How Many People Use the Internet?
About 6 billion people — roughly 74% of everyone alive — use the internet as of 2025, according to the International Telecommunication Union. But that tidy figure papers over the real story: who is not online, and how steeply the answer changes from one country to the next.
Who’s actually online?
Pick a country or region. The one global number hides a spread from near-100% to under 1%.
Figures: ITU 2025 and DataReportal Digital 2025/2026. Income split from World Bank / ITU.
The black line is the world average. Watch how few countries actually sit near it — most are far above or far below. That spread is the headline the single number erases.
The number — with a date and a caveat
As of 2025, the ITU puts global internet users at roughly 6 billion, about 74% of the world. Kepios and DataReportal's Digital 2025 report (January 2025) gave a more conservative 5.56 billion, or 67.9%. Both are right — they use different methods and measurement windows, and one is several months older than the other.
The gap matters because it shows why no single figure is final. Internet users grew by roughly 294 million in a single year — about 800,000 new people a day. Whatever number you quote is a snapshot of a count that is still climbing as you read it, and the honest version always carries a date and a source.
The bigger story: the 2.2 billion who aren’t
Flip the question. As of 2025, somewhere between 2.2 and 2.6 billion people — more than one in four humans — have never used the internet at all. DataReportal frames the online population as a "supermajority": since April 2024 there have been more than twice as many people online as offline. True, and still incomplete.
Because the offline billions are not scattered evenly. They cluster — by country, by income, by age, and by where the cables and towers were never built. A global average of 74% can describe a world where some places are effectively fully connected and others have barely started.
The divide: 94% versus 23%
Split the world by income and the gap is stark: about 94% of people in high-income countries are online, against just 23% in low-income countries. At the extremes, the Gulf states, Northern Europe and advanced Asia-Pacific economies report near-universal use, while East Africa sits under 30%.
Raw user counts tell a different story again, because population size dominates them. China has the most internet users of any country — around 1.3 billion — with India close behind at roughly a billion. Yet India also has the largest offline population on Earth, 440 million-plus, precisely because it is so populous. The bridge closing these gaps is almost entirely the smartphone: most of the "next billion" users are coming online via mobile in Africa, South Asia and Latin America, not via desktop broadband.
What being online actually looks like
For those who are connected, the internet is not an occasional tool — it is most of the waking day's media. The typical user spends about 6 hours and 38 minutes online daily across all devices, per DataReportal, the bulk of it on social platforms, messaging, and video. Video alone now makes up more than three-quarters of mobile data traffic in many markets.
It is worth remembering how recent all of this is. The world's first website went live in August 1991, published by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. In 1995, under 1% of humanity had any internet connection at all. Reaching three-quarters of the planet took barely three decades.
The interesting number isn’t the one people search for
"Six billion online" is a finish line that no longer moves the conversation much. The live question is the last quarter of the world — and how it comes on. The next billion users won't look like the first six: they're younger, lower-income, mobile-only, and joining in places where their first experience of the internet is an app, not a browser. Satellite networks like Starlink are starting to reach the places cables never will, which means the offline map of 2030 will be drawn by economics and policy as much as by technology.
So the better version of this question isn't "how many use the internet" — it's "who's left, and what reaches them first." For the other half of the picture — the places they're connecting to — see how many websites are on the internet.
Common questions
Game: higher penetration?
Six matchups. The trap is assuming a bigger or richer-sounding country is always more connected. It isn’t.
Higher internet penetration?
Sources
- International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Facts and Figures 2025 — ~6 billion users, ~74% global penetration, ~2.2 billion offline.
- DataReportal / Kepios, Digital 2025 Global Overview (Jan 2025) — 5.56 billion users, 67.9% penetration, 2.63 billion offline; ~6h38m daily online; +294M users in a year.
- DataReportal Digital 2026 and country reports — per-country penetration and user counts (US 93%, India 70%, China ~92%, etc.).
- World Bank / ITU — income divide: 94% in high-income vs 23% in low-income countries.
- CERN — the world’s first website published by Tim Berners-Lee, August 1991.
Figures are estimates that grow year on year; they are tagged to 2025 sources here.
More from the digital world
Three-quarters of the world is online — which is another way of saying two billion people are still waiting for their turn.