and none of the top 50 hides its count.

Subscribers are the API figure, which YouTube rounds down, so 316M means 316.0 million up to 316.99 million. Total views and videos are the channel's public totals, with views in billions to one decimal place. Country is the value the channel owner set in YouTube, shown as Not set when it is blank. Rows that show the same rounded count share a rank marked with =, and are listed in the order Wikipedia gives them, because the API cannot tell them apart.

Three pairs tie at the rounded figure. Alejo Igoa and Zee Music Company both show 123 million, Colors TV and Tips Official both show 82.6 million, and ISSEI / いっせい and Aaj Tak both show 75.7 million.

We leave out channels that YouTube generates itself. Wikipedia applies the same rule to automatically generated channels with no videos of their own, and our lookups show what it removes. YouTube Movies returned 200 million subscribers with no videos and no views. Music returned 128 million, Gaming 91.8 million, Sports 74.3 million, News 35.6 million and Live 15.8 million.

We also looked up the channels in 51st to 70th place on Wikipedia's list. The highest of them, Celine Dept, has 67.7 million, which is below the 50th place channel at 68.2 million. To check a channel yourself, the Channel ID Finder turns an @handle into the channel ID that the API takes.

The top 10, channel by channel

Views per video is our own arithmetic. It is lifetime views divided by video count, and it includes Shorts and old uploads, so it describes a channel's whole history. Category and language come from Wikipedia's table. Two channels share 10th place, so ranks 1 to 10 hold 11 channels.

• MrBeast leads with 521 million. The channel was created on 20 February 2012 and has 1,006 videos with 142.7 billion views, about 141.8 million a video. Wikipedia lists it as English-language entertainment.
• T-Series is second with 316 million. It is the channel of an Indian music label, created on 13 March 2006, and it has the most views of any channel in the table. The total is 359.3 billion across 27,339 videos, about 13.1 million a video.
• Cocomelon - Nursery Rhymes is third with 203 million. Created on 1 September 2006, it has 2,152 videos and 228.6 billion views, about 106.2 million a video. Wikipedia files it under education.
• SET India is fourth with 190 million and has uploaded 177,375 videos. Its 193.7 billion views come to about 1.1 million a video, the lowest in the top 10. Wikipedia lists it as Hindi-language entertainment.
• Vlad and Niki is fifth with 151 million. It is the newest channel in the top 10, created on 23 April 2018, with 1,065 videos and about 116.3 million views each.
• Stokes Twins is sixth with 148 million. It has the fewest videos in the top 10, 477, and 33.5 billion views, about 70.2 million a video. Wikipedia lists it under People.
• Kids Diana Show is seventh with 138 million, 1,746 videos and 126.4 billion views, about 72.4 million a video.
• 김프로KIMPRO is eighth with 135 million. Wikipedia lists it as Korean-language and under People. It has 4,496 videos and 155.1 billion views, about 34.5 million a video.
• Like Nastya is ninth with 133 million, 1,115 videos and 123.4 billion views, about 110.7 million a video.
• Alejo Igoa and Zee Music Company share 10th place at 123 million each. Alejo Igoa has 1,367 videos and 37.6 billion views. Zee Music Company, which Wikipedia lists as Hindi-language music, has 17,235 videos and 92.2 billion views.

The most subscribed individual creator

MrBeast is the most subscribed individual creator, and the most subscribed channel of any kind. Wikipedia describes him as an American YouTube personality. Its record of lead changes dates his first day on top to 2 June 2024, when he passed T-Series, and lists 12 channels that have held the position across 20 runs since May 2006.

T-Series held the position before him for 1,876 days from 14 April 2019, after a back and forth with PewDiePie in early 2019. Wikipedia counts four separate runs for PewDiePie, a record. He is 14th in the table now, with 109 million.

Wikipedia's milestone table gives 300 million on 10 July 2024, 400 million on 1 June 2025 and 500 million on 12 June 2026. The API's 521 million on 15 October 2026 is 21 million more than the 500 million mark, reached 125 days earlier. YouTube rounds public counts down, so treat that gap as approximate.

The next channels Wikipedia lists under People are Stokes Twins, sixth with 148 million, and KIMPRO, eighth with 135 million. Mark Rober is 26th with 84 million subscribers from only 272 videos, about 71.4 million views a video by our arithmetic. Subscribers say nothing direct about income. What a channel earns depends on views, ad rates and format, which our guide to how much YouTube pays per view works through.

How YouTube rounds subscriber counts

YouTube Help says the public subscriber count is a shortened version of the real one, and the shortening depends on the size of the channel. A channel with 123,456,789 subscribers shows as 123M, and that figure changes only when the channel gains another million.

The Data API goes the same way. The Channels documentation says subscriberCount is rounded down to three significant figures, and YouTube's revision history dates that change to 10 September 2019. It applies even when a channel owner asks for their own channel's data. Only the owner sees exact counts, in YouTube Studio.

Two things follow for this table. A channel listed at 316,000,000 has between 316,000,000 and 316,999,999 subscribers, and every channel above 100 million moves in steps of one million. Counts can also fall, because YouTube Help says closed accounts and spam subscribers do not count toward a channel's total.

Why rankings differ between sites

Two honest lists can still disagree. We compared our API reading with Wikipedia's table as we read it on 15 October 2026, and 9 of the first 50 subscriber counts differ. These are the reasons we can show.

• The read time differs. The API figure is higher than Wikipedia's for all nine channels: by 0.1 million for seven of them, by 0.2 million for Fede Vigevani and by 1 million for T-Series, which is 316 million in the API and 315 million on Wikipedia. We cannot tell which source was fresher. One ranking page we read says its data was updated on 13 February 2025 and lists PewDiePie in its top 10, where he is 14th in this table.
• Ties are broken differently. Three pairs in this table show the same rounded count. Wikipedia lists first the channel whose growth rate says it will pass the other, and this table follows that order. A site with another rule can swap them.
• The definition of a channel differs. Wikipedia leaves out automatically generated channels and channels made obsolete by a content transfer. A list without that rule would put YouTube Movies, at 200 million, in fourth place and Music, at 128 million, between Like Nastya and Alejo Igoa.
• Country is a different field. The API gives the country the owner set. For 7 of the 50 channels it differs from Wikipedia's table: Vlad and Niki, Kids Diana Show, Like Nastya, A4, Baby Shark - Pinkfong Kids' Songs & Stories, 5-Minute Crafts and Anaya Kandhal. Three more, WWE, KL BRO Biju Rithvik and BANGTANTV, have no country set. A country tally from one source cannot be set beside another's.
• View counting changed this year. The Channels documentation says that from 24 August 2026, viewCount counts a view the moment a video begins to play, for long-form videos, Live and Shorts. The views column here was read after that date, so compare it with totals from older pages with care.
• Smooth counters are estimates. YouTube's public count moves in the steps shown above, so a counter that ticks up one subscriber at a time cannot be reading it. We did not test any such counter.

What the top 50 adds up to

These figures are our own arithmetic on the table above, using the rounded counts YouTube returns.

• 17 of the 50 channels have passed 100 million subscribers. Three of them, MrBeast, T-Series and Cocomelon - Nursery Rhymes, have passed 200 million.
• Together the 50 channels hold about 5.48 billion subscribers, 3.82 trillion views and 2,248,789 videos. Rounding down means the true totals are a little higher. People subscribe to many channels at once, so the subscriber total says nothing about how many people that is.
• By the country field, India has 17 channels and the United States 14. South Korea has 3, Argentina, Japan, Mexico, Brazil and Pakistan have 2 each, the United Arab Emirates, Portugal and Canada have 1 each, and 3 have no country set.
• Video counts vary widely. Aaj Tak has 757,313 videos and UR · Cristiano has 149. Eight channels have more than 90,000 videos each: SET India, WWE, Sony SAB, Zee TV, Colors TV, Aaj Tak, HAR PAL GEO and ARY Digital HD.
• Zee TV is the oldest channel in the table, created on 11 December 2005. UR · Cristiano is the newest. It was created on 8 July 2024 and already has 83.5 million subscribers.
• Below the top 10 the order shifts easily. From 12th to 50th place, 24 of the 38 gaps between neighbouring rows are 1 million subscribers or less.

How to check a channel yourself

1. Open the channel on YouTube. The count you see is the shortened public figure described above.
2. For a number you can store, find the channel ID, then call the YouTube Data API's channels.list method with the statistics part. The response carries subscriberCount, viewCount and videoCount, with subscriberCount rounded down as described above.
3. If the channel is yours, open YouTube Studio, then Analytics, and use the Realtime card to see your count as it moves.

If you want a date for your own next milestone, the Subscriber Growth Calculator projects 1K, 10K, 100K and 1M from what you gained in the last 30 days.

For platform-wide figures such as total users and uploads, see our YouTube statistics guide.

Starting a first channel is a different job from reaching the top 50. Our guide to how to make a YouTube channel covers the setup step by step.

Questions people ask

Sources

1. YouTube Help. Check your YouTube subscriber count. support.google.com· Checked 15 October 2026.
2. Google for Developers. YouTube Data API: Channels resource. developers.google.com· Checked 15 October 2026.
3. Google for Developers. YouTube Data API: Revision history (10 September 2019 and 27 August 2026 entries). developers.google.com· Checked 15 October 2026.
4. Wikipedia. List of most-subscribed YouTube channels. en.wikipedia.org· Checked 15 October 2026.
5. YouTubeScribe. Channel lookups through the YouTube Data API channels.list method, 77 channels, 15 October 2026, 01:17 to 01:18 UTC. youtubescribe.com· Checked 15 October 2026.
6. Epidemic Sound. The most-subscribed and most-viewed YouTube channels in 2025 (data and rankings updated 13 February 2025). epidemicsound.com· Checked 15 October 2026.

Reviewed on 15 October 2026. If a line is wrong, email support@youtubescribe.com.