Kendrick Lamar needed 47 shows to have the biggest touring year a rapper has ever had. The Grand National Tour grossed $390.7 million from 2.037 million tickets across its 2025 dates, box office tracker ChartData announced on Thursday 24 September, and XXL reported that it is the highest-grossing touring year by a rapper in history.
The figure is the final count for a stadium run that opened in Minneapolis in April 2025 and ran through December, with SZA co-headlining the North American and European legs. It also shows how far the tour moved the ceiling for rap on the road.
What $390.7 Million Looks Like Per Night
Spread across 47 shows, the total works out to about $8.3 million in gross revenue and more than 43,000 tickets per performance, according to V101.9, which also noted that all $390.7 million came from shows played in the 2025 calendar year. That calendar detail is why the record is framed as a touring year: nothing from 2024 or 2026 is in the total.
Some nights went far higher than the average. The opening show at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis on 19 April 2025 brought in more than $9 million from over 47,000 tickets, and a Seattle stop grossed $14.8 million from more than 60,000 tickets, at the time a record for the highest-grossing hip-hop concert, V101.9 reported. Spate Hip-Hop News put that Lumen Field crowd at 60,941.
Why 47 Shows Beat 80
The previous rap benchmark was Drake’s It’s All a Blur Tour with 21 Savage, which pulled in $320.5 million from 1.3 million tickets across 80 shows in 2023 and 2024, XXL reported. The Grand National Tour passed that total in November 2025, before its Australian leg, to become the highest-grossing rap tour of all time.
The comparison shows where the difference came from. Drake’s figures work out to about $4 million and roughly 16,000 tickets a night. Lamar’s run averaged about twice the gross and well over twice the crowd per show, on 33 fewer dates. Fewer, bigger nights produced a higher total in a shorter calendar.
Stadiums Changed the Scale
Both headliners had toured widely before, but not at this size. Lamar’s The Big Steppers Tour in 2022 and 2023 and SZA’s SOS Tour in 2023 and 2024 sold out arenas and averaged $1.6 million and $1.8 million per show respectively, Billboard reported after the North American leg, when the Grand National Tour was pacing $11.1 million a night. Billboard concluded that Lamar now had the biggest stadium tour ever among rappers.
Los Angeles was the peak stop. Three nights at SoFi Stadium on 21, 23 and 24 May 2025, a homecoming for the Compton rapper, grossed a combined $40.4 million from 147,000 tickets, the biggest stop of the tour at that point, according to Billboard. SZA’s hometown show in St. Louis on 4 June drew 48,600 people for a gross of $8.8 million. By comparison, Doja Cat’s Tour Ma Vie, which reaches North America on 1 October, is booked into 31 arenas.
What SZA Brought, and What Punch Said About It
The record has already started an argument about credit. SZA co-headlined the North American and European portions of the tour, and the pair shared the stage on “All the Stars”, “Doves in the Wind”, “30 for 30” and “Luther”, V101.9 reported. Lamar headlined the Latin American and Australian dates alone.
Top Dawg Entertainment’s Punch answered the critics on X the day after the figure landed. “390 is nuts lol. Extremely grateful!” he wrote, according to XXL, before rejecting both readings of the record: fans could not discredit Lamar by pointing to SZA’s presence, he argued, nor discredit SZA by claiming she did not headline. “Dot got the highest grossing rap tour of all time AND SZA co-headlined,” he wrote, adding that both could have done separate stadium tours with similar results but chose to tour together.
Billboard’s co-headline rankings show the scale of the pairing. After the North American leg alone, 23 shows had grossed $256.4 million from 1.1 million tickets, making it the highest-grossing co-headline tour ever reported to Billboard Boxscore, ahead of Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s On the Run II Tour by less than $3 million. In ticket sales the Carters still led that ranking at the time, with 2.2 million.
Some observers argue that SZA’s share of the achievement is undersold. DancehallMag made the case that she was not a featured guest on a few songs but a full co-headliner and a constant presence across the biggest moments of Lamar’s year.
From the Super Bowl to Sydney
The tour arrived on unusual momentum. Lamar released his sixth album, GNX, in November 2024, and “Luther”, his duet with SZA, spent 13 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. The two shared the stage at the Super Bowl LIX halftime show after Grammy wins for “Not Like Us” and “Saturn”, Billboard noted.
DancehallMag counted the rest of that year. Lamar headlined the halftime show in New Orleans on 9 February 2025 in front of roughly 127.7 million television viewers, bringing out SZA, Samuel L. Jackson and Serena Williams. “Not Like Us” won five Grammys, including Record of the Year and Song of the Year, and “tv off” peaked at No. 2 on the Hot 100.
After North America came a 16-date European leg that Billboard listed as opening in Cologne on 2 July, with double-headers in Frankfurt, London and Paris. Lamar then continued as a solo headliner through Latin America and Australia between September and December. Openers changed by region, with Mustard, Doechii and Argentina’s CA7RIEL & Paco Amoroso all taking the slot, and surprise guests including Doja Cat, Justin Bieber, Lizzo, Playboi Carti and Baby Keem joined on different dates, according to V101.9.
How the Final Count Grew
The $390.7 million figure is higher than the numbers that circulated while the tour was still running. Earlier reports put the gross at $332.1 million from more than 1.5 million tickets before the final international dates were included; the updated count added more than $58 million and roughly half a million tickets, V101.9 reported, citing Spate Hip-Hop News.
It also landed close to an early forecast. In June 2025, with only North America complete, Billboard estimated that even with lower nightly grosses abroad, the tour was on track for about a $400 million finish. The final figure came in within $10 million of that projection.
What the Record Sets Up for Rap Touring
DancehallMag argued that rap has historically trailed rock and pop in touring revenue, on the assumption that its audience does not turn into ticket buyers at the same rate, and that the Grand National figure directly challenges that idea. Spate Hip-Hop News made a similar point, noting that stadium touring at this scale was long associated with the world’s biggest rock and pop acts.
The number now becomes the target. Drake, whose It’s All a Blur Tour held the rap record before the Grand National Tour, has said he will tour in 2027 to promote his Iceman, Habibti and Maid of Honour albums, XXL reported. Any rap run chasing the Grand National total will need stadium-sized nights, not just more dates.
For Lamar, the figure closes the books on a year in which he played the Super Bowl LIX halftime show, had a 13-week Hot 100 No. 1 with “Luther” and then sold more than two million tickets. His next project has no announced timeline, DancehallMag noted, and ChartData’s total makes 2025 the year the next big rap tour will be measured against.
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