If you’re setting your creator marketing budgets for 2026, here’s the number worth pinning to the wall: 87.49% of brands expect their influencer budget to go up this year, and only 5.55% expect it to drop. That’s from the Influencer Marketing Hub 2026 Benchmark Report, which surveyed more than 600 marketers. When almost nine in ten people spending the money plan to spend more, and barely one in twenty plan to spend less, that’s not a wobble. That’s the whole industry leaning in the same direction at once.
So the interesting question isn’t whether budgets are rising. It’s where the extra money actually lands. And the answer is good news if you’re a smaller brand watching the big spenders and wondering where you fit.
Budgets are climbing, and almost nobody is cutting.
The scale of the increase is the part that surprised me. It’s not a polite few percent. In the same report, 72.22% of brands said they expect their creator budget to rise by 50% or more this year. Half again on what they spent last year, for a huge chunk of the market.
You can read that two ways. The nervous read is that creator content is getting more crowded and more expensive, so you’d better bring a bigger wallet. The useful read is that the people closest to the results, the ones actually running the campaigns, keep voting with their budgets to do more of this. Brands don’t pour 50% more into a channel that isn’t working. They protect it.
The money is moving down-market.
Here’s the shift that matters most for a small brand. All that extra spend isn’t flooding towards celebrities and million-follower accounts. It’s moving the other way, towards the smallest creators.
The 2026 report calls it a down-market shift, and the numbers back it up. Brands are expanding their use of nano and micro creators far faster than macro or celebrity work. UGC creators sit right in that expansion: half of brands plan to grow their UGC use this year, and not a single respondent said they’d cut it or stop. Zero. In a survey of 600-plus marketers, nobody is walking away from user-generated content.
That tracks with what I see from the brand side of my inbox. The ask isn’t “get me one famous face.” It’s “get me a steady stream of real content that looks like a customer made it.” Reach used to be the whole game. Now brands want content that converts, and a nano creator or a UGC creator gives them that without the celebrity price tag.
UGC is the cheapest seat in the room.
When the same brands were asked what they pay by tier, UGC came out lowest of the lot. Roughly 80% of UGC creator pricing sat under $500 a piece. Compare that to mid-tier creators, where the most common bands were $2,000 to $5,000 and $5,000 to $10,000, and the value gap does the talking for you.
This is the bit I’d underline if you run a smaller brand. You don’t need a big-budget influencer line item to get in on the fastest-growing part of creator marketing. UGC is where the growth is and where the prices are lowest at the same time. If you’ve been putting it off because you assumed creator content meant celebrity money, that assumption is costing you. It’s worth knowing what UGC actually costs in the UK before you write it off.
Brands want the money back fast.
The other figure that jumped out at me was about patience, or the lack of it. Nearly two-thirds of brands, 65.9%, expect their creator spend to pay back within a month. Almost half, 48.4%, expect it inside two weeks. And the teams with the shortest payback windows were the same ones scaling their budgets hardest.
Short payback expectations reward a certain kind of content. One perfect hero video that took six weeks to make doesn’t fit a two-week window. A batch of UGC clips you can post, test, cut into ads and reuse across your channels does. That’s why more brands are choosing a UGC retainer over one-off videos. When you need results fast and often, a steady drip of ready-to-post content beats the occasional big production.
Shoppers would rather watch than read.
There’s a demand-side reason all this money keeps flowing to short video. Wyzowl’s State of Video Marketing 2026 found that 63% of shoppers would rather learn about a product or service from a short video than read about it. Video isn’t a nice extra any more; it’s how people prefer to be sold to. Ninety-one percent of businesses now use it.
Put the two halves together and the picture is simple. Brands are spending more, they want it back quickly, and their customers want to watch a real person use the thing before they buy. UGC sits exactly where those three lines cross.
What this means for your creator marketing budgets in 2026.
If you’re deciding your creator marketing budgets for 2026, the data points one way. You don’t need the biggest budget on the block. You need the format that gives you volume, speed and content that feels real: short-form video from creators who look like your customers. That’s the corner of the market where spend is growing fastest, prices are lowest, and payback comes soonest.
The brands winning at this aren’t the ones with the deepest pockets. They’re the ones treating UGC as an always-on habit rather than a one-off experiment. A handful of clips a month, tested and reused, quietly outworks a single expensive campaign.
If that’s the year you want to have, I film and edit scroll-stopping UGC for brands, handled end to end and ready to post. You can see the packages and pricing here, or email me at [email protected] and tell me what you’re working on.
