Billy Joel introduced himself to the Billboard Hot 100 with the eventual classic, and one of his signature songs, “Piano Man,” which hit No. 25 in April 1974. He landed his first No. 1 in July 1980 with the celebratory “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me.” His other two chart-toppers, among 13 top 10s and 33 top 40 hits: the ‘60s ode “Tell Her About It,” in 1983, and the rapid-fire history lesson “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” in 1989.
Joel has also earned four No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200, with his longest-leading, 1978’s 52nd Street, reigning for eight weeks. On the Adult Contemporary chart, he has earned eight No. 1s, with “The River of Dreams” ruling for a personal-best 12 weeks in 1993. He most recently made the Hot 100 and Adult Contemporary with his comeback hit “Turn the Lights Back On,” which reached No. 7 on the latter list in March 2024, becoming his 24th top 10.
The native New Yorker has won five Grammy Awards, including album of the year for 52nd Street in 1979 and both record and song of the year for “Just the Way You Are” in 1978. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999, became a Kennedy Center honoree in 2013 and was awarded the sixth-ever Gershwin Prize for Popular Song from the Library of Congress in 2014.
In honor of the icon — and upon the July 18 premiere of the two-part HBO/HBO Max documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes (named after his intimate piano ballad that rose to No. 37 on the Hot 100 in 1990) — Billboard looks at his biggest Hot 100 hits.
Notably, Joel solo-wrote each of the 25 songs below.
“I started just concentrating on songwriting when I was about 20,” Joel told Billboard in 2014. “I said, ‘OK, you ain’t gonna be a rock star, you don’t look like a rock star, it probably ain’t gonna happen. So what you should do is write songs and maybe other people will do your songs.’ I just felt like I had something to write, and the advice I got from the music business people that I knew was, ‘OK, now you should probably make an album of your songs.’ Get a record deal, make an album. This just happened to coincide with the era of the singer-songwriter.
“So, I got a record deal,” Joel continued, “made a record and then the advice I got was, ‘Now you should go out on the road and perform and support the album.’ So, I went out on tours, didn’t get paid nothin’, but played, and it kinda turned into this ‘Billy Joel pop star/rock star guy,’ which to this day is still kinda funny to me, because that’s not at all what I set out to do. I’m not gonna disown it — it’s the best job I ever had — but it ended up happening kind of randomly.”
Billy Joel’s Biggest Billboard Hot 100 hits chart is based on actual performance on the weekly Billboard Hot 100, through the July 19, 2025, ranking. Songs are ranked based on an inverse point system, with weeks at No. 1 earning the greatest value and weeks at No. 100 earning the least. Due to changes in chart methodology over the years, eras are weighted to account for different chart turnover rates over various periods.
