Which Udemy courses are making real money now?

Is Udemy still a place where instructors make real money?

Yes. Udemy still creates million-dollar instructor businesses today, although the money is concentrated among a relatively small group.

Udemy’s latest full-year filing gives us the clearest number available: instructors collectively earned $168 million during 2025. Eleven instructors individually made more than $1 million during the year, while nearly 1,600 earned more than the average annual income in their home country.

That is real money by any reasonable definition. The harder part is understanding how unusual those winners are. Udemy had more than 90,000 instructors and over 290,000 courses at the end of 2025. Dividing the $168 million pool evenly would produce less than $1,900 per instructor, although the real distribution is obviously much more concentrated.

The environment has also become tougher. Instructor earnings fell from roughly $191 million in 2024 to $168 million in 2025, a decline of about 12%. Meanwhile, instructors were publishing more than 6,300 new courses per month, up from more than 5,000 a month the previous year.

So yes, people still build serious businesses on Udemy. But publishing a decent course in a popular category and waiting for Udemy to sell it is a much weaker strategy these days.

Why is it so hard to know which Udemy courses are actually making money?

Udemy course revenue is unusually opaque because the public numbers show students and ratings rather than current sales, subscription minutes or instructor payouts.

A course page might show 500,000 students, but those learners could have arrived over ten years through heavily discounted purchases, instructor coupons, Udemy Business subscriptions, Personal Plan subscriptions or other channels. The instructor does not earn the same amount from each one.

Udemy itself knows far more than outside researchers do. Its instructor Marketplace Insights tool exposes topic-level demand, search volume, supply and revenue information, but those revenue figures are available privately to instructors rather than publicly on course pages.

That means we need several pieces of evidence at once. We can examine Udemy’s revenue mix, current Udemy Business learning growth, live enrollment and review counts, how recently leading courses are being updated, certification changes and the economics of each payment channel.

Student counts are therefore useful evidence of commercial scale. They just cannot tell us exactly what a course earns each month.

Has Udemy’s money moved away from one-off course sales?

Yes. Udemy is now primarily a subscription business, and that has changed which courses are worth the most to instructors.

Subscriptions generated 72% of Udemy’s revenue in 2025, compared with 66% one year earlier. Udemy Business produced $524 million, while the Consumer segment generated about $266 million. Enterprise revenue grew 6%; Consumer revenue fell 9%.

The shift continued into the following quarter. Consumer subscription revenue increased from $9.3 million to $14.4 million year over year, while transactional and other Consumer revenue dropped from $63.3 million to $44.1 million. The first number grew about 55%; the second fell roughly 30%.

That changes the meaning of a successful course. Inside Udemy Business, instructors get paid according to how much learners actually consume. Udemy currently puts 15% of qualifying subscription revenue into the instructor pool, then divides that pool according to each instructor’s share of eligible learning minutes.

A professional course that employees repeatedly use can therefore generate recurring income without requiring a fresh $15 checkout every time somebody starts it.

The strongest Udemy businesses today tend to work on both sides: people actively search for the subject themselves, and companies also have a reason to train employees in it.

Udemy metric	Earlier figure	Latest comparable figure	Change
Subscription share of revenue	66%	72%	+6 pts
Udemy Business revenue	$494.5M	$524.1M	+6%
Consumer revenue	$292.1M	$265.8M	-9%
Quarterly consumer subscription revenue	$9.3M	$14.4M	+55%
Quarterly consumer transactional/other revenue	$63.3M	$44.1M	-30%

Are AI courses making the most money on Udemy right now?

AI is currently Udemy’s strongest new wave of demand, but the best money is moving toward specific AI tools and work rather than broad “learn AI” courses.

Udemy reported 11 million cumulative GenAI course enrollments in the research behind its latest global skills report. During 2025 alone, AI-content enrollments grew 120% year over year and learners spent more than 700 million minutes on AI material.

The demand is moving quickly toward concrete tools. Microsoft Copilot consumption inside Udemy Business jumped 3,400% year over year. GitHub Copilot consumption increased 13,534%. AI agents and agentic AI also became major emerging learning topics.

Current course pages show that people are already paying attention at serious scale. “GitHub Copilot Beginner to Pro” has around 243,000 students and almost 79,000 ratings. “The Complete Prompt Engineering for AI Bootcamp” is around 420,000 students with more than 160,000 ratings. Both continue to receive substantial updates as the underlying products change.

The useful distinction now is between learning AI in the abstract and learning AI to do a job. Developers learning Copilot, analysts learning AI-assisted data work, managers learning Copilot workflows and engineers learning agents all have a clearer economic reason to take a course.

Generic AI courses can still become huge. For a new instructor, though, applied AI is the more convincing opportunity.

Is prompt engineering still a good Udemy business?

Prompt engineering is still selling strongly on Udemy, but the easy part of the opportunity has already passed.

“The Complete Prompt Engineering for AI Bootcamp” currently has about 420,000 students. “Prompt Engineering for Everyone Bootcamp” has around 76,000. Udemy’s enterprise data also continues to place prompt engineering among its fastest-growing professional skills.

So demand has clearly survived beyond the first ChatGPT hype cycle.

The course content has changed much faster than the label. The 420,000-student bestseller recently removed hours of older material and added newer models, AI agents, retrieval techniques and production-oriented AI work. Other successful prompt courses increasingly cover Claude, Gemini, context engineering, hallucination control and workflow automation.

A beginner course about writing better prompts is very easy to copy and competes with free information everywhere. A course that uses prompting as part of a harder skill—software development, marketing automation, research, data analysis, RAG or AI agents—has much more room to justify hours of paid learning.

Prompt engineering still makes money today. Plain prompt-writing courses face a much harder entry market than they did a few years ago.

Are GitHub Copilot and AI coding courses the hottest Udemy opportunity now?

For technical instructors, GitHub Copilot and AI-assisted coding are among the strongest current Udemy opportunities we can actually support with data.

The 13,534% year-over-year increase in GitHub Copilot learning inside Udemy Business is the most extreme growth figure in Udemy’s latest skills data. Public enrollment has followed. “GitHub Copilot Beginner to Pro” has about 243,000 learners, while another current “Complete Guide” has more than 82,000.

The content is also moving well beyond autocomplete. Current courses teach Agent Mode, planning, MCP, custom agents, Copilot CLI, testing and agentic software-development workflows. The 243,000-student course says it now receives monthly updates.

This category has three advantages at once. Developers already spend money on professional training, employers buy developer education through Udemy Business, and the product changes quickly enough to create repeated demand for updated instruction.

That final advantage also creates the main headache. An AI coding course can become stale very quickly. Udemy says its top instructors updated their courses five times on average during 2025. In fast-moving AI categories, frequent maintenance is becoming part of the job.

Do Python, machine learning and web-development courses still make serious money?

Yes. Python, machine learning and web-development courses remain some of Udemy’s largest commercial properties, although established instructors have a huge advantage over newcomers.

Jose Portilla’s “Complete Python Bootcamp” currently has about 2.18 million students and more than 560,000 ratings. “Machine Learning A-Z” has crossed one million students. Colt Steele’s “Web Developer Bootcamp” is also close to the million-student mark.

Those are extraordinary audiences, especially compared with younger categories. A leading GitHub Copilot course can look enormous at 243,000 students and still have barely one-ninth the enrollment of the dominant Python bootcamp.

The more revealing comparison is what happens to new generic competitors. A recently updated Python bootcamp from another instructor may have a few thousand, 30,000 or 75,000 students while the category leader sits above two million. The demand is alive; the distribution advantage is already owned.

That pushes new opportunities deeper into the stack. Python for automation, FastAPI, pytest, PySpark, AI engineering, financial analysis and specialized data work give an instructor a more realistic angle than another “Python from zero to hero” course.

Broad programming courses still make a lot of money today. Most of that money is much easier for an incumbent to capture.

Current course example	Approx. students	What it tells us
Complete Python Bootcamp	2.18M	Huge evergreen demand with a massive incumbent lead
Major machine-learning bestseller	1M+	Machine learning remains a large mature market
Major web-development bootcamp	Nearly 1M	Career-oriented coding courses still reach enormous scale
GitHub Copilot Beginner to Pro	243K	AI coding reached meaningful scale unusually quickly
Complete Prompt Engineering for AI Bootcamp	420K	GenAI demand is large, but competition is already established

Are cloud and cybersecurity certifications still Udemy money machines?

Yes. Cloud and cybersecurity certification courses remain some of the safest proven ways to build a large professional audience on Udemy.

The current Security+ bestseller from Jason Dion has about 525,000 students and 123,000 ratings. It has already been updated for the current SY0-701 certification. Major AWS Cloud Practitioner courses range from tens of thousands to well above 100,000 learners, while the broader AWS certification ecosystem has produced several much larger long-running courses.

The appeal is easy to see. Learners have an external deadline and a clear outcome: pass AWS, Azure, CompTIA, Cisco or another recognized exam. When an exam changes, existing learners need new material and instructors have a concrete reason to update their products.

The model also works across a portfolio. An instructor can teach Cloud Practitioner, Solutions Architect, Developer, Security and professional-level exams to overlapping audiences. Someone who trusts one course already knows where to look for the next one.

Cybersecurity demand is broadening as well. Udemy’s latest enterprise skills data shows fast growth around governance, risk and compliance alongside traditional security and network skills.

A giant certification category comes with heavy competition, of course. The more interesting openings often appear when a vendor launches a credential, changes an exam or creates a new enterprise skill before the rankings become dominated by courses with six-figure review histories.

Are Databricks and modern data-engineering courses becoming the next big Udemy winners?

Yes. Databricks is one of the clearest examples of a professional Udemy niche reaching serious scale while it is still much younger than AWS, Python or Excel.

The current “Databricks Certified Data Engineer Associate – Preparation” course has roughly 132,500 students and almost 19,000 ratings. A competing preparation course has around 39,000 students, while a separate practice-exam product from the leading instructor has passed 62,000 students.

Those numbers become more interesting when we look at how recently the exam changed. The leading courses were refreshed for the new 2026 version and now teach current Lakehouse, Spark, Delta Lake, streaming and governance material.

Microsoft Fabric is following a similar path from a smaller starting point. Udemy’s recent enterprise data puts Microsoft’s DP-600 Fabric certification and Databricks Data Engineer certification among fast-growing skills.

A category where the leader has 130,000 students can sometimes be more interesting for a new instructor than one where the leader has two million. It is already large enough to prove demand, while the competitive history is much shorter.

Data-engineering course example	Approx. students	Current position
Databricks Data Engineer Associate – Preparation	132.5K	Established bestseller
Databricks Data Engineer Associate – Ultimate Prep	39.4K	Strong competing full course
Databricks Associate practice exams	62.1K	Proof that exam prep supports multiple products
Databricks Data Engineer Professional preparation	41.5K	Advanced certification already has meaningful demand

Can Excel, Power BI and PMP courses still make serious money?

Yes. Excel, Power BI and PMP remain very strong Udemy businesses because millions of people already use these skills at work and have concrete reasons to improve them.

Excel is a good example of why fashionable topics can distract us. Large Excel courses have accumulated hundreds of thousands of students, and newer versions increasingly include Power Query, Power Pivot, dashboards, automation and Copilot. AI is giving instructors fresh material rather than making spreadsheet education irrelevant.

Power BI has the same workplace advantage. Courses can reach analysts, finance teams, managers and operations staff through both direct purchases and corporate subscriptions. Maven Analytics, for example, has built a large Udemy audience across business intelligence and data courses rather than relying on one hit.

PMP goes even further because a certification exam creates urgency. Andrew Ramdayal’s broader PMP catalog has attracted a very large audience, and his current condensed PMP exam course alone has more than 38,000 students while being updated for the latest exam changes.

These subjects work because they sit inside existing careers. A learner does not need to dream of becoming an Excel enthusiast. They may simply need to build a report tomorrow, qualify for a promotion or pass an exam.

Some of Udemy’s most durable money is still being made in decidedly unglamorous professional skills.

Can finance, HR and leadership courses make real money on Udemy?

Yes, especially through Udemy Business, although the strongest demand tends to be attached to a specific workplace problem rather than broad business advice.

Udemy’s latest enterprise skills research puts financial planning, banking, insurance and Professional in Human Resources certification among fast-growing areas. The same research found 25% growth in consumption of broader adaptive skills, with critical thinking up 37% and decision-making up 38%.

These categories often look smaller on public course pages than Python or AWS because enterprise consumption can matter more than marketplace purchases. An employee can watch a management, finance or HR course through a company subscription without appearing as somebody who paid $15 for that individual title.

Specificity matters a lot here. “Leadership” is a huge subject but a vague product. A course aimed at first-time managers, AI adoption for managers, financial planning, PHR preparation or decision-making for analysts gives someone a much clearer reason to spend time on it.

We see more dependable commercial logic in those concrete professional outcomes than in broad motivational or generic business content.

Does a Udemy course with one million students still make huge money today?

Maybe, but one million Udemy students tells us much more about lifetime success than current monthly income.

Jose Portilla’s Python bootcamp has more than 2.18 million students. That proves extraordinary distribution. It does not tell us how many people bought the course last week, how many currently consume it through subscriptions or what share of those historical enrollments came through very cheap promotions.

Course age makes the difference. Two products can each show 200,000 learners even though one accumulated them gradually over eight years and the other did it in two. The second course is showing far stronger recent velocity.

Updates give us another clue. Leading courses in GitHub Copilot, Security+, Databricks and current certification categories are still being refreshed frequently. A huge old enrollment count combined with stale material tells us far less about current earning power.

Ratings help, but they have the same historical problem. What we would really like to see is revenue by month, recent paid enrollments and subscription minutes. Udemy does not publish those numbers by course.

So throughout this analysis, we should read giant student counts as proof that a market has produced real winners. We should be much more careful when using them to say who is making the most money right now.

How much does an instructor actually keep from a Udemy sale?

Udemy instructors currently keep 97% of net revenue when they generate the sale themselves, but only 37% when Udemy generates a normal marketplace sale.

That gap is one of the most important pieces of the whole business model.

Suppose an instructor has a YouTube channel, email list or community and sends a learner through a personal coupon or referral link. Udemy says that instructor receives 97% of the qualifying net revenue. If the learner discovers the same course through Udemy itself without an instructor promotion, the instructor share falls to 37%.

Subscriptions use another system entirely. Udemy Business currently allocates 15% of its qualifying monthly subscription revenue to the instructor pool. Each instructor then receives a portion based on their share of total eligible consumption.

A student is therefore a terrible unit for estimating revenue. One learner may come from an instructor’s own audience and create a high-margin direct sale. Another may buy through the marketplace. A third may spend two hours in the course through an enterprise subscription.

This also explains why the strongest Udemy businesses often extend beyond Udemy itself. An instructor with an email list, YouTube audience, community and several related courses can generate direct sales, move learners into additional products and still collect subscription revenue.

The audience can be worth almost as much as the course.

What actually separates a high-earning Udemy course from thousands of average ones?

The Udemy courses making serious money today usually solve an expensive professional problem and then keep earning because the instructor owns a whole learning category rather than one isolated video course.

Look at the recurring winners. AWS learners need certifications. Security+ learners need an exam pass. Developers want Copilot skills that affect their daily work. Databricks learners want a marketable data-engineering credential. Excel and Power BI learners use the software in jobs they already have. PMP learners need a recognized qualification.

These subjects also keep changing. Exams get replaced, software gains features, AI tools evolve and best practices move. Udemy says its top instructors updated courses around five times on average during 2025. The strongest current courses we checked repeatedly show recent syllabus changes rather than years of neglect.

Then there is the portfolio effect. A successful AWS instructor can sell several certification courses. A project-management instructor can offer the full PMP course, a cram course and practice exams. A Databricks instructor currently has large audiences across Associate preparation, Professional preparation and separate practice tests.

This is where the economics become much stronger. Winning one search result brings an instructor into a learner’s orbit; the second and third products can monetize that trust again.

A high-earning Udemy business these days often looks less like “I made a course” and more like “I became one of the instructors people associate with this skill.”

Which Udemy courses are making real money now?

The clearest answer is that Udemy’s real money is currently concentrated in job-linked technology, certification and workplace-software courses, with AI-assisted work creating the strongest new growth.

GitHub Copilot and agentic coding stand out on momentum. A 13,534% jump in enterprise consumption is extraordinary, while leading courses have already moved into six-figure student counts.

Cloud and cybersecurity certifications remain more proven. Security+, AWS, Azure and related credentials combine large audiences with recurring exam changes and obvious career value.

Databricks and modern data engineering look especially interesting because the category has already produced courses above 100,000 students without having the decade-long competitive history of Python or AWS. Microsoft Fabric belongs in the same emerging cluster.

Python, machine learning and web development continue to support some of the largest courses on the entire platform. The catch is competition: the leaders have accumulated hundreds of thousands of ratings and, in some cases, more than one million learners.

Prompt engineering is still making money, but the stronger products are expanding into agents, coding, RAG, automation and applied AI. A basic prompt course is increasingly easy to replace.

Excel, Power BI and PMP deserve to sit beside the technical categories because their professional use is huge, their content keeps changing and employers have clear reasons to pay for the training.

Udemy itself remains a serious income platform: eleven instructors made more than $1 million in 2025. Yet the market underneath them has become tougher. Total instructor earnings fell about 12% that year while thousands of additional courses arrived every month, and subscription learning now controls most of Udemy’s economics.

The best Udemy course opportunities today sit where four things meet: people use the skill to make or protect money at work, companies also pay to teach it, the underlying tool or credential keeps changing, and the existing course rankings have not already become almost impossible to dislodge.

Udemy course market	What the evidence says now	Main catch
GitHub Copilot / agentic coding	Exceptional current growth	Requires constant updates
AWS / Azure / cloud certifications	Large, proven and repeatable	Heavy incumbent competition
Cybersecurity certifications	Large and durable	Popular exams are crowded
Databricks / modern data engineering	Strong current opportunity	Smaller absolute audience than AWS/Python
Python / ML / web development	Enormous established markets	Leaders already own huge distribution
Prompt engineering / GenAI	Still large	Basic content is becoming commoditized
Excel / Power BI	Durable workplace demand	Less hype, so easy to underestimate
PMP / professional certifications	Strong outcome-driven demand	Tied closely to credential cycles
Finance / HR / leadership	Real enterprise demand in specific niches	Generic courses are harder to differentiate