In 2010, the going rate for Sarah Ferguson, ex-Duchess of York to “open any door you want” for a supposed Sheikh was nearly a million dollars, the same amount she told an undercover reporter it would cost for Prince Andrew to “look after” you.
Prince Harry and Meghan, The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are absolute bargains by comparison.
Islands, Mariah Carey, big African cats: There are many unusual things deep pockets can allow you to rent and the Sussexes, like plenty of other members of the royal family, are now on that list too. Next month they will be in Australia for his and hers paid events.
A cool, nearly million might have gotten you Fergs (allegedly) leaning on Andrew on the behalf of your Skopje steel works or Warsaw water processing deal, but getting the far more photogenic and less prone to chronic foot-in-mouth-itis Sussexes will cost you about the same as a three-bedroom house.
The Sussexes are coming to Australia in April and the bills, for someone, must be mounting up.
Come April, for $3,199 you can buy a VIP ticket to an “intimate luxury weekend” in Sydney with just you and 299 other women with four figures to spare to share a twin room and to come away with a group photo with Meghan.
Then for $2,378.65, you can hear Harry give the keynote address at a Melbourne workplace mental health conference which should be interesting from a man who knows as much about being in the 9-5 workforce as Hannibal Lecter would about vegetarian cookery.
These Sydney and Melbourne outings are events that it would be impossible to imagine the Sussexes of 2020 or 2021 condescending to, back when streamers were throwing around eight and nine figures to secure the unspecified talents of two of the most famous people on the planet. However, five years on from Oprah, Harry and Meghan now find themselves in a situation best put by Destiny’s Child’s Bills, Bills, Bills.
“They have to earn a living,” a source has told the Telegraph. “They are private citizens and have to pay the bills like anyone else.”
The last time that the Sussexes were in Australia it was October 2018, when they were still basking in the honeymoon phase with each other. Everything seemed quintessentially peachy – outwardly anyway.
Inside the Sussex camp, longtime Times’ royal correspondent Valentine Low alleged in his book Courtiers that Megan was wondering where the pay cheque was. He wrote: “According to several members of staff, she was heard to say on at least one occasion: ‘I can’t believe I’m not getting paid for this.’”
This time, both the Sussex very much are.
So what happens to be the going rate for a duke or duchess, I hear you ask? Estimates put it at $70,000 to $500,000 each.
At the lower end we have NewsNation’s Paula Froelich who said during an appearance on The Royalist that both the Sussexes’ “going rate” at $70,000 ($USD50,000).
Other clues suggest the price tag might be higher, more around the half a million mark.
In Sydney, Meghan will be headlining the Her Best Life retreat in the beachside suburb of Coogee (the Khloe to Bondi’s Kim), which grew out of Besties, an enterprise set up by former radio boss O’Neill and Jackie ‘O’ Henderson. In 2024, O’Neill and Henderson flew Gwyneth Paltrow to Sydney for the debut Besties event, with the Oscar-winner’s fee pegged at somewhere between $150,000 and $500,000 by the Daily Mail.
Even at double that amount, it’s not as much as $1.4 million that Harry was paid to appear at a single JP Morgan night in February 2020.
Adding to the overall Australian Sussex bill would be their far from inconsiderable travel expenses.
The duke and duchess often travel by private jet, the Uber Pool of the 0.01 per cent. A return trip, from Los Angeles to Sydney, would cost about $555,000, according to EvoJets. Even if they agreed to fly, quelle horreur, commercial, first class tickets for the couple and business class tickets for, say, two bodyguards, their longtime aide James Holt, and an assistant would cost more than $110,000. (When Meghan flew to Paris last year to attend the Balenciaga show, she also took along her longtime makeup artist and friend Daniel Martin, so he could be attending too.)
Unlike the last time they were in Australia, the Governor-general’s official Sydney residence, Admiralty House won’t be on offer, meaning Harry and Meghan might face the hardship of staying at, for example, celebrity favourite, The Park Hyatt. The hotel’s Sydney Suite is at least $21,000-a-night. A lowly room with a view of the Opera House is, for those dates, $3,100-a-night.
Then there is their security. The Times has serialised Tom Bower’ new book Betrayal: Power, Deceit and the Fight for the Future of the Royal Family and in it he alleges that when they attended the 2025 Invictus Games in Vancouver “their exorbitant expenses” including for security were footed by the government and corporate sponsors. How much do bodyguards cost? I have no idea but that sum could well be a line item in someone’s Sussex budget right now.
If they are getting the full red carpet-bells-and-whistles treatment, including a private jet and two massive paydays, then that figure is more like $1.6 million. Even at the lower end, the total still sits in the robust six figures.
Is any of this particularly dignified? Is this the life that Harry and Meghan might have imagined living when they chucked in the grey British towel to feel their feelings, while living down the road from Oprah, a world away from the long arm of Crown Inc demanding they open biscuit factories in Huddersfield? One doubts and one doubts hard.
But they reportedly need a hell of a lot of money to keep the lights on. Bower has alleged that their living expenses, after tax, are about $4.2 million-a-year.
And they have few – if any – other options to pull in massive wads of cash.
On Tuesday, Hollywood trade bible Variety published a lengthy report detailing the disintegration of the Sussexes’ deal with Netflix and just how disinclined Hollywood appears to be to have much to do with them. The company is “sitting on a surplus of As Ever products, including tea and baking mixes” worth more than $14 million that they have been trying to give away to employees by “putting the goods on card tables in various office buildings.”
Last week Netflix parted ways with Meghan’s As ever lifestyle brand with the Sussex machine telling The Sun that the streamer had been too “cautious” and the brand had been “held back”.
The duchess has now picked Australia for the first expansion of As ever into the international market, according to the Telegraph, and will use her time in Australia “to hold a series of private meetings with potential partners, buyers and marketing executives.”
One wonders how much cash there might be in the jam cow.
According to Betrayal, the couple have “relied on a dribble of money from Harry’s occasional speeches and Meghan’s endorsement of fashion brands” and when it comes to As ever, “Profits were assumed to be dire.”
(A spokesperson for the duke and duchess has condemned Bower’s book, calling it “deranged” and saying it had “crossed the line from criticism into fixation”.)
If the Sussexes’ Australia sortie fails to land and result in mass ticket sales, you have to wonder how they will pull in those millions every year going forwards.
In all of this, should anyone be getting ready to saddle up their clucking high horse, dismount. The House of Windsor’s inhabitants have long made a habit of trading their presence for some nice fat zeros.
King Charles’ longtime aide and consigliore Michael Fawcett was forced to resign after a ‘cash for honours’ scandal in which it was alleged he had helped secure a CBE for a Saudi billionaire who was a prolific donor to Charles’ charities.
Meanwhile Charles accepted nearly $2 million in cash, delivered in a plastic bag from the bin Laden family to support his charity.
Princess Beatrice does things like open banks and host tea parties for middle eastern billionaires on the reg, Princess Anne’s son Peter Phillips has done a TV ad for a Chinese milk company and her daughter Zara Tindall regularly shills for Gold Coast shopping Pacific Fair, the Magic Millions racing carnival and car and clothing brands.
In all of this, there is a certain nice symmetry. Their 2018 Australia trip represented the curtain rising on their brief royal run; maybe their 2026 go will similarly be the beginning of their next professional chapter. And maybe, one day soon, you and I will be able to spend $21 on a jar of Meghan’s strawberry “spread” in keepsake packaging.
Our toast will never be the same again.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
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