What does "royalty-free" mean?

Of software, content, or materials, licensed for use after a one-time payment or fee, with no additional royalties required per use, reproduction, or distribution.

Royalty-free

adj

adj ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective

1
Of software, content, or materials, licensed for use after a one-time payment or fee, with no additional royalties required per use, reproduction, or distribution. not-comparable

Example

More examples

"Their footage library is royalty-free."

Etymology

From royalty + -free.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.