Password Statistics 2026

Roughly seven-in-ten (69%) say they feel overwhelmed by the amount of passwords they have to keep track of.

Some 41% of Americans say they always, almost always or often write down their passwords.

At the same time, 45% say they feel anxious about whether their passwords are strong and secure.

Password reuse is rampant, with 72% of Gen Z reusing passwords, contrasting with only 42% of Boomers – a significant generational disconnect.

Even more revealing, 55% of respondents have abandoned an account or created a new one simply to avoid going through the password reset process, while 30% of Gen Z often or always forget passwords to important accounts.

35% of Gen Z respondents revealed they never or rarely update passwords after a data breach at a company with which they have an account.

Just 13% of respondents report using a password manager to share credentials securely, surfacing a lack of alignment between how passwords are stored and shared.

Nearly half of Americans (45 percent) manage their passwords by saving them in an unencrypted digital note or writing them down on paper.

The average number of passwords has gone down from 168 per user in 2024 to 120 in 2026.

On average, 40% of people store their passwords in their preferred browser’s built-in password manager.

Globally, 54% of respondents have changed their longest-standing password within the past 12 months.

The share of Americans who say they use a password manager has risen from 20% in 2019 to 32% today.

Age differences About half of those ages 18 to 29 (49%) say they use a password manager.

Only 36 percent of U.S. adults—about 94 million people—currently use these security tools.

This year, 79 percent of password manager subscribers opted for cost-free apps, up dramatically from 63 percent in 2023.

Tech giants dominate the market: Google and Apple, through their proprietary services, control over 55 percent of the password manager market.

Users with password managers were less likely to experience identity theft or credential theft in the past year compared to those without (17 percent vs. 32 percent).

Only 33% of Gen X use a password manager, trailing behind 39% of Millennials and 46% of Gen Z.

The number of businesses using 1Password now exceeds 200,000, including 85% of the Forbes AI 50, and the net new logos added in Q3 is up 150% year over year.

TORONTO — 1Password , an identity security leader, today announced it surpassed $500 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), growing net new ARR by approximately 60% through the first three quarters of FY26, with Q3 26 at approximately 90% year over year growth.

Passkeys have reached global scale with 5 billion passkeys now in active use.

Across both consumer and workforce environments, awareness is now near-universal and adoption has followed: 90% of consumers are familiar with passkeys, and 75% have enabled them on at least some accounts.

Highlights from the research show consumer passkey awareness is on the rise and outlines several key trends in adoption among those who are aware of passkeys, including: 74% of consumers are aware of passkeys.

The availability of passkeys has steadily increased with implementation reaching 48% of the world’s top 100 websites as enterprises and service providers collectively seek to embrace a new era of faster sign-ins, higher success rates, fewer account takeovers, lower support costs, and reduced cart abandonment.

Because they’re not entering complex characters or one-time codes, users signing in with passkeys are three times more successful at getting into their account than password users (about 98% versus 32%).

Passkey authentications by Dashlane users have nearly doubled year over year, reaching 2.5 million per month.

Google leads the Power 20 at 28%, which means that even at the most passkey-successful major domain we measure, roughly seven in ten logins still don’t use passkeys.

The US stands out significantly, with 41% of consumers having confirmed a compromise or received a breach notification - ten percentage points above both Europe and APAC.

Credential abuse, previously our most common, has fallen steeply from 22% in the 2025 DBIR to 13%, but there is a good contributing reason for that.

As Figure 11 demonstrates, if you consider all instances of credential abuse at any point in the breach progression, it still sits on top at 39%.

Although organizations are good at enforcing “strong passwords”—it’s a default option in most systems nowadays—that is not keeping users from using passwords that have already been compromised, with the median percentage being 4%, as Figure 72 demonstrates.

Compounding this issue, the median percentage of users that are reusing passwords, or have the same password as others, is about 6%.

In 2024 alone, more than 2.8 billion passwords—hashed or otherwise—were posted for sale (or free for the taking) in criminal forums.

In this pattern, about 88% of the breaches involve the Use of stolen credentials, which sometimes serves as both the first and only action, while other times, it is just one piece of a larger attack chain.

Initial access comes from password spray attacks Password spray attacks account for over 99% of observed cloud initial access efforts.

Overall, password attacks are down 26% year-over-year.

According to the 2026 Hive Systems Password Table, a randomly generated 8-character password using numbers, upper- and lowercase letters, and symbols would take a hacker about 132 years to brute-force offline.

Take 2025: a single year with 2.6 billion breached passwords, almost all of them from dumps where the hash type isn't even known.

Only 1,143,815,266 (6%) of passwords were identified as unique.

Most people use 8–10 character passwords (42%), with eight being the most popular.

According to our weakest password research done in 2022, only 1% of passwords used a mix of lowercase, uppercase, numbers, and symbols. Now that figure has climbed to 19%, reflecting the impact of stricter platform requirements and a slow but measurable improvement in user behavior.

The majority of businesses and charities have implemented basic technical controls, such as updated malware protection (81% businesses and 63% charities), backing up data securely via a cloud service (74% businesses and 57% charities), password policies (74% businesses and 56% charities), network firewalls (74% businesses and 45% charities) and restricted admin rights (73% businesses and 65% charities).

However, adoption of more advanced controls like two-factor authentication (47% businesses and 38% charities), a virtual private network for staff connecting remotely (36% businesses and 17% charities) and user monitoring (30% businesses and 31% charities) remain lower than other measures.

Micro businesses saw some uplifts in the deployment of controls and procedures, including increases in those that only allow access via company-owned devices (64% up from 58% in 2024/2025), and those that require two-factor authentication (43% up from 35% in 2024/2025).

The most common measure used was the strong password authentication (83.69%), followed by data backup to a separate location or cloud (79.23%) and network access control (65.43%).

Enterprises less frequently used a combination of 2 or more authentication mechanisms (39.84%), encryption techniques for data, documents or e-mails (39.72%), ICT security tests (34.64%), ICT risk assessments (34.10%), or authentication via biometric methods (18.27%)

Verifiers and CSPs SHALL require passwords that are used as a single-factor authentication mechanism to be a minimum of 15 characters in length.

The most common failed checks related to passwords are the number of failed login attempts before lockout (97% of assessed devices) and passwords requiring lengths of 15 characters or more (90% of assessed devices).

In parallel, workforce deployment is approaching mainstream levels, with 68% of organizations deploying, piloting, or rolling out passkeys for employee authentication.

In workf orce environments, even among organizations that have deployed passkeys, 57% still rely on phishable authentication methods for primary day-to-day sign-in.

Organizations further along in deployment report tangible results: 47% improv ed security posture, 45% faster login times, and 35% reductions in helpdesk costs.

However, almost half (48%) report that their current system for monitoring password health and access is ineffective.

Unfortunately, over half of IT managers (51%) report that their employees don’t take cybersecurity measures seriously at all or only somewhat seriously.