Miles Teller Net Worth 2026: The $40M Rooster Fortune

Miles Teller‘s net worth is estimated at $16 million to $40 million as of November 2026. The wide range is the story itself: before April 2026, most trackers put him at $12 million to $16 million on the strength of a $3.5 million Top Gun: Maverick payday, then Celebrity Net Worth raised its figure to $40 million after the $325 million sale of The Finnish Long Drink Company, the canned-cocktail brand Teller backed as an early investor in 2019. Teller has refused to say what his share of that sale was worth, so the honest number is a range, not a single figure. Behind the range sits a career that runs from an $8,000 paycheck for Whiplash to a $17.8 million Pacific Palisades mansion bought in 2026, months after wildfire destroyed his previous home there.

Early Life and Background

Miles Alexander Teller was born on February 20, 1987, in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, a borough in Chester County about 30 miles west of Philadelphia. His mother, Merry, worked as a real estate agent; his father, Michael, worked as a nuclear power plant engineer. He has two older sisters, Erin and Dana. The family moved several times while he was growing up — Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and then Florida — and settled in Citrus County, Florida, when Miles was around twelve. That peripatetic childhood, moving between small towns and new schools, later became part of his own account of learning to read rooms fast, a skill that shows up in the ease with which he shifts between comedy, drama, and blockbuster work.

At Lecanto High School in Florida, Teller was the kind of student who did everything at once. He played alto saxophone, drums, piano, and guitar, served as president of the drama club, played baseball, and at one point hoped to pursue baseball professionally. He also worked as a server at a local restaurant called Crackers. The school’s production of Footloose gave him an early stage role; years later, in 2011, he appeared in the Hollywood remake of the same film. The music mattered more than it looked at the time: the drumming he learned as a teenager became the foundation of the performance that made his name, and the piano and guitar skills resurfaced in Top Gun: Maverick, where his rendition of “Great Balls of Fire” became one of the film’s most talked-about scenes.

One event from those years left a permanent mark. In 2007, during a summer break from college, Teller was a passenger in a car returning from a music festival in Connecticut when the vehicle lost control at 80 mph and flipped eight times. He was thrown from the car and left with multiple scars on his face and neck that remain visible today, along with serious shoulder injuries. He has spoken about the crash rarely and plainly, without turning it into a set piece. The scars became part of his screen presence — directors never hid them, and Teller never asked them to — and the accident is one reason his face reads as lived-in rather than polished on camera.

Education

After graduating from Lecanto High School in 2005, Teller moved to New York City to study at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. At Tisch he studied method acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute and screen acting with Stonestreet Studios, and he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in drama in 2009. The training was classical in shape — Strasberg method work, scene study, voice — and it arrived just as the 2007 crash had given him, at twenty, an unusually direct acquaintance with physical risk and recovery.

The NYU years also supplied his first professional footholds. He appeared in short films and in a 2009 television appearance on ABC’s The Unusuals, and his teachers and classmates formed the network that carried him into auditions after graduation. Teller has said in interviews that the Tisch training taught him to treat acting as a craft with repeatable technique rather than a matter of instinct alone, a view that fits the way he prepared for Whiplash: weeks of drumming practice on top of years of playing, so that the camera could hold on his hands without a double.

Career Journey

Teller’s feature-film debut came in 2010 with Rabbit Hole, the independent drama starring Nicole Kidman, who also produced the film and helped select Teller for the role of Jason, the teenage driver whose accident kills Kidman’s character’s son. The part was small and the pay was smaller — Teller has said he earned $5,000 for it — but the film put him in front of serious directors and proved he could hold a scene against an Oscar winner. He followed it with the 2011 Footloose remake, the 2012 found-footage party comedy Project X, and the 2013 college comedy 21 & Over, building a reputation as a reliable young actor who could handle comedy without losing the dramatic register.

The Spectacular Now (2013) changed the shape of his career. Playing Sutter Keely, a charming, self-destructive high-school senior, opposite Shailene Woodley, Teller won the Special Jury Award for Acting at the Sundance Film Festival, shared with Woodley. Critics singled out the looseness of the performance — the sense that Sutter was thinking on his feet — and the film remains the one Teller’s admirers cite when they argue he is a better actor than his franchise work suggests. Woodley and Teller would reunite almost immediately in the Divergent series, where he played Peter Hayes, the antagonist-turned-ally, across Divergent (2014), Insurgent (2015), and Allegiant (2016). The three films grossed more than $765 million combined worldwide and gave Teller his first sustained exposure to franchise-scale pay and franchise-scale audiences.

The years after Whiplash tested his judgment. He took the lead in the 2015 Fantastic Four reboot as Reed Richards, a film that was poorly received by critics and audiences and is now remembered as one of the decade’s notable superhero misfires. Rather than retreat, Teller stacked serious work on top of it: War Dogs (2016) opposite Jonah Hill, playing real-life arms dealer David Packouz in a story about two young men who won a massive Pentagon ammunition contract; Bleed for This (2016), for which he underwent a dramatic physical transformation to play boxer Vinny Pazienza; Only the Brave (2017), about the Granite Mountain Hotshots wildland firefighters; and Thank You for Your Service (2017), as a soldier struggling after returning from Iraq. He also led the Amazon Prime Video crime drama Too Old to Die Young (2019) for director Nicolas Winding Refn. None of these films made him rich on its own. Together they built the credibility that let him walk into a Top Gun sequel as a co-lead rather than a supporting player.

The 2020s moved him into producing as well as acting. In 2022 he starred as producer Albert S. Ruddy in the Paramount+ miniseries The Offer, a dramatization of the turbulent production of The Godfather, and served as an executive producer on the series. The same year he appeared opposite Chris Hemsworth in the Netflix science-fiction thriller Spiderhead. In 2025 he starred opposite Anya Taylor-Joy in the Apple TV+ film The Gorge, on which he was also an executive producer, and appeared in the A24 romantic fantasy Eternity alongside Elizabeth Olsen and Callum Turner, again as an executive producer. The producing credits matter to the money story: executive-producer fees and backend participation pay differently from straight acting salaries, and they signal a career shifting from hired hand to stakeholder.

Rise to Fame

Whiplash (2014) is the performance that made Miles Teller a serious actor in the eyes of the industry. Directed by Damien Chazelle, the film cast him as Andrew Neiman, an ambitious jazz drummer subjected to the brutal teaching methods of instructor Terence Fletcher, played by J.K. Simmons. Teller already knew how to play drums, but he underwent extensive additional training and performed much of the drumming seen on screen. The film earned five Academy Award nominations and won three, including Best Supporting Actor for Simmons, and it grossed $49 million worldwide on a $3.3 million budget. Teller himself was nominated for the BAFTA Rising Star Award, a Gotham Independent Film Award for Best Actor, and a Satellite Award for Best Actor. The pay for all of it, by his own account to The Times in 2016: $8,000 after taxes.

That $8,000 figure became the defining anecdote of his early career, and Teller has returned to it more than once. “When I did Whiplash, after taxes, I made like $8,000,” he told The Times. “So for me to be able to make a living, and to pay off my student loans and to do things you want to do, you gotta make studio films.” The line reads as a mission statement for everything that followed: the Divergent franchise, Fantastic Four, War Dogs, and eventually Top Gun: Maverick were, in that telling, the studio films that paid for the indies he loved.

Top Gun: Maverick (2022) delivered the audience his earlier work never had. As Lt. Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw — the son of Nick “Goose” Bradshaw, whose death was a pivotal event in the original 1986 Top Gun — Teller played the emotional center of the sequel opposite Tom Cruise. The film grossed nearly $1.5 billion at the worldwide box office, became the highest-grossing film of Cruise’s career, and turned Teller from a critics’ favorite into a mainstream movie star. His $3.5 million salary for the role, reported by Celebrity Net Worth, was more than 400 times his Whiplash pay. The film also gave him the scene general audiences remember best: Rooster at the piano in a bar, playing “Great Balls of Fire” while the room watches, a moment that used the musical training from his Florida school years directly.

The La La Land episode sits between those two poles and still follows him. Teller was originally attached to star in Chazelle’s musical alongside Emma Watson, and the part eventually went to Ryan Gosling opposite Emma Stone. Page Six reported in 2017 that Teller had been offered $4 million and held out for $6 million; The Hollywood Reporter carried a similar account. Teller has disputed that version flatly, telling Empire that the claim he turned down $4 million was “complete bullshit” and telling Esquire in 2015 that he received a call from his agent saying Chazelle no longer thought he was creatively right for the project. The film went on to gross $448 million on a $30 million budget and win six Academy Awards. Whatever happened in the negotiation, the episode shows the moment his asking price first became a public story — and the moment he learned how fast a salary rumor can harden into a reputation.

Main Sources of Income

Acting salaries remain the base of Miles Teller’s income. His film fees run from the five-figure indie paychecks of his twenties to the $3.5 million he earned for Top Gun: Maverick, and his television work — The Offer, Too Old to Die Young — pays on a separate, per-episode scale that streaming platforms do not disclose. Producing fees form a second stream: he was an executive producer on The Offer, The Gorge, and Eternity, which typically means a fee on top of the acting salary plus a share of any backend or profit participation, though the size of those shares is not public.

The third stream, and the one that changed his net worth most in 2026, is the Long Drink investment. Teller bought a minority stake in The Finnish Long Drink Company in 2019, increased it in January 2023 with fresh personal capital to fund a national marketing expansion, and stayed hands-on: traveling bar to bar, working with distributors, and appearing in the brand’s advertising. When Mark Anthony Group, the company behind White Claw, acquired the business in April 2026 for a reported $325 million, Teller’s stake converted into the largest single payday of his life — of an undisclosed size. A fourth, smaller stream is residuals and streaming licensing from a filmography that now includes two billion-dollar-scale franchises, and a fifth is real estate, where a Studio City purchase in 2016 produced a $1.7 million gain on sale seven years later.

Salary and Earnings

The salary record for Miles Teller is unusually well documented, because Teller himself has talked about the numbers. The table below uses only figures tied to a named source or to his own statements, and flags the one figure that rests on trade-press reporting alone.

The arc is steep: $5,000 for his debut, $8,000 for the film that won three Oscars, then a jump into seven figures once the franchise work began. The Top Gun: Maverick figure deserves a comparison inside its own cast. Tom Cruise started on a reported $12 million salary and finished with around $100 million from the film once his backend participation was counted, according to Business Insider and Variety reporting carried by trade outlets. Val Kilmer, returning briefly as Iceman, earned a reported $400,000. Teller’s $3.5 million sat second among the cast — a long way behind Cruise’s backend-driven total, and a long way ahead of everyone else in the ensemble. It also explains why his next roles were negotiated from a different position: after a $1.5 billion film, a $3.5 million fee is a floor, not a ceiling, and trade reporting has suggested his asking price for major studio roles now sits in the $5 million to $8 million range. That figure is unconfirmed, and we label it as such.

What the salary table cannot show is the money that never appears in a fee. Teller’s executive-producer credits on The Offer, The Gorge, and Eternity carry fees and participation that studios do not publish, and the Long Drink sale is a capital event, not a salary. The public salary record therefore understates his 2026 position — which is exactly why the net worth range in this article is so wide.

Businesses and Investments

The Finnish Long Drink Company is the single most consequential business decision of Miles Teller’s life, and it began by accident. In 2019 he came across the brand’s founders conducting a tasting at a liquor store in New York. The product is a canned version of Finland’s traditional “long drink,” a gin and grapefruit-soda mix. Teller liked it, bought a minority stake within a year, and then did something most celebrity investors do not do: he worked the brand. He traveled from bar to bar across the country promoting it, worked with distributors, took part in advertising campaigns, and in January 2023 increased his stake with his own money to fund a national marketing expansion. Other celebrity investors came in alongside him — DJ Kygo and professional golfer Rickie Fowler among them, with Jay-Z’s Marcy Venture Partners also listed as an investor — but Teller was the one most often photographed wearing the brand’s hat and talking about it in interviews.

The business grew fast. Since 2022 the brand more than tripled in size, selling 3.3 million 9-litre case equivalents in 2025 and becoming the sixth largest spirit-based ready-to-drink brand in the United States, in a ready-to-drink category worth $13.9 billion in the U.S. by 2025. In April 2026, Mark Anthony Group — the company behind White Claw, Mike’s Hard Lemonade, and Cayman Jack — acquired The Finnish Long Drink Company for a reported $325 million. The deal was Mark Anthony’s first major spirits-based ready-to-drink acquisition, and it closed weeks after the announcement.

What Teller personally received is the one number nobody will confirm. “I don’t really talk numbers,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in April 2026, declining to reveal his earnings from the sale. “I was always taught that’s not in good taste. All I’ll say is that I’m not retiring from acting anytime soon.” Celebrity Net Worth, which had carried his net worth at $16 million before the sale, raised it to $40 million in its September 2026 update, citing the acquisition. That $24 million jump is the site’s estimate of his proceeds plus the career value around them — not a disclosed figure. It is also the reason this article anchors at $40 million while keeping the $16 million floor in view: if his stake was small, the lower end is closer to the truth; if it was large, as Forbes reporting on his increased stake suggests, the upper end is. No outlet has published his ownership percentage, and this article will not guess one.

Beyond Long Drink, Teller’s business footprint is thin by design. He has no publicly documented second startup, no fashion label, and no venture portfolio that shows up in filings or trade reporting. His production work — executive producer on The Offer, The Gorge, and Eternity — is the closest thing to a second business, and it is best read as career infrastructure: producing gives him a say in material, a fee beyond the acting salary, and a credit that compounds. The 2026 picture is therefore unusually concentrated for a star of his standing: one big acting franchise, one big drinks exit, and real estate. That concentration is also a risk — a single deal drove most of the 2026 increase — and it is worth stating plainly.

Brand Deals and Sponsorships

Teller’s most visible commercial relationship is Long Drink itself, and it is not a standard endorsement. He was an equity holder who promoted the product because he owned part of it, wearing the brand’s hat in interviews, traveling to bars and distributors, and shaping its marketing — work that The Hollywood Reporter and trade coverage describe as hands-on rather than a paid-post arrangement. That distinction matters: an endorsement pays a fee and ends, while equity pays when the company sells, which is what happened in April 2026.

Away from Long Drink, Teller has no large publicly documented endorsement portfolio. He has not fronted a watch, car, or fashion campaign of the kind that fills other actors’ income tables, and no major standalone sponsorship deal with a disclosed fee shows up in trade reporting. What he has done is the quieter version of the same work: appearing at brand events, supporting the drinks business in interviews, and lending his name to the FireAid benefit concert in January 2025, where he spoke about losing his home in the Palisades Fire. The absence of a big endorsement roster is itself a data point — his income is unusually tied to acting fees and one investment, rather than spread across the sponsorship deals that pad many celebrity balance sheets. It also leaves headroom: a star of his profile, after a $325 million brand exit he helped build, is in a strong position to command endorsement fees if he chooses to pursue them.

Houses, Cars and Other Assets

Real estate is the most concrete part of Miles Teller’s wealth, because property records leave a paper trail that salaries do not. In 2016 he paid $3 million for a home in Studio City, California. He listed it for $5.7 million in May 2023 and ultimately sold it for $4.7 million — a $1.7 million gain on the purchase price, before costs, across seven years of ownership.

The Pacific Palisades story is longer and harder. In March 2023, Teller and his wife Keleigh paid $7.5 million for a Cape Cod-style home in Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades neighborhood: 6,600 square feet, five bedrooms and seven bathrooms, built in 2015, set between the Palisades Bluffs and Palisades Village. In January 2025 the house was destroyed in the Palisades Fire, one of the Los Angeles wildfires that destroyed around 7,000 homes and businesses, killed 12 people, and displaced nearly 100,000 residents. Keleigh shared the final photograph she had taken of the home as they drove out, and later wrote that she wished she had grabbed her Monique Lhuillier wedding gown; it was lost in the fire. Teller has described the morning in interviews: waking to see the fire small on the horizon, his wife — a Southern California native — reading the wind, his grandmother living with them after his grandfather’s death weeks earlier, and a 90-minute window between waking and mandatory evacuation. One item he carried out was his late grandfather’s watch.

The financial aftermath is still partly opaque. The couple subsequently sold the fire-damaged lot for $2 million — $5.5 million less than they paid for the house, though describing the whole gap as a loss would be misleading without knowing what their homeowners insurance paid. That Christmas, Teller surprised Keleigh by having the wedding dress recreated. Then, rather than leaving the neighborhood, they doubled down on it: in May 2026 they paid $17.8 million for a newly constructed mansion in the Lower Riviera section of Pacific Palisades, a home originally listed at $22.5 million. The three-story house spans 10,293 square feet on 0.37 acres, with six bedrooms, custom oak paneling, a chef’s kitchen with a walk-in pantry and a separate catering kitchen, a wine bar, a home theater, a full bar and lounge, a wine cellar with a tasting room, a gym, a sauna and steam room, an elevator, and an outdoor pool, spa, firepit, and outdoor kitchen. The purchase came weeks after the $325 million Long Drink sale closed, and the timing is hard to miss: the most expensive home Teller has ever bought followed the largest payday of his life by a matter of weeks.

On cars, the public record is thin. No reliable outlet has published a verified list of Teller’s vehicles, and this article will not invent one. He is not known as a collector in the way some of his peers are, and his public appearances center on homes and work rather than garages. What can be said is that his asset base is property-heavy and concentrated in Los Angeles: a Studio City sale banked, a Palisades loss absorbed, and a larger Palisades purchase made in the same neighborhood that burned.

Awards and Achievements

Teller has never won an Academy Award, and his awards record is thinner than his reputation suggests — a gap that says more about the kinds of films he makes than about the quality of the work. The headline honor came early: the Special Jury Award for Acting at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival for The Spectacular Now, shared with Shailene Woodley. Whiplash brought the nominations that mattered most to his standing — the BAFTA Rising Star Award, a Gotham Independent Film Award nomination for Best Actor, and a Satellite Award nomination for Best Actor — while the film itself won three Academy Awards, including Best Supporting Actor for J.K. Simmons, from five nominations. He also shared a CinemaCon Ensemble Award with the Fantastic Four cast in 2015, and picked up MTV Movie Award and Teen Choice Award nominations along the way.

The recent work has added producing recognition. As a co-producer of The Gorge, Teller was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie. In 2025 he won the Distinguished Performance Award at the Savannah Film Festival for Eternity. In October 2026 he was honored with the Artist of Distinction Award at the Newport Beach Film Festival, presented at the festival’s annual Honors ceremony — a career award that arrives as his second act, the post-Top Gun run of producing and prestige projects, gathers pace. The Top Gun: Maverick performance also earned him a Critics’ Choice Super Award nomination for Best Actor in an Action Movie in 2023. The honest summary: one Sundance win, a BAFTA Rising Star nomination, an Emmy nomination as a producer, and a filmography whose commercial peak — nearly $1.5 billion for Top Gun: Maverick — dwarfs its trophy count.

Net Worth Growth Over the Years

The table below is a NetWorthCraft estimate built from the reported salaries, property records, and tracker figures cited in this article. The early years are reconstructions from known paydays; the 2026 range reflects the disclosed disagreement between trackers after the Long Drink sale.

Two things stand out. First, the growth was slow for a decade and then sudden: twelve years to reach roughly $12 million, then a single transaction in 2026 that may have tripled the total. Second, the 2026 jump is the least certain number in the table, because it depends on an undisclosed ownership percentage. If the Long Drink proceeds were modest, Teller’s true figure sits near the $16 million floor and the growth story is one of steady accumulation; if they were large, the $40 million anchor is right and 2026 was the year acting stopped being his main source of wealth. Either way, the direction is up, and the driver in 2026 was not a film.

Social Media Presence

Miles Teller keeps one of the lowest social-media profiles of any actor at his level of fame. He has spoken in interviews about staying off Instagram — The Hollywood Reporter‘s April 2026 profile noted that readers will never see him there — and he does not run a public Instagram account as a promotional channel in the way most of his peers do. He has used X (formerly Twitter) in the past, including to dispute the Page Six account of his La La Land departure, but his posting is sporadic and he does not use social platforms to sell a lifestyle brand or to document his daily life.

That absence is a deliberate choice with a financial shape. Social reach is, for many actors, a monetizable asset — sponsored posts, brand partnerships, direct-to-fan marketing — and Teller has largely declined to build it. The trade-off is privacy and control: his public image is set by his films and by the rare interview, not by a feed. The exception proves the rule. When the Palisades Fire destroyed his home, it was Keleigh who shared the final photograph of the house and the news of the lost wedding dress on Instagram, and the posts traveled widely precisely because the couple so rarely shares personal material. For readers looking for a follower count, the honest answer is that there is no verified, actively maintained public account to count — and that is the point.

Personal Life

Teller met model Keleigh Sperry at a Grammys after-party in 2013. They became engaged on August 20, 2017, while traveling at the Molori Safari Lodge in South Africa’s Madikwe Game Reserve, and married on September 1, 2019, in Maui, Hawaii, in a ceremony at Sacred Hearts Mission Catholic Church followed by a reception at the Ritz-Carlton. Sperry, born October 16, 1992, in California, was raised in Orange County; her father Rand founded the real estate firm Sperry Van Ness in 1987. She has worked as a model and actress, and the couple’s public life together is notably quiet: joint appearances at premieres, the occasional shared post, and little else. As of November 2026 there is no public record of the couple having children, and this article does not speculate about their family plans.

Music remains the thread that runs through his private life. He plays drums, piano, guitar, and saxophone, and those skills have repeatedly crossed into his work — the drumming in Whiplash, the piano in Top Gun: Maverick. He is also the rare leading man whose face carries a visible record of a bad day: the scars from the 2007 crash are there in every close-up, unhidden and unexplained on screen. Friends and collaborators describe him as intensely loyal to directors he trusts — he has said he will “go to my grave” knowing he stayed loyal to Chazelle and La La Land when the production was falling apart — and the through-line of his career, from the $8,000 indie to the $325 million exit, is a willingness to bet on people and projects before the money is certain.

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Published on November 5, 2026. Last reviewed November 2026. Found an error? See our corrections policy.