ChatGPT statistics 2026: 1.2 billion weekly users, every number sourced and dated

ChatGPT reaches 1.2 billion people a week as of October 2026

Each of these ChatGPT statistics links to the company, survey or measurement firm that published it. The date is the period the figure describes, which for surveys and traffic data comes before the day it was published.

Don't add these up. OpenAI counts the people who use ChatGPT in a week, on the web and in its apps. Sensor Tower counts the people who open the mobile app in a month. Similarweb counts visits to the website, not people. Each of them answers a different question.

OpenAI's written DevDay recap calls the figure "our collective 1.2B weekly users", in a sentence about developers building inside ChatGPT. The slide behind Sam Altman on stage read 1.2 billion weekly ChatGPT users (Engadget live blog, 29 September 2026). We count it as ChatGPT users, as the slide does. If OpenAI later says it includes other products, the 2026 pace on this page is too high.

How fast is ChatGPT growing in 2026?

ChatGPT added about 1.4 million weekly users a day between February and September 2026, by our count from OpenAI's own dated figures. That's twice the pace of the stretch before it. From the October 2025 count of 800 million to the February 2026 count of 900 million, it added about 690,000 a day.

The fastest stretch ran from February to March 2025, when it added 2.56 million weekly users a day. OpenAI shipped its upgraded image generator that March, and Lightcap said that more than 130 million users made over 700 million images in a few days (TechCrunch, August 2025).

Late 2025 was the slow patch. OpenAI had hoped to reach 1 billion weekly users by the end of that year, The Information reported in July 2026, citing internal figures (summary by The Next Web). It got there in 2026 instead. Over the whole run, weekly users grew twelvefold in 1,058 days. ChatGPT launched on 30 November 2022, so the first weekly count OpenAI gave, 100 million at DevDay on 6 November 2023, came 341 days after launch.

One caveat matters. These are the dates OpenAI announced each number, and it doesn't say on which day it crossed each line. So every per day figure is an average of the days between two announcements.

How many people pay for ChatGPT?

More than 50 million people pay for a consumer ChatGPT plan, OpenAI said on 27 February 2026, on the same day it reported 900 million weekly users. That's about one paying subscriber for every 18 people who use it in a week, or 5.6%. "ChatGPT is where people start with AI," OpenAI wrote in the same post. You'll find the plan prices and tiers on our AI subscription statistics page.

Business use grew faster than that. Lightcap told CNBC in February 2025 that ChatGPT had 2 million paying enterprise users. By August 2025 he said it had 5 million paying business users, per TechCrunch. In November 2025 OpenAI counted more than 7 million ChatGPT for Work seats, and it said that more than 1 million businesses were paying for its products. In February 2026 it reported more than 9 million paying business users, which is 4.5 times the count of a year before. OpenAI's wording shifts between users and seats, so it's safer to read the trend than the exact multiple.

OpenAI doesn't report ChatGPT revenue on its own. For the company as a whole, CFO Sarah Friar wrote in January 2026 that its annualized revenue passed $20 billion in 2025, up from $6 billion in 2024, Reuters reported. Bloomberg reported in August 2026 that OpenAI was on its way past $40 billion. On 29 September 2026, Axios reported that it was close to $70 billion. OpenAI hasn't confirmed either of the 2026 figures, and both of them came from unnamed sources.

What do people use ChatGPT for?

Most people use ChatGPT for everyday advice, facts and writing, not for code. That's what the largest study of real ChatGPT conversations found. It's an NBER working paper by OpenAI economists and Harvard's David Deming, published in September 2025. OpenAI says it analyzed about 1.5 million consumer conversations (the paper's main sample is about 1.1 million), and no human read any of them.

Writing was the top task at work, at about 40% of all work messages in July 2025. Coding is small. Only 4.2% of all ChatGPT messages were about programming, and just 1.9% were about relationships and personal reflection. About 10% of them asked for tutoring or teaching. OpenAI also sorted the same messages by what the user wanted: 49% asking, 40% doing and 11% expressing.

Personal use is growing the fastest. The paper counted 451 million consumer messages a day in June 2024 and 2.6 billion a day in June 2025. The share that wasn't about work went from 53% to 73% of the total. So use outside of work grew about eightfold in a year, while work use grew about 3.4 times.

Health is a big part of it. OpenAI said in January 2026 that more than 230 million people ask it health and wellness questions every week.

Who uses ChatGPT? Age, gender and country

Younger adults use ChatGPT the most, and the early male skew is gone. Pew Research Center found that 44% of US adults say they use ChatGPT, in a survey of 5,119 adults that it ran from 17 to 23 February 2026. That's up from 34% in 2025, 23% in 2024 and 18% in 2023, though Pew changed the wording of the question in 2026. Adults under 50 are about twice as likely to use it as those who are 50 and older (57% against 28%).

In OpenAI's own data, the users who gave an age of 18 to 25 sent about 46% of all messages, per the NBER paper. Among users whose first names read as typically masculine or feminine, the share with feminine names rose from 37% in January 2024 to 52% by July 2025. By May 2025, OpenAI said, adoption was growing more than four times as fast in the lowest income countries as it was in the richest ones.

Similarweb's August 2026 data for chatgpt.com tells a slightly different story on gender, because it measures who visits the website, not what their names are. It puts the audience at 54.46% male and 45.54% female, and 25 to 34 year olds are the largest age group at 28.56%. The US sent 19.36% of the desktop traffic, ahead of India (10.1%), Brazil (5.61%), Japan (4.96%) and Germany (3.2%).

Outside the US, the Reuters Institute ran a survey in six countries (Argentina, Denmark, France, Japan, the UK and the US) in June and July 2025. On average, 22% of people there had used ChatGPT in the past week, which put it well ahead of any other AI tool, and 29% said they trust it (report, October 2025). For news, chatbots are still a small part of the picture. The Reuters Institute's 2026 Digital News Report found that 10% of people use AI chatbots for news each week, up from 7%, and that it's 16% for those under 35 (summary).

How many messages and visits does ChatGPT get?

ChatGPT users sent more than 2.5 billion prompts a day in July 2025. That's the latest daily count OpenAI has published as of October 2026. OpenAI told Axios that more than 330 million of those came from the US. Seven months before that, Altman had put it at more than 1 billion messages a day. The NBER paper puts the weekly total for July 2025 at 18 billion messages from 700 million users, which it says is about 10% of the world's adults.

On the web, Similarweb shows 5.6 billion visits to chatgpt.com in August 2026, and the average visit lasted 6 minutes 40 seconds. In its list of the top websites in the world for that month, chatgpt.com is fifth, behind Google, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Similarweb's own rank on the chatgpt.com overview page is seventh.

On phones, Sensor Tower says the ChatGPT app passed 1 billion monthly active users in May 2026, which is faster than TikTok, YouTube or Instagram got there. ChatGPT, Google Gemini and DeepSeek took nearly 90% of all the time that people spent in AI assistant apps in the first quarter of 2026, per Sensor Tower's State of AI 2026.

Developers count too. Altman said at DevDay in October 2025 that 4 million developers had built with OpenAI and that its API was processing more than 6 billion tokens a minute. In February 2026, OpenAI said the number of weekly users of Codex, its coding agent, had more than tripled since the start of the year, to 1.6 million.

Is ChatGPT losing ground to Gemini and Claude?

ChatGPT still leads on every count, but its share is shrinking. Sensor Tower says that ChatGPT's share of the unique users of AI assistants, across apps and the web, fell below 50% for the first time in March 2026, as Gemini and Claude grew. In that same month, US uninstalls of the ChatGPT app peaked at roughly 200% above its average in the week of 9 to 15 March, after OpenAI's agreement with the Department of War, Sensor Tower found.

Pew's February 2026 survey shows how big the gap is in the US. 44% of adults say they use ChatGPT, against 24% for Gemini, 17% for Copilot, 14% for Meta AI, 8% for Grok and 6% for Claude. You'll find the full comparison, with every yardstick side by side, on our AI chatbot market share page.

How many ChatGPT users show signs of a mental health crisis?

About 0.15% of ChatGPT's weekly users have conversations that include explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent, OpenAI estimated on 27 October 2025. It put the share who show possible signs of psychosis or mania at about 0.07%. OpenAI called both of these an initial analysis, because the conversations are rare and hard to detect.

Those shares sound tiny. But if you apply them to the 800 million weekly users OpenAI reported that month, they come to roughly 1.2 million and 560,000 people a week. That's our arithmetic, not OpenAI's.

How we compiled these numbers

We opened every figure at its primary source on 6 October 2026. Those are OpenAI's own posts, the NBER paper, Pew Research Center, the Reuters Institute, Sensor Tower and Similarweb. Where a company told a reporter, we name the outlet that ran it. Every number, the wording at its source and the URL are in our research log.

We left out anything we couldn't open at its origin. That cut a widely repeated claim that OpenAI confirmed 1 billion weekly users on 8 September 2026, a figure of "3 billion daily messages", subscriber splits by plan, and every number that only shows up on statistics aggregators. The growth pace and the paid share are our own arithmetic from OpenAI's dated figures. We'll update this page when OpenAI publishes a new count.

How to cite these ChatGPT statistics

You're free to use any figure or table on this page, as long as you link back to it. Please credit the original source for the numbers that came from someone else, too. A plain credit line like this one works:

Source: Whizi Research, "ChatGPT statistics 2026: 1.2 billion weekly users, every number sourced and dated", whizi.io/resources/chatgpt-statistics, updated October 2026.

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