Kacey Musgraves Age 2026: How Old Is Kacey Musgraves?

Last updated: November 13, 2026  ·  By Nathan Cole

Kacey Musgraves is 38 years old in 2026. She was born Kacey Lee Musgraves on August 21, 1988, which means she turned 38 on August 21, 2026 — and she spent that birthday exactly where a country star should: on stage, opening her Middle of Nowhere Tour at the United Center in Chicago. If a page you read this year still says 37, it was written before that birthday and it is out of date.

Thirty-eight finds her in the middle of the busiest year of her career in a long while. She released Middle of Nowhere, her sixth studio album, on May 1, 2026, ended a years-long freeze with Miranda Lambert by recording their first-ever duet together, played a 30-date arena tour across North America, and lost her mentor Dolly Parton in August. Her net worth is estimated at $12 million, per Celebrity Net Worth, and she stands 5 feet 5 inches tall. This is the full picture, kept current to November 13, 2026: the birth date and the math, the East Texas childhood, the Nashville Star years, the Golden Hour sweep, the divorce and the comeback albums, the 2026 tour, the Lambert reunion, the Dolly tribute, and the money.

How Old Is Kacey Musgraves in 2026?

Kacey Musgraves is 38 years old as of November 13, 2026. The math is simple and it is worth doing out loud, because so many pages get it wrong: born August 21, 1988, she turned 37 on August 21, 2025, and 38 on August 21, 2026. Ask Oracle’s live age calculator, checked in November 2026, puts her at 38 years, 2 months and 20 days — and the 38th birthday itself doubled as a career milestone, the opening night of her Middle of Nowhere Tour at the United Center in Chicago.

That makes her one of the rare country stars whose career can be measured in clean decades. She was 18 when Nashville Star put her on national television in 2007, 24 when her major-label debut arrived in 2013, 30 when Golden Hour won Album of the Year in 2019, 35 when “I Remember Everything” gave her a first Hot 100 No. 1 in 2023, and 38 when she released Middle of Nowhere and took it to arenas. Parade marked the birthday on August 21, 2026 with a career retrospective headlined “Kacey Musgraves Turns 38” — and called her, in the same piece, an eight-time Grammy winner.

The confusion online has a clear cause. Age pages are usually written once and left alone, and a page written in 2024 says 35 forever. StardomNetWorth, last updated January 27, 2026, still lists her as 37 in its table — it was right for the first eight months of 2026 and wrong after August 21. PopGolden’s profile is worse: its age section still says 35. If the page you are reading does not mention Middle of Nowhere or the 2026 tour, it was written before May 2026 and its age is suspect. The correct answer, as of November 13, 2026, is 38.

Born in Sulphur Springs, Raised in Golden: The East Texas Childhood

Kacey Lee Musgraves was born on August 21, 1988, in Sulphur Springs, Texas, and grew up in Golden, a community of a few hundred people in Wood County, about 75 miles east of Dallas. That two-town answer is the honest one, because the sources split: Wikipedia and Simple Wikipedia record Sulphur Springs as the birthplace, while Parade, Far Out Magazine and most profile pages say Golden. The split has a plain explanation — Golden is where she was raised, where her family lived, and where she went to Mineola High School, while Sulphur Springs is the larger Hopkins County town where she was born. She arrived six weeks premature and weighed only five pounds, a detail Wikipedia records and several biographies repeat.

Her parents are Craig and Karen Musgraves. Her younger sister, Kelly Christine Sutton, became a photographer and has shot much of Kacey’s album art. Music started early: she began writing songs at eight, learned mandolin and guitar as a child, and was performing around East Texas before she was a teenager. By the time most kids her age were picking up a first instrument, she had already released her first independent album — Movin’ On in 2002, when she was 13 — followed by Wanted: One Good Cowboy in 2003 and a self-titled record in 2007. Three self-released albums before the age of 20, all before Nashville had heard of her.

Golden shaped the songwriting more than any lesson could. It is the kind of place where everybody knows whose truck is parked outside the diner, and the small-town detail in her early songs — the trailer parks, the gossip, the church pews — came from living there, not from imagining it. She left for Nashville as a teenager, but the East Texas lens never left the writing. Twenty years later she was still writing about it: Middle of Nowhere takes its title and much of its sound from Texas dancehall culture, and one of its tracks is named “Uncertain, TX” after a real East Texas town.

18 and on TV: Nashville Star and the Move to Nashville

Musgraves was 18 years old when she competed on Nashville Star in 2007, finishing in seventh place. The show was a televised singing competition, and seventh place sounds modest until you count what it bought her: a national television audience, a Nashville network, and a reason to move to the city for good. She was still a teenager, and the show put her in front of the songwriters and publishers who run the town.

The years after the show were the slow kind of career-building that never makes a montage. She moved to Nashville, wrote songs for other artists, and waited for a record deal. The first big placement arrived in 2013, when Miranda Lambert cut “Mama’s Broken Heart” — a song Musgraves co-wrote with Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally. It became a hit for Lambert, and it did something a seventh-place finish could not: it proved Musgraves could write a country song that worked on country radio. The Lambert connection matters twice in this story. It started as a songwriting credit in 2013, and thirteen years later it became a duet that ended a long freeze between the two Texas singers.

She signed with Mercury Nashville in 2012, at 23. The debut album was already written. What followed was one of the strongest major-label debuts of the decade.

Same Trailer Different Park: The 2013 Breakthrough

Same Trailer Different Park arrived in March 2013, when Musgraves was 24, and it announced a songwriter who wrote about small-town life without either romanticizing it or sneering at it. “Merry Go ‘Round” was the calling card — a waltz about trailer-park boredom that won the Grammy for Best Country Song in 2014 — and “Follow Your Arrow”, with its cheerful shrug at small-town judgment, became an anthem. The album won the Grammy for Best Country Album the same night, giving her two Grammys before her 26th birthday.

Pageant Material followed in 2015, when she was 26, and A Very Kacey Christmas in 2016, when she was 28. Neither chased the debut’s sound. The Christmas record, a mix of standards and originals, is the reason album-counting gets confusing: count it and Middle of Nowhere is her seventh album; leave it out and it is her sixth studio album, which is how the label bills it. Either way, the run from 2013 to 2016 established the pattern of her career — a new record every couple of years, each one a small left turn from the last, and a reputation as the sharpest lyricist in Nashville.

By 28 she had three Grammys’ worth of recognition behind her and a fan base that had grown up with her. The next record would make her a star far beyond country radio.

Golden Hour and the 2019 Grammy Sweep

Golden Hour arrived in March 2018, when Musgraves was 29, and it changed the scale of her career in a single year. The record traded the sharp edges of her early writing for warmth — disco shimmer, soft-focus romance, songs about falling in love and staying in it. “Butterflies” and “Space Cowboy” became the signature tracks, and the album crossed over in a way her earlier records had not, reaching listeners who had never bought a country album.

On February 10, 2019, at 30, she won four Grammys in one night: Album of the Year and Best Country Album for Golden Hour, Best Country Song for “Space Cowboy”, and Best Country Solo Performance for “Butterflies”. Album of the Year is the biggest prize in the room, and winning it for a country record that sounded like nothing else on country radio was the moment her career stopped being a Nashville story and became a music-industry story. She had gone from seventh place on a TV talent show to the top of the Grammys in twelve years.

The sweep also set up the record she would spend the next few years chasing. Four Grammys in a night is a peak, and peaks invite the question of what comes next. Her answer was not to repeat Golden Hour. It was to make a record about the marriage that was ending while she made it.

Star-Crossed, Divorce, and Deeper Well

Musgraves married singer-songwriter Ruston Kelly in 2017, when she was 29. The marriage ended in divorce in 2020, when she was 31, and Star-Crossed, released in September 2021, was the record of it — a divorce album built as a three-act tragedy, with a companion film to match. She was 33 when it arrived, and it sounded nothing like Golden Hour: darker, sharper, and far less interested in being liked. Critics praised it. It did not win Grammys. That was, in a way, the point.

The comeback came from an unexpected direction. “I Remember Everything”, her 2023 collaboration with Zach Bryan, became her first Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 — at 35, a decade into her major-label career, on somebody else’s single. The song won the Grammy for Best Country Duo/Group Performance in February 2024 and made her the only artist ever to win a Grammy in all four major country categories: Best Country Album, Best Country Song, Best Country Solo Performance, and Best Country Duo/Group Performance.

Deeper Well followed in March 2024, when she was 35, debuting at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 — her biggest debut sales week at the time, and her fifth No. 1 debut on the Top Country Albums chart. Its single “The Architect” won Best Country Song at the Grammys in February 2025, her eighth Grammy. The Deeper Well World Tour ran from April to December 2024, her first arena-scale world tour. Then, in June 2025, she broke a rib on vacation in Mexico — a small, unglamorous injury that kept her off stage while she planned what came next. What came next was a return to Texas.

Middle of Nowhere: The 2026 Album and Arena Tour

Musgraves announced Middle of Nowhere on March 11, 2026, and released it on May 1, 2026, through Lost Highway Records. It is her sixth studio album — seventh if you count the 2016 Christmas record — and it is the most Texan record she has made: 13 tracks built from Texas dancehall sounds, traditional country, Norteño, mariachi and zydeco, with guest spots from Willie Nelson, Miranda Lambert, Billy Strings and Gregory Alan Isakov. The singles included “Dry Spell”, “Middle of Nowhere”, “Loneliest Girl” and “Mexico Honey”, the last of which became her first solo top 40 hit.

The tour matched the album’s scale. The Middle of Nowhere Tour was a 30-date North American arena run that opened on August 21, 2026 — her 38th birthday — at the United Center in Chicago, and wrapped on October 27, 2026, at Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle. Two nights at Madison Square Garden in New York, two at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, two at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. Opening acts rotated by city: Midland, Flatland Cavalry, Carter Faith, Charles Wesley Godwin, William Beckmann, Gabriella Rose, Estevie and the Brudi Brothers. She played 11 of the album’s 13 tracks a night, alongside “Slow Burn”, “Butterflies”, “High Horse”, “Merry Go ‘Round” and “Follow Your Arrow”.

The 2026 story did not end in Seattle. On October 22, 2026, SPIN reported she had announced Middle of Nowhere Vol. 2: Tex Mex Tapes, a 16-track companion arriving January 15, 2027, with 11 new songs, five covers and four tracks sung entirely in Spanish. And the UK leg follows in February 2027, with arena shows in Glasgow, Manchester and London. At 38 she is not winding down a career. She is extending an album into a second volume and a second continent.

The Miranda Lambert Duet and the End of a Feud

The most talked-about song on Middle of Nowhere is “Horses and Divorces”, her first-ever duet with Miranda Lambert — and the public end of a freeze between the two Texas singers that had lasted years. The two co-wrote the track with Shane McAnally after years of not speaking, and the song is, by Musgraves’ own description, a small joke about the world sitting down, poking fun at each other, having a beer and calling it a day. It is nominated for Musical Event of the Year at the CMA Awards, with the ceremony set for November 18, 2026, where Musgraves holds five nominations in all, including Album of the Year.

The duet has now been performed live twice. The first time was at the album-release show at Gruene Hall in New Braunfels in May 2026, where Lambert told the room they were burying the hatchet and Musgraves answered that they were both dumb. The second was October 7, 2026, at the Moody Center in Austin, where Lambert walked onstage during Musgraves’ set in front of a home-state crowd and the two sang it together, hugging first. JamBase and American Songwriter both covered the Austin night, and the footage traveled fast — a reconciliation staged as a surprise, in Texas, on a tour named after nowhere.

Lambert’s own career makes the reunion land harder. She is five years older than Musgraves, born November 10, 1983, and her fortune is far larger — an estimated $60 million, per Celebrity Net Worth — built on a longer run of hits and bigger tours. For the full picture of her career and money, see Miranda Lambert’s net worth on Guide Net Worth. The duet works because the two women are equals on stage even when the numbers differ, and because thirteen years after Lambert cut Musgraves’ song, Musgraves finally got Lambert on her own record.

The tour produced one more surprise worth recording. On September 28, 2026, at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, Musgraves dressed as Brooks & Dunn’s Ronnie Dunn and brought Dunn himself onstage for a duet of “Neon Moon”. She was 38, he was 73, and the bit — a tribute and a joke at once — became one of the most shared clips of the tour.

Dolly Parton: A Mentor Lost in August 2026

Dolly Parton died on August 25, 2026, at age 80, four days after Musgraves turned 38 and opened her tour. Parton was the most important mentor of Musgraves’ life — a fellow country woman who had shown how to be famous, funny and in control of your own image for six decades — and the loss landed in the middle of the biggest tour of Musgraves’ career.

In a People interview in November 2026, Musgraves spoke about Parton and called herself “lucky” to have known her. The word is doing a lot of work: Parton was not a distant influence but a presence, a phone call away, a model for how to age in public without disappearing. Musgraves paid tribute to her on the Houston stop of the tour, where she also honored the late Tejano legend Selena, and the Parton tributes ran through the rest of the run. Losing a mentor at 38, in the middle of a comeback tour, is a particular kind of grief — the person who could have told you how to handle the moment is gone in the middle of it.

The Dolly connection also explains something about Musgraves’ longevity. Parton’s career lasted because she owned her image, her songs and her business. Musgraves has followed the same playbook in a smaller key: her own label deals, her own visual world, and a refusal to make the same record twice. At 38, with eight Grammys and a sixth album behind her, she is roughly where Parton was at the same age — established, respected, and still surprising people.

Personal Life and Dating in 2026

Musgraves is not publicly confirmed to be dating anyone as of November 13, 2026. She was married to Ruston Kelly from 2017 until their divorce in 2020, and she has kept her romantic life mostly private since. In comments reported on November 12, 2026, she spoke about what she wants in a partner now: confidence and security. It is a short answer, and it fits the pattern of her thirties — less interested in performing a relationship for the public, more interested in naming what matters.

Her family is the visible constant. Her sister Kelly photographs her album art. Her parents still live in Texas, and the East Texas home base is where she returns between tours. She has no children, and she has never made a public issue of that either way. The personal life section of a celebrity profile is usually where speculation creeps in; the honest version here is short, because the verified facts are short.

What is public, and worth noting, is the business around the music. In April 2026 she launched an exclusive Depop shop, selling pieces from her own wardrobe to fans. In May 2026, Lee announced “Kacey Lee”, its first celebrity denim collaboration, designed with Musgraves exclusively for Walmart — an eight-time Grammy winner putting her name on jeans sold at the biggest retailer in America. These are small revenue lines next to touring, but they show a 38-year-old thinking about her brand the way a business owner thinks about it: the music is the core, and everything else is a shelf around it.

Kacey Musgraves Net Worth in 2026

Kacey Musgraves’ net worth in 2026 is estimated at $12 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth, which last updated her profile on November 11, 2025. That is the headline number, and this article uses it as the anchor because it is the figure the reporting converges on — but readers should know what kind of number it is. It is an outside estimate, not a confirmed accounting of her finances. Her exact assets, investments and annual earnings have not been publicly disclosed, and Forbes publishes no current net-worth figure for her.

Higher figures circulate. PopGolden puts her at $15 million. StardomNetWorth, last updated January 27, 2026, claims $25 million — from a page that also lists her age as 37, which has been wrong since August 21. Neither names a reporting basis for its figure, and neither is treated here as a competing audit. The honest range is $12 million anchored, with unsourced tracker figures running higher. For the full breakdown of how the $12 million figure is built up — the albums, the tours, the Zach Bryan single and the brand deals — see Kacey Musgraves’ net worth on Guide Net Worth, and Kacey Musgraves’ net worth on CelebAmerica, our sister site, which traces the same fortune from Golden Hour to Middle of Nowhere.

The money comes from four streams that have been compounding since she was a teenager: music royalties and streaming across six studio albums; touring, including the Deeper Well World Tour in 2024 and the 30-date arena run in 2026; songwriting, including the Lambert cut that started her Nashville career; and brand deals like the Lee denim line and the Depop shop. Touring is the biggest of the four now — two arena-scale tours in three years — and the 2026 run, with two nights at Madison Square Garden and two at Crypto.com Arena, is the largest of her career. At 38, with a fresh album and a just-completed arena tour, the fortune is still growing, and the gap to richer peers like Lambert could narrow if Middle of Nowhere keeps selling through 2027.

How Tall Is Kacey Musgraves?

Kacey Musgraves is 5 feet 5 inches tall (165 cm). The figure is consistent across biography sources — BiographyWallah, The Famous Personalities, StardomNetWorth, Far Out Magazine and BioWikis all give the same number — and it is worth stating plainly because the internet disagrees with itself on almost every celebrity height. She has never made height a talking point; it is one of the few numbers about her that nobody argues over.

For scale: she is the same height as Miley Cyrus, also 5 feet 5 inches, and two inches shorter than Lainey Wilson’s reported 5 feet 7 inches. On stage the number disappears — the fringe, the boots and the disco balls do the work — which is why the question keeps getting asked. The answer is 5 feet 5 inches, and it has been 5 feet 5 inches in every profile written about her for a decade.

Awards and Grammys: Eight Wins from 17 Nominations

Musgraves has won eight Grammy Awards from 17 nominations, and the table below shows how they stack up. The count matters because the internet spent most of 2026 getting it wrong: several profiles still said seven, a figure that was correct until February 2025, when “The Architect” won Best Country Song and made it eight. Parade, BusinessWire, Depop and Simple Wikipedia all give eight as of 2026.

Beyond the Grammys she has won seven Country Music Association Awards and four Academy of Country Music Awards, per Simple Wikipedia. She is also the only artist ever to win a Grammy in all four major country categories. The 2024 win for “I Remember Everything” completed that set. And the 2026 CMA Awards, set for November 18, 2026, could add to the shelf: she holds five nominations, including Album of the Year for Middle of Nowhere and Musical Event of the Year for “Horses and Divorces”.

Kacey Musgraves Age Compared to Her Country Peers

Age only means something in context, and Musgraves’ context is a generation of country stars who all came up within a few years of each other. The table below lines her up against the peers she is most often compared with, using birth dates reported by Wikipedia and the biography sources checked for this article.

The comparison cuts two ways. Lambert, five years older, is the richer of the two by a wide margin and the longer-established star; Stapleton, ten years older, is the veteran of the group. Combs, Wilson and Wallen are all younger and all bigger streaming names right now. Musgraves sits in the middle on age and ahead of all of them on one measure: Grammy wins. Eight is more than any of them holds, and Album of the Year is a prize none of them has won. For the ages of the peers in this table, see Luke Combs’ age, Lainey Wilson’s age, Chris Stapleton’s age, Jelly Roll’s age and Morgan Wallen’s age on Guide Net Worth. More country stars appear in our Celebrity Net Worth archive.

Why Some Sites Still Say Kacey Musgraves Is 37

Search “Kacey Musgraves age” and the first page of results will show you 35, 37 and 38 side by side. All three were right once. A page written in 2024 that says 35 was right in 2024. A page written in early 2026 that says 37 was right until August 21, 2026. The problem is that age pages are rarely updated, and the search results do not carry a visible “written on” date next to the number.

The fix is to check the page for a 2026 fact. If it mentions Middle of Nowhere, the Middle of Nowhere Tour, the Lambert duet, or Dolly Parton’s death, it was written after May 2026 and its age is current. If its newest fact is Deeper Well or the 2025 Grammys, it predates her 38th birthday and its number is stale. And if it says 35, it was written before August 2023 — three birthdays ago. The correct answer, as of November 13, 2026, is 38, turning 39 on August 21, 2027.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources & Reporting

This article was researched on 13 November 2026 from live reporting: Simple Wikipedia and Wikipedia for the August 21, 1988 birth date, the Sulphur Springs birthplace, the six-weeks-premature birth, the eight Grammy Awards, the seven CMA Awards and four ACM Awards, and the 2013–2026 album sequence; Parade (August 21, 2026) for the 38th birthday, the Golden, Texas hometown, and the eight-time Grammy winner description; TV Insider for the three self-released albums before age 20 and the 5-pound birth weight; BiographyWallah (March 12, 2026) for the Sulphur Springs birthplace with a Golden upbringing and the 5 feet 5 inches height; Far Out Magazine for the Golden hometown and the same height; Celebrity Net Worth (last updated November 11, 2025) for the $12 million estimate; BusinessWire (May 19, 2026) and Depop (April 30, 2026) for the eight-Grammy count and the sixth-studio-album billing; WebWire and Cinéorama (March 2026) for the March 11, 2026 announcement and May 1, 2026 release of Middle of Nowhere; Across the Country (updated November 11, 2026) and TickPick for the 13 tracks, the four guest artists, the 30-date tour, the August 21 Chicago opening and October 27 Seattle close, and the February 2027 UK dates; JamBase (October 8, 2026) and American Songwriter (October 9, 2026) for the October 7, 2026 Austin duet with Miranda Lambert, the Gruene Hall first performance, and the Shane McAnally co-write; SPIN (October 22, 2026) for Middle of Nowhere Vol. 2: Tex Mex Tapes (January 15, 2027) and the five November 18, 2026 CMA nominations; iHeart/WGAR (September 29, 2026) for the September 28, 2026 Ronnie Dunn “Neon Moon” duet in Nashville; and SeatGeek for the 17 Grammy nominations. Where sources disagreed — the birthplace, the stale 35- and 37-year-old listings, the seven-vs-eight Grammy count, the $12 million vs $25 million estimates — the article names the disagreement instead of picking a number silently. Corrections are welcome via the About page.