ChatGPT Statistics 2026: Weekly Users, Revenue and Usage Data

ChatGPT reached more than 1 billion weekly active users, OpenAI said on August 31, 2026. That compares with more than 900 million weekly active users at the end of February. The February update also counted more than 50 million consumer subscribers, about 5.6% of the weekly audience. Read together, those ChatGPT statistics show most people use the product for free, and that split shapes how OpenAI earns from it.

By July 2025, 18 billion messages were being sent each week by 700 million users, an NBER working paper found. Its authors include OpenAI economists and Harvard’s David Deming. That works out to roughly 25.7 messages per user per week. The figures below cover users, messages, use cases, demographics, subscribers, revenue, traffic, and workplace adoption from OpenAI, Pew Research Center, the NBER, and Similarweb.

Key Takeaways

• About 5.6% of ChatGPT’s weekly users paid for a consumer plan in February 2026.
• Paying business users equal about 1% of weekly users, yet enterprise now makes up more than 40% of revenue.
• ChatGPT users sent roughly 25.7 messages each per week in July 2025.
• grok.com averages 10.37 pages per visit against 4.66 for chatgpt.com, in Similarweb’s August 2026 data.
• About 80% of active users had typically masculine first names in the first months, a share that declined to 48% as of June 2025.
• 34% of U.S. adults say they have ever used ChatGPT, including a 58% majority of adults under 30.
• ChatGPT Ads has reached $1 billion in annualized revenue run rate in less than 200 days after launch.

Editor’s Choice

• Weekly active users: more than 1 billion weekly active users in August 2026.
• Consumer subscribers: more than 50 million consumer subscribers in February 2026.
• Paying business users: more than 9 million paying business users in February 2026.
• Monthly revenue: $2 billion in revenue per month as of March 31, 2026.
• Weekly messages: 18 billion messages each week in July 2025.
• Post-money valuation: $852 billion after a $122 billion round closed in March 2026.

ChatGPT Statistics: How Many People Use ChatGPT?

These figures are compiled from 34 sourced figures. Of those, 23 come from OpenAI’s own publications and 11 from the NBER working paper, Pew Research Center, and Similarweb. Sources run from June 2025 to September 2026. Only company-reported, survey, and measurement data qualified, and figures are reviewed on a rolling basis when sources publish new editions.

• ChatGPT was released to the public on November 30, 2022, and by December 5 it had more than one million registered users.
• By July 2025, its 700 million users represented around 10% of the global adult population, according to the NBER paper.
• OpenAI said on March 31, 2026, that it was the fastest technology platform to reach 10 million users and soon the fastest to 1 billion weekly active users.
• OpenAI’s January 2026 finance update said WAU and DAU figures continue to produce all-time highs, without giving a daily figure.
• The NBER study draws on a privacy-preserving analysis of 1.5 million conversations, covering consumer plans only.

Source: NBER Working Paper 34255 (September 2025), OpenAI announcements (November 2025 to August 2026)

Did ChatGPT Reach 100 Million Users in Two Months?

OpenAI’s own figures do not give a two-month number. OpenAI was the fastest technology platform to reach 10 million users, and the fastest to 100 million users. The NBER paper reports more than 100 million logged-in WAU after one year. The two-month figure did not appear in any OpenAI or NBER source reviewed here.

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ChatGPT Usage by Age in the US

• The share of Americans who have used ChatGPT has roughly doubled since summer 2023, according to Pew Research Center.
• While a 58% majority of adults under 30 have used it, 66% of Americans have not used the chatbot, including 20% who say they have heard nothing about it.
• Use among adults under 30 was 43% in 2024, a year before the latest survey.
• Pew surveyed 5,123 U.S. adults from Feb. 24 to March 2, 2025, all members of its American Trends Panel.
• Adults under 30 stand out for hearing a lot about it: 53% say this, compared with 15% of those 65 and older.

Recent Developments

• September 2026: On September 23, OpenAI said ChatGPT Ads will begin rolling out across Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and Taiwan, taking ChatGPT Ads to over 60 countries.
• September 2026: On September 22, OpenAI introduced GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, reducing API prices for Sol and Luna by 50%.
• September 2026: On September 11, OpenAI engineers wrote that Habitat now handles more than 70 million requests every second, supporting products used by over 1 billion people each week.
• August 2026: On August 31, advertisers can purchase ChatGPT ads directly via Ads Manager across India, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, and the platform is now used by tens of thousands of advertisers.
• August 2026: On August 6, OpenAI Signals data showed multimedia is the fastest-growing use case globally, accounting for 7.8% of messages.
• July 2026: On July 23, OpenAI said every week, more than 300 million people turn to ChatGPT with health-related questions. Clinical adoption figures sit in the separate AI in healthcare data.

ChatGPT Messages and Engagement

• Users also doubled the number of distinct tasks they have tried on ChatGPT within six months of signing up, OpenAI Signals data shows.
• The data is based on a 0.1% sample of users whose accounts were created between 2025-10-15 and 2026-05-01.
• About 10% of all messages are requests for tutoring or teaching, per the NBER paper.
• Search usage has nearly tripled in a year, OpenAI reported in March 2026.
• OpenAI’s APIs now process more than 15 billion tokens per minute, separate from consumer chat traffic.

Source: NBER Working Paper 34255 (September 2025), OpenAI Signals (June 2026)

By the numbers: The NBER paper found between July 2024 and July 2025, the number of messages sent grew by a factor of more than 5, while OpenAI Signals shows six months after signing up, users sent 50% more messages per day than they did when they signed up. Per-user activity is rising alongside the user count.

What People Use ChatGPT For

• Approximately 30% of consumer usage is work-related, and approximately 70% is non-work, according to OpenAI’s September 2025 study summary.
• At work, people are more than twice as likely to use ChatGPT to complete a task or create something than they are outside work.
• Three-quarters of conversations focus on practical guidance, seeking information, and writing.
• Only 1.9% of ChatGPT messages are on the topic of Relationships and Personal Reflection.
• Asking is a growing and highly rated category that shows people value ChatGPT most as an advisor.

Worth noting: Coding is a small slice of consumer ChatGPT use. The NBER paper found only 4.2% of ChatGPT messages are related to computer programming, compared to 33% of work-related Claude conversations. Anthropic’s side of that comparison is in the Claude usage statistics. The authors say this may be because the use of LLMs for programming has grown very rapidly through the API.

ChatGPT Conversation Topics

• The three most common Conversation Topics are Practical Guidance, Seeking Information, and Writing, collectively accounting for about 77% of all ChatGPT conversations.
• About 40% of all work-related messages in July 2025 are Writing, by far the most common work topic.
• Practical Guidance is the second most common use case at work at 24%.
• About two-thirds of all Writing messages ask ChatGPT to modify user text rather than creating new text from scratch.
• Multimedia saw a large spike in April 2025 after ChatGPT released new image-generation capabilities, and the elevated level has persisted.

Source: NBER Working Paper 34255, September 2025

ChatGPT Adoption by Education Level

• Most Americans, 79%, have heard at least a little about ChatGPT, including 34% who have heard a lot about it, per Pew Research Center.
• When Pew first asked about it, in March 2023, 58% said they had heard at least a little about it.
• Some 46% of all adults under 30 have used it to learn something new, and 42% have used it for entertainment.
• Adults with higher levels of formal education are more likely than those with less education to have used ChatGPT. Wider generative AI adoption data covers tools beyond ChatGPT.

ChatGPT Users by Gender, Age and Language

• Nearly half of all messages sent by adults were sent by users under the age of 26, the NBER paper found.
• Usage among people over 35 is rising in nearly every country, and in France and Czechia their share of messages increased by more than 10 percentage points in the past year.
• The leading non-English languages on ChatGPT are Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic, according to OpenAI Signals.
• By May 2025, ChatGPT adoption growth rates in the lowest income countries were over 4x those in the highest income countries.
• Countries across Latin America, Africa, and Oceania are catching up to early adopters, narrowing the global adoption gap.

Source: NBER Working Paper 34255 and OpenAI study summary, September 2025

Why it matters: The typical ChatGPT user no longer fits the early-adopter profile. OpenAI Signals reports users predominantly using a language other than English now represent over half of active users, and the NBER paper puts active users with typically masculine first names at 48% as of June 2025. Assumptions built on a young, English-speaking, male user base now describe a minority.

How Americans Use ChatGPT for Work, Learning and Entertainment

• The share of employed adults who say they use ChatGPT for work has risen by 20 percentage points in two years, including an 8-point increase since last year.
• 38% of employed adults ages 18 to 29 say they have used ChatGPT on the job, compared with 30% of those ages 30 to 49 and 18% of those 50 and older.
• Workers have mixed feelings about its use and expect it to have a major impact on jobs, according to other Pew research. Employment effects are tracked in the AI job loss data.
• Pew has asked since March 2023 about three ways people might use ChatGPT: for work, to learn something new, or for entertainment.

ChatGPT Subscribers and Paid Plans

• Subscriber momentum accelerated meaningfully to start the year, with January and February on track to be the largest months, OpenAI said.
• ChatGPT Enterprise seats specifically have grown 9x year-over-year, OpenAI reported in November 2025.
• ChatGPT Go has rolled out to 170 additional countries, making it the fastest-growing plan before its worldwide launch in January 2026.
• ChatGPT Go costs $8 a month in the US, ChatGPT Plus $20, and ChatGPT Pro $200.
• Ads are shown only to users on the Free and Go plans, while Plus, Pro, and Enterprise subscriptions remain ad-free.
• Paying business users are about 1% of the weekly audience, counted on the same February day.

Source: OpenAI announcements, November 2025 and February 2026

How Many People Pay for ChatGPT?

More than 50 million consumer subscribers paid for ChatGPT in February 2026, OpenAI said, alongside more than 9 million paying business users. The consumer figure equals about 5.6% of weekly users. ChatGPT for Work seats rose 40% in just 2 months before the November 2025 count.

ChatGPT Website Traffic and Engagement vs Other AI Chatbots

• On Similarweb’s worldwide ranking, chatgpt.com placed 5th among the top 50 most visited websites for August 2026.
• In the AI Chatbots and Tools category, chatgpt.com ranks 1, followed by gemini.google.com at 2 and claude.ai at 3. Google’s own user counts are in the Gemini usage data.
• chatgpt.com visits average 00:06:40 with a 26.58% bounce rate, against 00:06:52 and 27.3% for gemini.google.com.
• character.ai visits average 00:15:58, with 12.13 pages per visit. The platform’s audience is profiled in the Character AI statistics.
• OpenAI said in March 2026 that ChatGPT has 6x the monthly web visits and mobile sessions than the next largest AI app, while total AI time spent is 4x the next largest AI app.

Across our platform statistics pages, the largest service by reach is rarely the deepest by engagement. Our Grok user data shows the same split between audience size and time on site.

Is ChatGPT Losing Users or Market Share?

OpenAI’s user counts show continued growth: more than 1 billion weekly active users in August 2026 compares with more than 900 million weekly active users in February. On Similarweb’s August 2026 ranking, chatgpt.com ranks 1 in AI Chatbots and Tools. Neither source publishes a share of all chatbot users, so share-loss claims need a dataset outside these figures.

ChatGPT Revenue and Advertising

• Within a year of launching ChatGPT, OpenAI reached $1 billion in revenue, and by the end of 2024 it was generating $1 billion per quarter.
• OpenAI says it is growing revenue four times faster than the companies that defined the Internet and mobile eras, including Alphabet and Meta.
• Enterprise makes up more than 40% of revenue and is on track to reach parity with consumer by the end of 2026.
• The ads pilot reached more than $100 million in ARR in under six weeks, according to the March 2026 update.
• Compute grew from 0.2 GW in 2023 to 0.6 GW in 2024, and ~1.9 GW in 2025, a curve OpenAI says revenue followed.
• OpenAI announced $110 billion in new investment at a $730 billion pre-money valuation in February 2026. Funding and valuation history sit in the OpenAI company statistics.

Source: OpenAI, January 2026

How Much Revenue Does ChatGPT Make in 2026?

The closest public figures are company-level. OpenAI said it is now generating $2 billion in revenue per month when it closed its funding round on March 31, 2026. Separately, ChatGPT Ads has reached $1 billion in annualized revenue run rate in less than 200 days after launch, per the August 31 update.

ChatGPT Enterprise and Workplace Statistics

• OpenAI surveyed 9,000 workers across almost 100 enterprises for its December 2025 enterprise report.
• Over the past year, weekly messages in ChatGPT Enterprise increased roughly 8x, and the average worker is sending 30% more messages.
• Usage of structured workflows such as Projects and Custom GPTs has increased 19x year-to-date.
• Workers report saving 40-60 minutes per day, with heavy users reporting more than 10 hours per week.
• 75% of workers report that using AI at work has improved either the speed or quality of their output.
• Coding-related messages increased 36% for workers outside of technical functions.

The takeaway: Enterprise use is deepening faster than it is spreading. OpenAI’s December 2025 report found average reasoning token consumption per organization has increased by approximately 320x in the past 12 months, far above the roughly 8-fold rise in weekly Enterprise messages. Companies are asking the model to reason more per request as well as asking more often.

Codex and Agentic Work Inside Companies

• Frontier firms, those in the top 10% of AI usage each month, now generate 8.3x as many output tokens per active user as typical firms, up from 2.6x in January.
• Among weekly active users, 21% at frontier firms use Plugins and 19% use skills, compared with just 9% and 3% at typical firms.
• At OpenAI, 95% of employees use Plugins weekly.
• Weekly Codex users have more than tripled since the start of the year to 1.6 million by February 2026, and Codex now serves over 2 million weekly users, up 5x in the past three months by March.
• Usage is highest among early-career workers and falls among more senior employees. Tool-by-tool adoption figures are in the AI coding statistics.

Conclusion

More than 1 billion weekly active users now use ChatGPT, and more than 50 million consumer subscribers pay for it, so the paying base is a small slice of the audience. The money follows depth. A few million business users and a fast-growing ad tier carry revenue that the free majority does not, so engagement per user matters more than the next user milestone.

The next markers to watch are whether enterprise revenue reaches its stated parity with consumer by the end of this year, and whether per-user message volume keeps climbing as agents take on longer tasks. For the company behind the product, those numbers matter as much as the weekly-user count.