VPN usage statistics 2026: who uses a VPN, and why

In the United States, 42 percent of adults said they use a VPN in an August 2026 survey of 1,008 people by Security.org, up from 32 percent in 2025. In the UK, daily VPN app users more than doubled after age checks began in July 2025, according to Ofcom. No reliable global count exists.

Key VPN usage statistics

How many people use a VPN in the United States?

The most recent survey with a published method is Security.org's annual VPN report. Security.org is a review site that also recommends VPN products, so read it as an industry survey. It states its method: an online survey of 1,008 US adults in August 2026, with the sample set to match the US population by sex, age and race.

What it found:

• 42 percent of US adults use a VPN on personal devices, work devices or both, up from 32 percent in 2025.
• Personal-only use rose eight points to 25 percent and drove most of the increase.
• 51 percent of adults aged 18 to 29 use one, the highest of any age group. Nearly two-thirds of adults 60 and older do not.
• 60 percent of women did not use a VPN, compared with 50 percent of men.
• 16 percent of people without a VPN said they were at least somewhat likely to start within a year.

A ten-point jump in one year is large for a survey of about a thousand people. Treat the direction as more reliable than the exact figure.

For a sense of how new this is, a Pew Research Center quiz of 1,055 adult US internet users in June 2016 found that only 13 percent knew a VPN reduces the risk of using insecure Wi-Fi.

Why do people use a VPN?

Security.org asked VPN users for their reasons in the same 2026 survey. Multiple answers were allowed.

More than one in ten users said they rely on a VPN to reach age-restricted or adult content.

The same survey asked non-users why not. The top answers were "I don't need one" (39 percent), "I don't know enough about them" (24 percent), "I don't see the benefit" (19 percent) and "too expensive" (18 percent).

It also found two gaps in understanding. 36 percent of respondents wrongly believed a VPN alone protects a device from viruses or malware, and 62 percent said it was very or extremely important that their VPN keeps no activity logs. If hiding browsing from your provider is your reason, our guide to what an internet provider can see explains what a VPN does and does not change.

What happened to VPN use in the UK after age checks?

This is the best measured case of a law changing VPN use, because the regulator published the data.

Under the Online Safety Act, sites carrying pornography had to check users' ages from July 25, 2025. In its Online Nation 2025 report, published December 10, 2025, Ofcom wrote that VPN usage "more than doubled in the UK", "rising from about 650k daily users before 25 July 2025 and peaking at over 1.4m in mid-August 2025, but has gradually declined to around 900K in November".

Two limits apply. The data comes from Apptopia and covers VPN apps on mobile devices only, so desktop use is not counted. And Ofcom notes that daily VPN use is much lower than visitor numbers for the adult sites themselves, which it puts at 7.8 million UK visitors a day to services with age checks.

Search interest moved much more sharply than actual use. Top10VPN, a review site that tracks VPN search volume by country, recorded UK demand 1,327 percent above the prior 28-day average on July 25, 2025, rising to 1,987 percent on July 27. A twentyfold jump in searches against a doubling in daily users shows why demand spikes should not be read as user counts.

(Ofcom's site blocks automated requests, so the link may need a normal browser. We checked the figures against the Internet Archive's copy of the same PDF.)

Where does VPN demand spike?

Top10VPN's demand tracker, last updated June 5, 2026, compares daily VPN search volume in a country with the average of the previous 28 or 30 days. These are its own measurements. Recent entries:

The triggers fall into two groups: governments cutting or filtering access, and age verification laws.

On the first group, the two main trackers count differently, so here are both. Access Now and the #KeepItOn coalition documented 313 shutdowns in 52 countries in 2025, up from 304 in 2024 and 289 in 2023. Top10VPN's annual cost report, published January 5, 2026, counted 212 major government-imposed outages in 28 countries and estimated their cost at $19.7 billion. Access Now counts every documented shutdown. Top10VPN describes its total as major outages.

How many VPN users rely on a free VPN?

In Security.org's 2026 survey, 43 percent of VPN users relied on a free service, up from 28 percent in 2025 and level with 43 percent in 2023. Among those who paid, the average reported cost was $21 a month. NordVPN was the most used brand at 24 percent of users, and Proton VPN was second at 15 percent.

The share on free apps matters because of what researchers find inside them. A University of Michigan-led team presented a study at NDSS 2026 that ran 281 popular Android VPN apps from the Google Play Store through an automated test system. From the paper's abstract:

• 61 apps transmitted unencrypted data, and 5 sent sensitive VPN configuration files in cleartext.
• 29 apps leaked user traffic, including DNS, outside the tunnel.
• 76 apps transmitted the Advertising ID, a device-unique identifier used for tracking.
• 143 apps failed to obfuscate traffic to avoid trivial blocking.

The authors note that these apps together have hundreds of millions of installs. We go through the business models behind them in are free VPNs safe.

How many businesses use a VPN?

Official surveys give firmer numbers here than for consumers.

• European Union: 49.64 percent of EU enterprises used a VPN in 2024, according to Eurostat. Strong password authentication was the most common security measure at 83.69 percent.
• United Kingdom: 36 percent of businesses and 17 percent of charities had "a virtual private network, or VPN, for staff connecting remotely", according to the government's Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025/2026, based on 2,112 businesses and 1,085 charities surveyed between August and December 2025.

Corporate VPN hardware is also a target. Verizon's 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report, published in April 2025, found that edge devices and VPNs made up 22 percent of the targets in breaches that began with vulnerability exploitation, almost eight times the 3 percent in the previous year's report. That concerns the VPN gateways companies run for remote access. It is a separate matter from consumer VPN apps.

What there is no good number for

• Global VPN users. Totals such as 1.6 billion or 1.75 billion appear on many pages, sometimes credited to a VPN company. We could not open a method behind any of them on October 11, 2026. No statistical office or regulator publishes a global count.
• A global share of internet users on a VPN. We could not open the research behind the percentages in circulation.
• Market size. Published estimates of the VPN market differ widely, and we could not open the reports behind them. We quote none.
• Usage in countries that restrict VPNs. Search demand is measurable from outside. Actual use is not.

How we picked these numbers

We kept a number only if we could open its original source on October 11, 2026 and read the figure there. Regulators and statistical offices (Ofcom, Eurostat, the UK government) come first, then peer-reviewed research, then industry surveys that publish a sample size and date. Security.org and Top10VPN are review sites with a commercial interest in VPNs, and their figures are labeled as their own. Survey data, measured app use and search demand are kept apart because they answer different questions. Last checked: October 11, 2026.

FAQ

What percentage of people use a VPN?

In the United States, 42 percent of adults said they use one in an August 2026 survey by Security.org, up from 32 percent in 2025. Among adults aged 18 to 29 the figure was 51 percent. No comparable official figure exists for the world as a whole.

How many people use a VPN in the UK?

Ofcom reported about 650,000 daily users of VPN apps before July 25, 2025, a peak of over 1.4 million in mid-August 2025 and around 900,000 in November 2025. Those figures cover mobile apps only, so total use is higher.

Why did VPN use rise in 2025 and 2026?

Two causes show up in the data: age verification laws, as in the UK and Australia, and government internet restrictions, as in Iran and Uganda. In the US survey, general privacy and general security remained the most common reasons people gave.

Do most VPN users pay for their VPN?

In the 2026 Security.org survey, 43 percent of US VPN users relied on a free service, up from 28 percent a year earlier. Those who paid reported an average cost of $21 a month.

How many companies use a VPN?

Just under half of EU enterprises (49.64 percent) used a VPN in 2024 according to Eurostat. In the UK, 36 percent of businesses had one for staff connecting remotely in the 2025/2026 government survey.

The 62 percent who want a VPN with no activity logs are asking the right question. Secria VPN keeps no activity logs: we do not record browsing, DNS queries or traffic contents. It runs on RAM-only servers with post-quantum key exchange (ML-KEM-1024) on every connection.