Hilary Duff’s kids were asleep on the tour bus as it pulled up to Austin’s Germania Insurance Amphitheater. It was 5 a.m., but Duff, high on adrenaline from her show the previous night, was wide-awake — just like she’d been for the seven nights prior. She hoped to finally get some sleep, but unfortunately for her, the amphitheater is next to the Circuit of the Americas racetrack, and a fleet of F1 cars were just starting their day.
Hilary on the cover of Billboard – November 7, 2026
“It was like, feeoooo, feeoooo, feeeoooo,” Duff says, approximating the sound of those cars throttling by at 150 miles an hour. Staring down another day of being a mother before getting onstage to be a pop star, Duff was on the verge of malfunction.
“I’d only gotten two hours of sleep, and it was like, ‘Help me, please,’ ” she recalls. “My husband grabbed my pillow, my blanket, blasted sound machines, gave me an eye mask, gave me earplugs, put headphones on top of the earplugs and was like, ‘I will keep the kids away from you. Don’t come out of here for six hours, because you have a show tonight.’ ”
Hilary Duff will sit down for an exclusive conversation at the 2026 Billboard Live Music Summit, where she will receive the Outstanding Pop Tour of the Year Award. Tickets for the Nov. 10 event are available here.
Nearly 25 years into her musical career, Duff is no stranger to life on the road. But until her zeitgeist-capturing Lucky Me Tour this past summer, she’d never brought her husband and kids along for the ride. The ongoing run is supporting her February album, Luck … Or Something, a surprise hit after Duff’s 11-year break from music that reached No. 3 on the Billboard 200. With its tight 37 minutes of catchy, clever and often genuinely deep bops, it proved she still has serious pop cachet to spare. The album currently has 411.4 million on-demand official U.S. streams, according to Luminate.
The Lucky Me Tour is also a smash, having grossed $48.3 million from 610,000 tickets sold through its first 40 shows, according to Billboard Boxscore. In late September, Duff announced 32 more dates in arenas across Europe, Latin America and the United States that will run from May to November 2027. “I don’t think anyone knew this was going to be what it turned into,” she says, “but I am also not naive in a way of thinking this could have never happened. I have had a huge touring business before.”
While it’s been nearly 20 years since she’s toured, what’s happening on The Lucky Me Tour is far more than a comeback: It’s her biggest tour ever, and one with which she’s redefining her career, evolving her identity and giving a master class on how a millennial pop star can grow up with her audience. “Life has been very good to me, and also very challenging at times,” she says. “Having that mixed bag of life underneath my belt has [created] who I am onstage now. A big draw for me has always been being able to relate to people, and I find that’s happening again this time around — but in a very new way.”
Even those who didn’t watch the Disney Channel in the early 2000s likely know who Duff is. The Houston native was 14 years old when she began playing Lizzie McGuire on the hit Disney Channel show of the same name. The program ran from 2001 to 2003 and made Duff the kind of archetypal Disney Channel star who — like Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato after her — could transition from beloved tween TV actress to movie star (with 2003’s The Lizzie McGuire Movie and more) to chart-topping pop singer.
