Internet users share
The percentage of the population that used the internet in the last three months.
How it is measured
Household surveys and subscription data compiled by the ITU.
Where the number came from
The International Telecommunication Union, founded in 1865 to coordinate telegraphy and now the UN’s telecommunications agency, has collected national connectivity statistics since the internet became a policy object in the 1990s. The definition in current use, someone who accessed the internet from any location and any device within the last three months, was chosen because it can be asked in a household survey anywhere in the world; earlier attempts based on subscription counts badly undercounted places where one connection serves a family, a village kiosk or a shared handset. The measure carries the political weight of the "digital divide", named in the mid-1990s and adopted as a development target, which is why the ITU number is quoted in ministerial speeches and why some national estimates deserve the scepticism you would apply to any self-reported score.
Worked example: India at 70 percent is a bigger fact than the United States at 95
Our figures put India at about 70 percent for 2025, China at roughly 91.6 percent for 2025, the United States near 94.7 percent for 2024 and Iceland around 98.2 percent for 2024. The first thing to check is the years, which differ by row and are printed for that reason: comparing a 2024 American figure with a 2025 Indian one embeds a year of growth that belongs to neither country. The second is what a percentage means over different denominators. Seventy percent of India is on the order of a billion people, comfortably more than the entire online population of the United States and Europe combined, so India moving from 70 to 80 percent is a larger event in absolute terms than any rich country reaching saturation. The third is that the top of this table has stopped being informative. Once a country passes roughly 95 percent, further movement is measuring the definition rather than the country, since the remainder is largely people who will not use the internet rather than people who cannot. Beyond that point the interesting questions move to speed, cost, and whether access means a shared phone or a household connection, none of which this indicator sees.
Figures read from our own internet users share table; each row there carries its observation year and whether it came from a live feed or the frozen archive.
Our data source
World Bank WDI (IT.NET.USER.ZS), ITU data.
Refresh cadence: Annual; taken on each rebuild.
What to watch for
Survey years lag by one to two years in many countries, and a few small territories carry figures more than a decade old rather than none at all; every row prints its own year, so check it before comparing. Usage intensity is not captured either: someone who checks messages monthly on a shared handset and someone with fibre at home both count as a user. A country at 100 percent has reached the ceiling of the definition, not the end of the digital divide.
CIA World Factbook equivalent field: "Internet users" (frozen at the January 2026 final edition; our figures continue from live sources).