Today, in 2025, 74 per cent of the world’s population are online, compared with 71 per cent a year earlier. In absolute numbers, this corresponds to 6 billion people, up from 5.8 billion in 2024. Year-on-year growth increased slightly to 3.3 per cent, up from 2.9 per cent previously. While progress continues toward universal connectivity more than a quarter of the global population remains offline.
Internet use remains closely linked to the level of development. High-income countries[1] are nearing universal Internet use with 94 per cent of the population using the Internet.[2] In contrast, only 23 per cent of the population of low-income countries are using the Internet.
Looking at the regions, in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Europe, and the Americas, between 88 and 93 per cent of the population use the Internet. In Asia-Pacific and the Arab States regions, Internet use is at 77 and 70 per cent, respectively, which is in line with the global average. By contrast, the average figure for Internet use for Africa is just 36 per cent.
Universal connectivity also remains a distant prospect in the least developed countries (LDCs) and landlocked developing countries (LLDCs), where only 34 and 38 per cent of the population are online, respectively.
While the annual growth rate in 2025 in these economies averages 7.4 and 5.5 per cent, respectively, which is higher than in most of the other groups or regions, the connectivity gap is not expected to close anytime soon.
[1] In this publication, regions correspond to the ITU regions, whose composition is available at http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Pages/definitions/regions.aspx. The composition of of the special groups – least developed countries (LDCs), landlocked developing countries (LLDCs), and small island developing states (SIDS) is available at https://www.un.org/ohrlls/. Country groupings by income are those used in the World Bank classification, available at https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/906519 .
[2]Taking into account that some people may never want to connect, as a matter of convention universality is taken to mean an Internet penetration rate of at least 95 per cent.