Best MLM Companies 2026: What Their Own Numbers Show

August 14, 2026 · Company Reviews
Prices and terms last verified August 14, 2026.

The honest way to rank MLM companies is by what their own income disclosures admit. OPTAVIA reports that 23.28% of all U.S. coaches earned nothing in 2025. Young Living reports a median of $23 across all Brand Partners. Most companies publish medians only for people who already earned, which hides everyone who made nothing.

If you have typed “best MLM companies” into Google, you have already seen the answer everyone gives. A ranked list. Product categories. A paragraph about culture and leadership.

Not one of them opens the income disclosure.

Not one.

So that is what this page is. Twelve companies, read out of the documents they publish themselves, with the dates on them.

A disclosure before we start. I earn recurring commission from one company on this list, The Home Business Academy. I have put it in the table with everyone else and given it the same treatment, which you will see is not flattering. No page on this site links to it and there are no affiliate links anywhere in this post.

What Does “Best” Even Mean Here?

Every list you have read ranks these companies on things you cannot verify. Product quality. Culture. “Integrity.”

Here is a criterion you can check in about four minutes: does the company tell you what happens to everybody, or only to the winners?

That single question separates these twelve companies more cleanly than product category, company age or commission percentage. And it is the only one where the company has to put a number in writing.

Two of the twelve report against everybody.

What Each Company Reports

Every figure below is gross, before expenses, and comes from the company’s own statement.

Four of those were checked against the live document on 14 August 2026. The rest come from copies captured on 7 August 2026, and I will come back to why that distinction matters more than it should.

Why Do These Numbers Look Better Than They Are?

Because of the denominator.

Read this line from Amway’s 2025 disclosure carefully:

Top 50% of the IBOs $3,598 (average) and $551 (median)

A median of $551 sounds modest but real. Now read the sentence that defines who is in that calculation:

We calculated average annual earnings by adding up all individual earnings and dividing by the number of U.S. IBOs who received at least one payment from Amway in 2025.

Everyone who received no payment is not in that number. They are not in the bottom of it, dragging it down. They are outside the calculation entirely.

The same document says 38% of U.S. IBOs had no reported product sales, did not sponsor anybody, and received no payments at all.

So the $551 is the median of the top half of the 62% who got paid something.

Read that twice.

That is not a trick unique to Amway. It is the house style.

doTERRA publishes a $244 annual median, for the top 50% of active Wellness Advocates who earned commission, after telling you 58% of active Wellness Advocates earned none. Isagenix publishes a $1,254 median for the top 50% of associates who earned money, after telling you more than 89% of the people who joined that year opened customer accounts and were not eligible to earn at all. Herbalife reports monthly figures for distributors who ordered for resale and earned in a typical month.

Each of those sentences is true. Each is also carefully built.

And “active” is doing heavy lifting too, because nobody agrees what it means. doTERRA counts you as active if you bought product, enrolled somebody, or earned a commission during the year. Nu Skin uses a rolling three-month window. Plexus requires a downline and a commission inside six months.

Three companies, three definitions, one word.

The Twelve, One at a Time

Eight of them are worth looking at individually. The rest are in the table above and the sources at the bottom.

OPTAVIA - the best disclosure in the set

OPTAVIA’s 2025 statement does the thing nobody else does. It publishes the whole distribution against all independent coaches operating in the U.S., in sixteen bands, starting with a band labelled NO EARNINGS at 23.28%.

Add the next two bands and 45.20% of all coaches earned $250 or less for the year. That is my arithmetic on their published bands, not their sentence.

At the other end, 0.15% earned more than $200,000.

I checked this against the live PDF on 14 August 2026 and the document code still matches the copy I had. That is the only company here where I can say that with a straight face.

Young Living - the only real median

Young Living publishes a row labelled ALL BRAND PARTNERS. Average $881. Median $23.

Twenty three dollars.

Not the median of earners. The median of everybody who held a Brand Partner account for any part of the year.

Their lowest rank, Associate, is 64.1% of all partners, with an average of $22 and a median of $0.

Sit with the gap between $881 and $23 for a second, because it tells you the shape of every compensation plan in this article. The mean is carried by a handful of people at the top. The median is what happens to the person in the middle.

One caveat and it matters. The copy I have was republished by TruthInAdvertising.org rather than pulled from Young Living, and it covers calendar year 2022 despite being titled 2023. Verify it against Young Living’s own page before you quote it.

Amway - the biggest name, and the 38%

Average annual earnings for all U.S. IBOs at Founders Platinum and below: $750 before expenses, a figure that does include IBOs who reported no sales.

38% had no reported sales, sponsored nobody, and received nothing.

Amway deserves some credit here. Publishing a mean that includes the people who did nothing is more honest than most of this list manages, even while the medians beside it quietly exclude them.

Their own document adds: “Expenses reduce the amount you earn.”

doTERRA - 58% of the people who showed up

In 2025, approximately 58% of U.S. active Wellness Advocates earned no commissions.

Active, remember, means they bought product, enrolled someone, or earned a commission. So this is 58% of the people who were doing something, not 58% of a dormant list.

For the ones who did earn, the top 50% had an annual median of $244.

Nu Skin - read the monthly figures twice

Nu Skin reports that an average of 26.67% of U.S. Active Brand Affiliates earned a sales compensation payment in a given month.

Which means roughly 73% did not, in an average month.

And Active Brand Affiliates were 46.54% of total Brand Affiliates.

So the 26.67% is a slice of a slice.

Average monthly compensation to Active Brand Affiliates was $178.75.

There is no annual figure and no median anywhere in the document.

Herbalife - a lesson in what a decade changes

The 2025 statement, published June 2026, says about 107,769 U.S. distributors ordered product for resale and about 47,000 earned money in a typical month. The median for the “All Other” group was $320 a month.

Now the 2012 edition of the same document, which I also have:

the compensation chart below indicates that 434,125 Distributors (88%) received no payments from Herbalife during 2012

Same company. Same document series. In 2012 they printed the 88% figure against all U.S. distributors. The current edition reports against distributors who ordered for resale and earned in a typical month.

The business did not necessarily get better.

The reporting got narrower.

Plexus - what a disclosure looks like with nothing in it

Average earnings across active and inactive Brand Ambassadors: $771. For U.S. Active Brand Ambassadors: $2,923.

No median. No percentage earning nothing. No distribution.

Two averages and a definition of “active” that requires you to have a downline.

That is the entire document.

It is not a lie. It just answers a question nobody asked.

Home Business Academy - my own conflict, on the record

I earn recurring commission from HBA. Here is their disclosure anyway.

The heading says the statement covers April 31, 2024 to April 31, 2025. April has thirty days.

That date does not exist. Twice.

The next paragraph gives the number: an average annual gross revenue of $328.89 for affiliates, “based on the May 31 2022 to May 31 2023 statistical data.” A different period, two to three years before the one in the heading.

Highest paid affiliate $301,341.20. Lowest paid $0.00. No distribution, no median, no percentage earning nothing.

To their credit, they add the line most companies leave out: the average “includes a large number of affiliates who did not do enough work to get even 1 visitor to their affiliate link.”

That is honest about effort and silent about outcome. And the copy I could find sits on an individual affiliate’s funnel subdomain rather than a corporate page, which is its own kind of answer.

If you promote something, hold it to the standard you hold everything else. I would rather write this paragraph than have you find it yourself.

Where This Falls Short

These are the companies’ own documents. Nobody audits them. There is no standard format, no required disclosure, and no regulator checking the arithmetic. I am reporting what they published, not verifying that it is true. If you intend to repeat any of these figures in your own marketing, the substantiation burden sits on you, not on the company that printed them.

Four are current, eight are not. OPTAVIA, doTERRA, Herbalife and Nu Skin were checked against their live pages on 14 August 2026. Amway, Plexus, Young Living, Isagenix, It Works!, Melaleuca, Arbonne and HBA come from copies captured on 7 August 2026, and several of those documents report 2021 or 2022 data because that is the most recent edition I could find.

Three came from third-party republishers, not the companies. Young Living, Melaleuca and Arbonne. The documents carry company copyright notices and look genuine, but a mirror is weaker evidence than a company URL and you should treat it that way.

These documents move. Almost all of them live at web addresses with no year and no version number, so a new edition silently replaces the old one. Amway’s sits at a URL ending AmwayIncomeDisclosure_USEN with nothing to say which year you are looking at. When 2026 lands, 2025 stops existing at that address. If a figure here matters to a decision you are making, open the live document and check what edition you are actually reading.

Twelve companies is not the industry. There are hundreds. I picked recognisable names where a disclosure existed. That selection is not random and it is not a survey.

Who Should Actually Do This?

Nobody should read a page of medians and conclude anything about themselves. But there are honest ways to use these numbers.

If you are being recruited, ask for the income disclosure before the meeting, not after. If the person recruiting you cannot produce it, that tells you something. If they produce it and have never read past the headline average, that tells you more.

If you are already in, find your company’s document and work out which denominator the headline uses. It takes four minutes and it will change how you talk to your own prospects, which is the part that actually matters.

If you are choosing between companies, the disclosure is the cheapest due diligence available. A company that publishes a full distribution against everybody has decided it can survive you knowing. That is worth more than a compensation plan slide.

And if you want to understand what you can legally say about any of these numbers once you start promoting, the rules changed in April 2026 and most affiliates have not caught up.

Rob’s Take

I have been in and around this industry since 1996. I have read a lot of these documents, and I have watched a lot of people never read one.

Here is what thirty years tells me that no single disclosure does. The shape is always the same. A very small group at the top earning real money, a long tail earning nothing, and a middle that spends more than it makes for longer than it expected. Herbalife printed 88% receiving no payments in 2012. Young Living printed a $23 median in 2022. Different companies, different decades, same curve.

That is not a scandal. It is what a business looks like when the barrier to entry is a starter kit and nobody is screened.

There is an old rule about tools that you learn the first time you borrow a good one. A sharp chisel does not make you a joiner. It just stops the tool being the reason you failed. These compensation plans are the same. The good ones remove an excuse. They do not supply the skill, the audience or the hours.

So use the disclosure for what it is actually good for. Not to decide whether people make money, because some clearly do. Use it to find out whether the company is willing to tell you what happened to everybody else.

Two of twelve were. Start there.

And whatever anybody shows you on a screen, ask one question before you sign anything.

Compared to whom?