Marilyn Monroe never posed for Playboy. The nude shots in the December 1953 debut were taken four years earlier for a calendar, for fifty dollars, and Hugh Hefner simply bought the rights. That accident built a magazine, and the women who came after it turned a rabbit logo into the most reliable launchpad in American celebrity.
Plenty has changed since this list was first published. Print came back on 11 February 2025 after a five-year silence, with Lori Harvey on the cover and Gillian Nation crowned Playmate of the Year, and Cara Delevingne wore the Bunny suit for the Summer 2026 issue. The title is scarce again, which has made the women who hold it, and the ones who held it decades ago, far more interesting than they were in 2020, and reopened the argument about who the hottest Playboy models really are.
Seventeen names follow, and the numbers run for navigation rather than as a ranking. Ordering the hottest Playboy models by looks alone would tell you nothing worth knowing, so each entry leads with what the magazine gave her and what she did with it afterwards. Several of these women also appear on our wider list of top Instagram models.
17 Best Playboy Models and Playmates to Watch
Crowned Playboy Playmates sit beside cover stars who never took a centerfold, because the magazine built both kinds of career. The Playboy girls who arrived in the nineties sit beside one who arrived in 2026, and a few of the hottest Playboy models here were never on the payroll at all. Each card carries her Playboy credit, her nationality and the page she posts on now.
Five months after giving birth, Denise Richards posed fully nude for the December 2004 issue and has never once framed it as a mistake. The Bond girl from The World Is Not Enough and the lead in Wild Things was already a household name when she did it.
Her OnlyFans opened in June 2022, and filings in her 2025 divorce put the account between two and three hundred thousand dollars a month, which would make her the highest earning of the Playboy models with OnlyFans pages. She belongs with the hottest MILF OnlyFans creators on both audience and price, and she is still filming The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills while she does it.
Five pictorials, opening in May 1996 and closing with the January 2009 anniversary issue, make Carmen Electra one of the hottest Playboy models of the nineties and the most published of her generation. Prince handed her the stage name; Baywatch and MTV did the rest.
She opened an OnlyFans in 2022 saying she finally wanted to be her own boss, and the page has outlasted the celebrity wave that followed her onto the platform. Anyone comparing it with the best OnlyFans models will notice she treats the account as a job rather than a stunt, which is precisely why it still works.
Seven years inside the Playboy Mansion between 2001 and 2008 made Holly Madison the public face of the Hefner household without ever making her a Playmate. Her only pictorial ran in November 2005.
Two New York Times bestsellers followed, Down the Rabbit Hole in 2015 and The Vegas Diaries the year after, and she now hosts The Playboy Murders alongside a rewatch podcast that reopens the mansion years episode by episode. She has ended up as the period’s chief witness, a stranger job than anything the magazine ever gave her.
Texas produced the most tragic story in the magazine’s history. Anna Nicole Smith was waiting tables in Houston when she mailed in test shots, took the March 1992 centerfold, and was named Playmate of the Year in 1993.
Guess campaigns, her own reality series and a marriage that reached the Supreme Court followed, and she died in 2007 at thirty nine. The silhouette she made famous is the one driving the current wave of curvy Instagram models, which is why her photographs get reposted more now than in the years immediately after her death.
@amandacerny
Pittsburgh produced the Playmate who saw the creator economy coming. Amanda Cerny took the October 2011 centerfold, then spent the Vine years building an audience past four million while most of her peers were still waiting for a magazine to call.
Her second act dwarfs the first. Comedy sketches, a YouTube channel in the millions, film roles in Pain and Gain and Creed II, and a co-founder credit on the Zeus Network. Among the hottest female YouTubers who started somewhere else entirely, she is the one who turned a Playboy spread into an actual media company, and the only one of the hottest Playboy models here with a streaming service to her name.
@kendrawilkinson
Not every woman here wore the Playmate crown. Kendra Wilkinson never took a centerfold, yet three nude pictorials alongside Holly Madison and Bridget Marquardt plus five seasons of The Girls Next Door made her one of the most recognisable Playboy girls of the 2000s.
She passed the California real estate exam in June 2020 and sells property for a living now, which became the premise of Kendra Sells Hollywood. Her mansion-era pictorials still circulate wider than most of the best nude Instagram models working today, and she discusses that period with more candour than almost anyone who lived through it.
@victoriasilvstedt
Sweden sent Playboy a beauty queen and got back a television career. Victoria Silvstedt won Miss World Sweden in 1993, took the December 1996 centerfold, and was named Playmate of the Year for 1997.
Three decades on she remains a fixture on European television and a permanent face on the Monaco and Saint Tropez circuit, one of the very few Playmates of that era who never stepped away from public life. Her feed holds up against the hottest blonde Instagram models half her age, which is less luck than thirty years of knowing exactly what she is doing.
@jordy_jor
The December 2018 centerfold closed out an era. Jordan Emanuel, raised in Baltimore and educated at Miami, took the 2019 Playmate of the Year title and became only the third Black woman in the magazine’s history to hold it, and the last before print went dark.
Modelling was never the whole plan. She co-founded Women With Voices in Brooklyn, won Miss Black America New York in 2018, works as a journalist, and joined Bravo’s Summer House: Martha’s Vineyard in 2023. Very few Black Instagram models have used a Playboy platform this deliberately.
@marilynmonroe
It began with a photograph she never sold to Playboy. Marilyn Monroe posed for Tom Kelley in 1949 for fifty dollars, and Hugh Hefner bought the rights years later for the December 1953 debut, printing her with no contract, no fee and no involvement from her at all.
That issue sold more than fifty thousand copies and paid for everything the company built afterwards. Her estate runs a verified Instagram with a seven-figure following, and she is still the measuring stick every one of the famous Playboy models who followed gets held against.
@pamelaanderson
Fourteen covers, and nobody else is within shouting distance. A stadium camera at a Vancouver football game found Pamela Anderson in the crowd in 1989, her first cover ran that October, and she kept coming back until the January 2016 issue, the last nude cover the magazine ever printed.
Baywatch and Home Improvement made her the defining sex symbol of the nineties. Netflix’s Pam and Tommy in 2022 and her own documentary a year later handed the narrative back to her, and she spends the attention on animal rights work, cookbooks and a makeup-free Instagram that outperforms most Instagram bikini models without trying to compete with them. No list of the hottest Playboy models has ever been published without her somewhere near the top of it.
@jennymccarthy
Ten thousand women applied for the October 1993 issue and Hugh Hefner chose the one he described as a wholesome Catholic girl. Jenny McCarthy was paid twenty thousand dollars for that pictorial and a hundred thousand when the 1994 Playmate of the Year title followed.
MTV’s Singled Out came next, then a sketch show, then The View, then fourteen seasons of The Masked Singer. Six covers across two decades make her one of the most reprinted Playboy centerfolds in the archive, and the bestsellers and beauty line she built afterwards are why she is still on television three decades later.
@kimkardashian
December 2007 is still one of the best selling Playboy issues of the century, and the shoot was filmed for Keeping Up with the Kardashians while she argued with her mother about going through with it.
SKIMS raised money at a five billion dollar valuation in November 2025 and her stake alone clears a billion and a half, which puts her above every one of the highest-paid Instagram influencers by a distance. She is wealthier than the rest of the hottest Playboy models combined, and the cover was the point where she stopped being a reality television sidebar and started being the main business.
@lindsaylohan
A million dollars bought Playboy its biggest seller in years. The January and February 2012 double issue recreated Tom Kelley’s original Monroe pictorial shot for shot, leaked online before it reached shelves, and forced reprints in New York and Los Angeles.
Her comeback took another decade to arrive. Netflix gave her three films, Freakier Friday returned her to cinemas in 2025 for the first time since 2010, and a Hulu drama she is producing lands in 2027. The shoot now reads as the closing scene of her tabloid years rather than the end of a career.
@caradelevingne
Summer 2026 gave the magazine its first out lesbian cover star and its first supermodel in the Bunny suit since Kate Moss in 2014. Zoey Grossman shot it, Ottessa Moshfegh wrote the profile, and Cara Delevingne described the day as the first time being photographed naked had felt like her own idea.
Burberry made her a teenager, and Suicide Squad, Carnival Row and Only Murders in the Building made her an actress. She stays near the top of any list of hottest female Instagram models, she is the most recent addition to any current list of the hottest Playboy models, and the issue is decent evidence that the brand has worked out what a cover is supposed to do in 2026.
@charlizeafrica
Hers is the Playboy credit nobody on this list would have chosen. Photographs taken in 1994, early in her modelling career, ran in the May 1999 issue with her on the cover, and she went to court over them.
The case against the photographer who sold the images succeeded. The attempt to stop the magazine did not. An Oscar nomination arrived two years later, the Academy Award for Monster four years after that, and then a production company and the Mad Max and Atomic Blonde franchises. Her entry is the reminder that a Playboy appearance was not always a career decision.
@saraunderwood
Portland supplied the July 2006 centerfold and the 2007 Playmate of the Year, and then the internet handed her a second job. Sara Jean Underwood co-hosted roughly a hundred and fifty episodes of Attack of the Show before the cable era ran out.
Treehouses, cabins and Pacific Northwest light fill her feed now, shot by her and starring her, a format copied so widely it has become a genre. Professionally she has more in common with the outdoor influencers signing tent and truck deals than with anyone else on this page.
@ditavonteese
A misprint gave her the name she still uses. Heather Sweet picked Dita Von Treese; the December 2002 cover came back reading Von Teese, and she decided she preferred it.
Burlesque was close to extinct when she started performing, and she is the single biggest reason it is not. The lingerie label carrying her name is a real trading business with years behind it, a different proposition to the best lingerie OnlyFans girls selling access to a feed, and her pin-up styling remains the most copied look on Instagram.
Richest Playboy Models in 2026
A standard centerfold paid around twenty five thousand dollars. What these women earned afterwards sits in an entirely different bracket, and the distance between first place and second is wider than the rest of the list put together. Work out which of the hottest Playboy models actually built money and the answer has very little to do with centerfold fees. These are the richest Playboy models by current public estimates.
- 1. Kim Kardashian,about 2 billion dollars
A one-third stake in SKIMS, valued at five billion dollars in November 2025, does almost all of the work here. The 2007 cover is a footnote on her balance sheet and the reason anyone was watching in the first place. - 2. Charlize Theron,about 200 million dollars
Leading-role fees built the base, and Dior and Raymond Weil contracts have reportedly supplied half her income in a given year. She is the only woman on this list who won an Academy Award after appearing in the magazine. - 3. Cara Delevingne,about 50 million dollars
Burberry, YSL Beauty and Tag Heuer kept her among the best paid models in the world for a decade, and the acting work has been steady enough to carry her through the years she was not walking. - 4. Jenny McCarthy,about 25 million dollars
Trackers usually quote this figure jointly with her husband Donnie Wahlberg. Fourteen seasons of The Masked Singer, a shelf of bestsellers and a cosmetics line explain the rest of it. - 5. Pamela Anderson,about 20 million dollars
Rebuilt after a well-documented stretch of tax and property trouble. Fourteen covers never paid like a franchise, but the Netflix resurgence, the Broadway run and the beauty brand have.
Accumulated wealth and current income are two different tables. Denise Richards reportedly clears two to three hundred thousand dollars a month from a subscription page, which beats what several women above her earn in a year from traditional work. Anyone studying how to make money as an influencer will notice the same pattern in all five: they stopped renting their image out and started owning the thing that sells it.
Why Playboy Playmates Still Matter in 2026
The magazine is physically back. Playboy returned to newsstands on 11 February 2025 after five years away, and Gillian Nation took the 2025 Playmate of the Year title. Raised on a remote Montana farm and found through a nationwide Bunny search, she debuted over Super Bowl weekend in a diamond-covered Bunny suit reported at ten million dollars, which is not the behaviour of a brand quietly winding down. A casting search run across the whole country is also a long way from how Playboy Bunnies were recruited for the clubs in the sixties.
Scarcity is doing the heavy lifting. One Playmate of the Year a year and a handful of print issues is a far narrower pipeline than the monthly machine that produced hundreds of Playboy centerfolds between 1953 and 2020, so a single cover now carries weight it had lost by the end of the print run. The Winter issue that followed bundled twelve new Playmates with Jane Birkin photographs from the 1970 archive, aiming squarely at collectors.
A subscription business runs alongside it. Centerfold launched in December 2021 with Cardi B as founding creative director and was renamed Playboy Club in March 2023, which put the company in direct competition with the platforms its own alumni were already using. A wave of YouTuber OnlyFans creators made the identical calculation in the same period, so the move says more about where subscription money sits than about any change of heart at Playboy.
Hottest Playboy Models at a Glance
Age, nationality, occupation and the verified Instagram handle for all seventeen, in one image. Ages are correct as of October 2026, and Anna Nicole Smith is the only name without an official account.
Conclusion
Marilyn Monroe’s accidental first cover and Cara Delevingne’s deliberate one sit seventy three years apart, and the same pattern holds in every decade between them. The magazine was the introduction, never the career. Pamela Anderson turned fourteen covers into a franchise, Kim Kardashian turned one into a two billion dollar company, and Sara Jean Underwood turned hers into a photography business in the woods.
Some of these women still trade on the brand every week and some have been gone for decades. Together they make up the hottest Playboy models the magazine has produced across seven decades, and the ones at the top of the page are simply the ones you can see most clearly. With print running again and the Playmate of the Year title back in circulation, the sexiest Playboy models of any era are easier to follow than they have ever been.
Playboy Models FAQ
Pamela Anderson holds the record with fourteen covers between October 1989 and the January 2016 farewell nude issue, more than any other person in the magazine’s history. Marilyn Monroe is the more culturally loaded answer, because the December 1953 debut carried photographs she had sold to a calendar company four years earlier and never expected to see there. Between them they bookend the entire run, one as the accident that started it and the other as the face that carried it for three decades.
Gillian Nation holds the title, named 2025 Playmate of the Year as part of the brand’s return to print. She was home-schooled on a remote farm in Montana, found through a nationwide Bunny search, and debuted over Super Bowl weekend in New Orleans in a diamond-studded Bunny suit reported at ten million dollars. Before her, Jordan Emanuel was the last individual Playmate of the Year in 2019, and the 2020 title was shared between all twelve of that year’s centerfolds as the print magazine wound down.
Standard Playmates were historically paid around twenty five thousand dollars for a centerfold. Jenny McCarthy’s fees are the clearest benchmark: twenty thousand dollars for her October 1993 pictorial and a hundred thousand when the Playmate of the Year title followed. Celebrities negotiated separately and went far higher, with Lindsay Lohan reportedly paid a million dollars for the 2012 double issue. The real money now sits elsewhere, in brand ownership and subscription platforms, where one former Playmate can clear more in a month than a year of print centerfold fees ever paid.
The best known celebrity Playboy models include Kim Kardashian in December 2007, Naomi Campbell in December 1999, Drew Barrymore in January 1995, Denise Richards in December 2004, Lindsay Lohan in the January and February 2012 double issue, Kate Moss on the 60th anniversary cover in 2014, and Cara Delevingne on the Summer 2026 cover. Charlize Theron appeared on the May 1999 cover under very different circumstances, as the photographs came from her early modelling career and reached the magazine without her agreement, and she took the matter to court.
Print is running again. The monthly magazine stopped after March 2020, but Playboy returned to newsstands on 11 February 2025 with Lori Harvey on the cover, its first physical issue in five years, and has published on a roughly quarterly basis since. The Summer 2026 edition put Cara Delevingne in the Bunny suit, and a Winter issue paired twelve new Playmates with archive Jane Birkin photographs from 1970. Alongside the magazine the company runs Playboy Club, the subscription platform that launched as Centerfold in December 2021 and was renamed in March 2023.
Kim Kardashian, by an enormous margin. Public net worth trackers put her around two billion dollars, almost all of it tied to her roughly one-third stake in SKIMS, which raised money at a five billion dollar valuation in November 2025. Charlize Theron follows at roughly two hundred million, then Cara Delevingne near fifty million, Jenny McCarthy at about twenty five million in a figure usually quoted jointly with her husband, and Pamela Anderson at around twenty million. None of those fortunes came from the magazine itself, which is rather the point of this list.
Denise Richards runs the best known page, opened in June 2022, with filings from her 2025 divorce putting the income between two and three hundred thousand dollars a month. Carmen Electra launched hers the same year, saying she wanted to be her own boss for once, and has kept it active long after most celebrity accounts went quiet. Several other Playboy models with OnlyFans pages arrived in the same window, and the company answered by building its own subscription platform rather than watching its alumni earn that money somewhere else.
