The 25 Best Songs About Money, Ranked by Chart Success From Broke Anthems to Big-Bank Flexes

How We Ranked These 25 Songs

Every music blog has a list of the best songs about money, and almost all of them are ranked the same way: by whichever songs the writer personally loves most. We did it differently. Every song on this list is ordered strictly by its peak chart position (Billboard Hot 100 first, with UK Singles Chart or genre-chart data used where that's the best available record), pulled from verified chart histories, not vibes. If a song never charted, it's not in the ranked table, no matter how many "best money songs" round-ups it shows up in. (We did the same thing for our 40 best rock songs of all time, and the results were just as scrambled.)

The result reshuffles a lot of assumptions. The most famous money song in rock history doesn't crack the top 15. A rapper who was an Instagram personality eighteen months earlier ties Dire Straits' three-week reign at No. 1. That's the point: chart data doesn't care about critical consensus.

The Rock Money Anthems

The song most people assume tops any money-song ranking comes first: Pink Floyd's "Money," from 1973's The Dark Side of the Moon. Roger Waters wrote it as a moral reckoning with his own ambition. He told The Observer in 1993 that writing it forced him to decide "whether I'm really a socialist or not," before admitting he coveted a Bentley "like crazy." That tension between critique and craving is baked into the lyrics, cash-register sound effects and all. It became Pink Floyd's first US hit, but it peaked at only No. 13 on the Hot 100.

Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing" tells a messier story. Mark Knopfler wrote it as a satirical jab at the still-new MTV, channeling the voice of a blue-collar appliance-store worker griping about musicians who get "money for nothing and chicks for free" while he hauls refrigerators. The irony: the song's MTV-heavy rotation helped make Knopfler, a balding roots-rock guitarist who was about as far from an MTV archetype as it got, into a bona fide star. It hit No. 1 on the Hot 100 on September 21, 1985, and stayed there for three weeks.

AC/DC's "Moneytalks" is the least chart-successful of the three, cracking the Hot 100 at only No. 23 in 1990. Hard-rock bravado about cash, it turns out, doesn't automatically translate into pop-chart dominance. If you want to hear how Pink Floyd's other Dark Side of the Moon tracks hold up, this one's worth a spin:

Disco and New Wave Cash Grabs

The 1980s turned money into a Top 10 dance-floor formula. Donna Summer's "She Works Hard for the Money" came from an unlikely spark: at a Grammys after-party, Summer wandered into a restroom and found an exhausted attendant, Onetta Johnson, asleep at her post. Summer wrote the title on the spot and finished the song with producer Michael Omartian. It became the final track written for her 1983 album, took Summer back to No. 1 on Billboard's Hot R&B Songs chart, and peaked at No. 3 on the Hot 100.

Madonna's "Material Girl" is so culturally synonymous with 1980s money-worship that it's easy to assume it was a monster smash everywhere. Per Official Charts, it peaked at a respectable but not chart-topping No. 3 in the UK in March 1985, spending ten weeks on the chart. Pet Shop Boys took a subtler, synthier route with "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)," a deadpan new-wave duet about ambition without scruples that reached No. 10 on the Hot 100 in 1986. If icy synth-pop is your thing, our Electronic quiz and Pop quiz both lean into this era.

Hip-Hop's Flex Anthems Take Over

Soul got there first: The O'Jays' 1974 classic "For the Love of Money" (later immortalized as The Apprentice's theme) turned a warning about greed into a No. 9 Hot 100 hit built on one of the funkiest bass lines of the decade.

Three decades later, Kanye West's "Gold Digger," featuring Jamie Foxx doing his best Ray Charles, hit No. 1 in 2005. But the genre's clearest lesson in how a money song becomes a phenomenon is Cardi B's "Bodak Yellow." Cardi came up through Instagram and reality TV, not the traditional rap pipeline, and "Bodak Yellow" ran on pure, specific, first-person swagger ("I don't dance now, I make money moves"). It turned her from internet personality into the No. 1 artist in America within months of its release in mid-2017, and stayed at No. 1 for three weeks, matching Dire Straits' 1985 run stride for stride. Explore more of the genre's biggest hits on our Hip-Hop quiz, or check the soul and R&B side of the ledger on our R&B / Soul quiz.

The Full Ranked Table

Beloved but Never Charted

Some of the most-cited "best money songs" in blog posts and playlists never appear on any chart at all, usually because they weren't released as singles. Wu-Tang Clan's "C.R.E.A.M." is the clearest case: one of the most quoted hip-hop verses about money ever recorded, and it never touched the Hot 100. Several deeper Pink Floyd album cuts that grapple with wealth and industry (tracks that never got a single release) show up constantly in fan rankings for the same reason. Indie and alt-rock money songs tend to fall into this bucket too: critically adored and constantly streamed, but structurally never eligible to chart because no label ever pushed them as a single. None of that makes them worse songs. It just means they're popularity-contest winners, not chart winners. That's the exact distinction the table above is built to draw.

What Actually Makes a Money Song a Hit

Line up the top of this list and a pattern emerges fast: the money songs that chart highest are almost never general critiques of greed or capitalism. They're specific, first-person boasts. "I make money moves," not "money is the root of all evil." Cardi B, Kanye West, Lorde and Ariana Grande all built their money songs around a single character's voice and a concrete flex (or, in Lorde's case, a pointed refusal of one). Pink Floyd's "Money" and ABBA's "Money, Money, Money," by contrast, work as broader social commentary, and chart-wise they're both comparatively modest.

If you want to hear how these rock-era money anthems actually sound against the rest of their catalogs, the Rock quiz pulls 30-second clips from across the decade these songs came from, see how many you can name.