Do Audiobooks Earn Public Lending Right Payments in the UK, Canada and Australia?

Audiobooks earn Public Lending Right payments in the UK, Canada and Australia, but each country attaches different conditions and none of them signs you up automatically. An audiobook Public Lending Right claim needs its own ISBN, a separate registration with that country’s scheme, and an author who meets that country’s residency or citizenship test.

Do Audiobooks Qualify for Public Lending Right in the UK, Canada and Australia?

Public Lending Right is a government payment to authors and other book contributors, made because libraries lend their books for free. Funding comes from a fixed annual government pot, not from the libraries and not from your book sales. The UK, Canada and Australia each run their own version, and all three now accept audiobooks. Every scheme stands alone, with its own forms, rules and closing date. None of them is specific to audio: each covers print books and ebooks on broadly similar terms, and registers every format separately. Audiobooks are the subject here, and the rules below are the ones that apply to them.

Every figure below comes from the scheme’s own published pages. Each carries the year it applies to, because the rates reset annually.

One point matters more than any other here. Getting your audiobook into a library is not the same as registering for Public Lending Right. No scheme treats a distributor, a library platform or a library itself as an enrolment agent. Your audiobook can sit in catalogues for years, lend steadily, and pay you nothing, because nobody told the scheme you exist. We covered the separate problem of how an audiobook reaches Libby and hoopla in the first place in an earlier article. This one picks up afterwards, with the money.

Are You Eligible to Claim? Residency and Citizenship

Public Lending Right is tied to where you live or which passport you hold, not to where your audiobook sells. Check this before anything else, because an author can meet every requirement about the recording and still be shut out here.

The UK test is residence, not nationality. Your only or principal home must be in the UK or the European Economic Area at the moment you register. If you have more than one home, the principal one is wherever you spent most of the previous 24 months. Authors living in the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man or Gibraltar are specifically excluded, despite the UK connection. A British passport on its own does not qualify you.

Canada asks the opposite question and looks at status rather than address. You must be a Canadian citizen or a permanent resident. Citizens can claim from anywhere in the world, so a Canadian living in Berlin remains eligible.

Australia takes both routes. Australian citizens can claim wherever they live. Non-citizens can claim if they normally reside in Australia, but that eligibility ends if they move away.

One common case falls outside all three. An author who holds only US citizenship and lives in the US qualifies nowhere, however well the audiobook lends in London, Toronto or Melbourne. The US operates no national Public Lending Right scheme of its own, so there is nothing domestic to fall back on either.

Which Audiobooks Actually Count as Eligible?

Once you have cleared the residency and citizenship test, each scheme runs a series of checks on the recording itself. There are three, and an audiobook has to pass all of them.

Does the Audiobook Have Its Own ISBN?

An ISBN is the 13-digit number that identifies one specific edition of one specific book. Every scheme requires one for the audiobook itself. The paperback’s number will not do, because an ISBN identifies a format as well as a title.

This is where an audiobook published through ACX runs aground. ACX, the platform that produces and publishes audiobooks for Audible, neither asks for an ISBN nor issues one. It identifies your audiobook by an ASIN instead, which is the product code Amazon assigns on its own platforms. An ACX-only audiobook therefore has no number any scheme will accept, and no amount of library lending will change that.

The UK names the problem outright. The British Library’s PLR pages state that “ASINs are not eligible as they are only used by Amazon”, and rule out Audible download editions along with them. They also explain why: Amazon runs a closed system, and has not licensed those editions for lending by UK public libraries. Canada and Australia arrive at the same place by a simpler route. Both require an ISBN, so an ASIN-only title fails for want of one rather than because the ASIN is named. Canada asks specifically for a new 13-digit ISBN belonging to the audiobook, and Australia additionally wants a catalogue record in a national bibliographic database, either the Australian National Bibliographic Database or SCIS.

Getting an eligible number is not usually expensive. Audiobook distributors that reach library platforms commonly supply a free ISBN with distribution, and you can otherwise obtain your own from your national ISBN agency. A distributor’s free ISBN is a genuine ISBN and satisfies all three schemes; its drawback is that it belongs to the distributor and will not travel with you if you move. That trade-off, and the case for holding your own number, is why an audiobook needs a separate ISBN in the first place.

Is It the Right Kind of Recording?

The three schemes differ sharply here, and Canada is much the strictest of them.

The UK applies what amounts to a readability test. An audiobook qualifies only if printing the whole recording would give you something that reads like a book. It must also be a reading of an existing printed book, or else name a narrator. Dramatisations, recorded interviews, speeches and comedy sketches all fail that test. The UK sets no restriction on subject matter, so a how-to book is as welcome as a novel.

Canada rules out whole categories of writing regardless of format. Cookbooks, self-help titles, how-to guides, travel guides, manuals, reference works, dictionaries, directories and textbooks are all excluded, as are books produced for an educational market. Non-commercial audiobooks are excluded too. That list catches a great deal of self-published non-fiction, so it is worth reading the Canadian eligibility page in full before assuming a claim is possible. Canada’s eligible genres are fiction, poetry, drama, children’s literature, general non-fiction and scholarly work.

Australia publishes no subject test at all. Its list of ineligible items covers music and audio-visual material, magazines and other serials, games and cards, single-use books such as activity and sticker books, and anything lacking an ISBN. A practical guide that Canada would refuse is therefore claimable in Australia, provided it meets the other conditions.

Was It Published Recently Enough?

Canada and Australia both work to a five-year window. An audiobook published longer ago than that cannot be claimed in either country. Canada measures the window against its annual intake, and Australia accepts claims up to five years after the year of publication.

The UK sets no such limit, and a decades-old title can be registered today. What the UK will not do is backdate. You are paid for loans that happen after you register, and never for the years between publication and registration. The practical warning is the same in all three countries: register as soon as the audiobook is published rather than when you get round to it.

Do AI-Narrated Audiobooks Qualify?

Canada answers this directly and says no. Its eligibility page lists “a machine narrated audiobook” among the works it will not accept, alongside non-commercial recordings.

The UK and Australian schemes publish nothing on synthetic narration either way. We could find no rule, no guidance note and no FAQ entry on either site addressing it. That silence is genuinely unresolved rather than quietly permissive, so it would be unwise to read it as approval and build a claim on it. If your audiobook uses a digital voice, ask the scheme in writing before you register, and keep the reply.

Who Gets Paid on an Audiobook, and How Much of It?

A Public Lending Right payment belongs to a title, not to a person. Each scheme works out what a title has earned, then divides that amount between the people who made the audiobook. The slice you receive is called your percentage share, and it is worth settling before you look at the sums, because the calculations in the next section all multiply by it. All three countries divide a payment in strikingly different ways, and the difference matters most to an author who narrated their own book.

The UK sets fixed percentages rather than leaving them to negotiation. Of the payment a title earns, the writer takes 60%, the narrator 20% and the producer 20%. Producer here has a specific meaning: the person who organised the recording session, not the company that employed them. An author who writes and narrates claims both of those shares, which the British Library’s guidance puts at 80%. An abridger or editor takes 12% and a translator 18%, each deducted from the writer’s share rather than from anyone else’s.

That leaves an obvious question for a solo indie author, and the guidance does not fully answer it. If you wrote the book, narrated it and arranged the recording yourself, you appear to fit the producer definition too, which would account for the remaining 20%. The guidance says you may claim for additional contributions, but it only works the writer-and-narrator case through. The difference is real money, because where a contributor does not register, the scheme asks for a notional share to be set aside for them rather than shared out among everyone else. Put the question to the PLR office at bl.uk/services/plr before you register, rather than assuming either answer.

Canada recognises narrators as creators in their own right and works in ceilings rather than fixed splits. An author may claim up to 50% of the payment for the narrated version, and the narrators may claim up to 50% between them. Where two people share the narration, that 50% is divided between the two of them rather than paid twice. The ceilings are maximums rather than entitlements, and a claim has to reflect what you actually contributed; below a 10% share you cannot register at all. For a translated audiobook the narrator ceiling drops to 33%, which explains a figure that circulates in author forums as though it were the general narrator rate. It is not, and it applies to translations only.

Australia does not pay narrators anything. Its eligible creator categories are authors, editors, illustrators, translators and compilers, with a maximum of five per book, and narrators appear nowhere on that list. A second Australian rule points the same way. Creators must hold an ongoing financial interest in the book, meaning a continuing right to royalties, which a narrator paid a one-off session fee does not have. Australian shares then follow each creator’s actual royalty proportion rather than any fixed table, so an author receiving all the royalties claims 100%.

Self-publishing authors in Australia have one extra step. They are both the creator and the publisher, so they should register in both roles and lodge a claim for each. A publisher claim only pays out if an eligible creator on the same book is also being paid, which means registering as publisher alone earns nothing.

How Each Scheme Measures Library Use

How much a title earns in the first place depends on what its country’s scheme actually measures, and the three measure completely different things. That is why one audiobook can earn a useful sum in one country and nothing in another. The UK counts loans, Canada counts catalogue presence, and Australia counts copies held. None of these stands in for the others.

The UK Pays for Each Borrow

Every time a UK public library lends your registered audiobook, that loan is worth a set amount. For the 2024–25 PLR year the rate was 12.40p per loan. Those pennies accumulate across all your registered titles over the PLR year, which runs from 1 July to 30 June. The British Library then pays the total once a year, each February.

Two limits sit either side of that total, and they do different jobs. If the year’s loans add up to less than £1, nothing is paid at all. If they add up to more than £6,600, the payment is capped there however many loans you recorded. Nine loans across your registered titles therefore come to roughly £1.12, which just clears the floor, and an author would need somewhere over 53,000 loans in the year to reach the ceiling.

The way those loans get counted changed recently. The British Library used to estimate the national figure from a rotating sample of library authorities. Since 1 July 2025 it has used loans data from every UK public library instead. Its published earnings breakdown corrects a good deal of optimism. Of 24,992 payments made for 2024–25, some 19,039 fell in the £1 to £99.99 band. Only 311 reached the top band of £5,000 to £6,600.

Canada Pays for Sitting on the Shelf

Canada does not count borrowing at all. Its payments page is explicit that the scheme counts neither the number of copies a library holds nor the number of times the book goes out. What matters is simply whether a library system has your title in its catalogue.

Each year the programme selects a group of large public library systems, spread across every province, territory and region, and searches their catalogues for every registered title. Those selected systems are what the scheme calls the sample. Your title can appear in none of them, in all eight, or anywhere in between. That count is the raw number the payment is built on.

Three further terms complete the calculation, and each is simpler than it sounds:

• The hit rate is the cash value of one appearance in one sampled library system. Canada sets it annually by dividing the available budget by the number of registered titles found that year. For 2024–25 it was C$61.47.
• Your percentage share is the proportion of the title’s payment you are entitled to as one of its contributors. In Canada an author claims up to 50% of an audiobook’s payment, and the narrators up to 50% between them.
• The time adjustment reduces the payment as a title ages. It pays 100% for the first five years after registration, 80% from six to ten years, 70% from eleven to fifteen, and 50% from sixteen to twenty-five. After twenty-five years the title is retired, which Canada says is a matter of fairness to new titles and creators.

Multiplying the library count by those three figures gives the payment for one title. Working an example through shows the scale. Take an audiobook found in five of the eight sampled systems, with a narrator claiming a 50% share, registered seven years ago. Seven years falls in the six-to-ten band, so the time adjustment is 80%. Start with the hit rate of C$61.47 and multiply it by five, which gives C$307.35. Halve that for the 50% share, giving C$153.68. Then take 80% of it. The payment for that title is C$122.94. Payments across all your titles are added together, and Canada pays nothing at all unless the combined total reaches C$50.

Australia Pays for Copies Held

Australia counts neither loans nor catalogue entries. Instead it works from an estimate of how many copies libraries hold between them. It surveys a sample of library systems, then scales the result up to a national estimate. For a digital format such as an audiobook, holdings are converted into what the scheme calls equivalent book copies.

A title needs an estimated 50 copies or more before any payment is calculated at all, and the resulting total must then clear A$100. Rates are tiered by the size of the estimate. The Public Lending Right Committee’s 2024–25 annual report sets them at A$2.30 per copy for the first 1,500 equivalent copies. They rise slightly through the middle bands, then fall to A$1.75 above 60,000. Australia also runs two schemes side by side on the same rules: PLR for public libraries, and ELR for school, TAFE and university libraries. The A$100 minimum applies to each separately.

That report also shows how new audiobooks are to the scheme. They made up 4.4% of books in the 2024–25 survey, but 16.8% of newly claimed ISBNs, so the share is climbing fast from a low base.

Two of these three measures reward getting stocked rather than getting borrowed. That puts the emphasis on library acquisition well before any payment question arises, and it is a separate piece of work with its own tactics. We set out how libraries decide which self-published books to buy in an earlier article.

When to Register, and Why the Published Dates Need Checking

Each scheme runs to an annual calendar, and missing the date costs you that year rather than the whole entitlement. The UK runs its PLR year from 1 July to 30 June, and asks you to register by 30 June to be counted in that year’s calculation. Canada opens a postal window each year, running roughly from 15 February to 1 May. It mails a File Update form to registered creators, and audiobooks need their own separate registration form alongside it. Australia runs an annual claim period closing on 31 March.

Treat all of those dates as a starting point rather than gospel, because the schemes’ own pages lag behind their own calendars. Checked on 24 August 2026, the British Library’s PLR page carried three different statements about how it measures loans. Two described the superseded sampling method. Only the dated July 2025 statement matched the current national data. The Canadian registration page announced a window running to May 2026 that had already closed. The Australian scheme page still gave 31 March 2025 as the deadline for new title claims.

None of that makes the schemes unreliable, and the underlying rules are stable. It does mean a published date is worth confirming rather than trusting. Email or ring the scheme, ask when the current window opens and closes, and keep the reply somewhere you will find it next year.

Public Lending Right will not transform an audiobook’s income. In the UK, three quarters of all payments made for 2024–25 came to less than £100, and Canada and Australia both set floors that a modestly held title will not reach. It is still worth the paperwork, because registration is free, you do it once per title, and it then pays for as long as libraries keep the recording. Start with the residency and citizenship test, since that decides whether the rest applies to you. If you pass it, make sure the audiobook carries its own ISBN, then register in the next window rather than the one after.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does distributing my audiobook to Libby or hoopla register it for Public Lending Right?

No. Distribution and registration are separate acts, and no scheme names a distributor or a library platform as an enrolment agent. You register directly with the national scheme yourself: the British Library for UK PLR, the Canada Council for the Arts for Canadian PLR, and the Office for the Arts for the Australian schemes. A title can lend for years without earning anything if nobody ever registered it.

Can a US author claim Public Lending Right on an audiobook?

Not under the UK, Canadian or Australian schemes. UK PLR requires your principal home to be in the UK or the European Economic Area when you register, and takes no account of nationality. Canada requires Canadian citizenship or permanent residence. Australia requires Australian citizenship or ordinary residence in Australia. The US runs no equivalent national scheme of its own.

Do I need a separate ISBN for the audiobook, or can I use my paperback’s?

The audiobook needs its own. An ISBN identifies one specific format, so the paperback’s number will not register an audio edition. Canada is explicit that the audiobook requires a new 13-digit ISBN and counts as a separate title. The UK asks you to register each edition that carries a different ISBN. An audiobook with no ISBN at all cannot be registered anywhere.

Does an Audible-exclusive audiobook earn Public Lending Right?

No, and the reason is the missing identifier rather than the exclusivity. Audible downloads carry an ASIN, the code Amazon uses in place of an ISBN, and the British Library’s PLR guidance states that ASINs are not eligible because only Amazon uses them. The same guidance excludes Kindle and Audible editions because Amazon has not licensed them for UK public library lending. Kobo’s substitute numbers beginning 123 fail on the same basis. A free ISBN issued through KDP is a real ISBN and does not have this problem.

Can I register my ebook and paperback for Public Lending Right as well?

Yes, and you register each format separately because each carries its own ISBN. Print books and ebooks both qualify for UK PLR, and for the Canadian and Australian schemes, on broadly the same terms as audiobooks. Two identifier traps apply to those formats rather than to audio. A Kindle ebook is issued with an ASIN and is not eligible, and Kobo assigns 13-digit numbers beginning 123 to titles without a real ISBN, which the British Library rejects on the same basis as ASINs. A free ISBN from KDP for a paperback or hardcover is a genuine ISBN and registers normally. Irish PLR is the exception: it accepts print only, and takes neither ebooks nor audiobooks.

How much do audiobook Public Lending Right payments actually come to?

For most claimants the sums are small. The UK rate for 2024–25 was 12.40p per loan, and of 24,992 payments made across all formats, some 19,039 came to less than £100. Canada sets a floor of C$50 and a 2024–25 ceiling of C$4,500, so a title found in few sampled libraries may earn nothing at all. Australia pays nothing until a title reaches an estimated 50 copies and the total clears A$100.