List of best-selling albums by year in the United States

This is a list of the best-selling albums by year in the United States, published by American music magazine Billboard since 1956 as year-end rankings of album sales. Until 1991, the Billboard album chart was based on a survey of representative retail outlets that determined a ranking, not a tally of actual sales. Weekly surveys and year-end charts by Billboard and other publications such as now defunct Cash Box magazine sometimes differed. For instance, during the 1960s and 1970s, the number-one album as determined by these two publications differed in 10 out of 20 years. From 1992 onwards, the Billboard year-end and weekly charts were calculated by Nielsen SoundScan. Note that this slightly differs from prior Billboard year-end album charts, which were a measure of chart performances over twelve months from around December to November (cutoff determined by Billboard's publication schedule) rather than actual total sales. In addition, certain additions post-2015 may differ from best-selling albums in the United States of the Nielsen SoundScan era, which includes album-equivalent units by means of streaming.^[2]

Harry Belafonte's Calypso (1956) was the first record to be recognized as a year's top-selling album by Billboard, when it started tracking sales figures. American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift is the first and only artist to have eight of their albums become best-selling records of their respective years. She accomplished it with Fearless (2009), 1989 (2014), Reputation (2017), Lover (2019), Folklore (2020), Midnights (2022), 1989 (Taylor's Version) (2023) and The Tortured Poets Department (2024). American acts Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, and Eminem, and British acts Elton John and Adele, have had two of their albums be the top-sellers in two separate years. American singer Michael Jackson's 1982 Thriller became the best-selling record in the country for two consecutive years in the 1980s. Other albums to achieve the same accomplishment included the My Fair Lady Original Cast Recording from the hit 1956 Broadway production between 1957 and 1958, the original soundtrack of West Side Story between 1962 and 1963, and Adele's 21 between 2011 and 2012. The Spice Girls are the only female group to appear on the list. Their debut album "Spice" was the best-selling album of 1997.