Instagram Statistics 2026: Users, Demographics, Reels and Engagement

Most Instagram statistics pages are copies of other Instagram statistics pages. This one used to be one of them: 125-plus numbers, many without a source and some from 2019.

So I rebuilt it from the sources that actually measure Instagram: Meta’s own earnings calls, DataReportal’s country reports, Pew Research Center’s surveys and Socialinsider’s study of 35 million posts.

Every number below has its source, the date of the data and a link, so you can check it before you quote it.

Instagram user statistics: how many people use Instagram

Meta doesn’t report Instagram’s users every quarter. What you get instead are milestones Meta announces itself, usually on an earnings call, so the two headline numbers are months apart.

• 3 billion monthly active users. Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram’s head, Adam Mosseri, announced the milestone on September 24, 2025 (TechCrunch (opens in new tab)), and Meta repeated it on its third-quarter 2025 earnings call (opens in new tab) on October 29, 2025.
• 2 billion daily active users. In January 2026 Meta described Instagram as “just shy” of 2 billion daily users (Q4 2025 call (opens in new tab)). On the Q2 2026 call (opens in new tab) on July 29, 2026, Zuckerberg said it had reached 2 billion.
• About two in three monthly users open the app every day. That’s my arithmetic from the two figures above, and only a rough ratio: they were announced ten months apart.
• 54.6% of internet users aged 16 and over say they used Instagram in the past month, the third-highest share of any social platform. Leave out China and Russia, where Instagram is blocked, and it’s 71.4%, the second-highest share. These are GWI survey figures in DataReportal’s Digital 2026 Mid-Year Global Update (opens in new tab) (data to April 2026).

Instagram next to Meta’s other apps

Instagram is now about as big as Facebook by daily use. So if you’re choosing between the two for your content or your ads, look at who’s there: Instagram’s audience is much younger (see the next section).

Instagram demographics: age and gender

The best measured audience is the American one, thanks to Pew Research Center’s yearly surveys. Pew asks people which platforms they use instead of taking the platforms’ word for it.

• Teens use it a lot. 12% of all U.S. teens say they use Instagram “almost constantly” and another 31% several times a day, according to Pew’s 2025 teen survey topline.
• Women are the majority of the U.S. ad audience: 54.5% of Instagram’s adult ad audience in the U.S. was female in late 2025, according to Meta’s ad tools as reported in DataReportal’s Digital 2026: United States (opens in new tab).
• The favorite platform of people under 35. Asked which social platform is their favorite, 16.4% of social media users aged 16 and over named Instagram, second only to WhatsApp. Among 16- to 34-year-olds it’s the clear first choice (GWI, in DataReportal’s Digital 2026 Global Overview Report (opens in new tab), published October 2025).
• Worldwide, most of the audience is under 35. People aged 18 to 34 made up 64.6% of Instagram’s adult ad audience in January 2025, the most recent age split DataReportal has published (my sum of its figures for women and men in the two age groups, from its Instagram stats page (opens in new tab)).

Instagram users by country

India is by far Instagram’s biggest market. By April 2026, Meta’s ad tools showed more than 513 million people in India that advertisers could reach on Instagram, over a quarter of Instagram’s global ad reach (DataReportal, Digital 2026 Mid-Year Global Update (opens in new tab)).

The table shows six of Instagram’s largest markets, plus the UK and Germany. The numbers are ad reach, the people Meta lets advertisers target, not monthly active users: they can include duplicate or fake accounts, and Meta revises them often.

Two things stand out. Instagram’s ad reach equals 92% of adults in Turkey and 87% in Brazil, so in those markets it works like a mass medium.

And Germany is the only one of the eight where reach shrank, while India added almost 90 million people in a year.

How people use Instagram: time spent, Reels and DMs

Time spent

• 1 hour 13 minutes a day. That’s how long the average active Android user spent in the Instagram app in August 2025, third among the 15 biggest social apps after TikTok and YouTube, according to Similarweb data in DataReportal’s Digital 2026 Global Overview Report (opens in new tab).
• Time spent is still growing. Meta said global time spent on Instagram grew by double digits year over year in the second quarter of 2026, mostly because of better recommendations in Feed and Reels (Q2 2026 call (opens in new tab)).
• 20% of U.S. adults regularly get news on Instagram (Pew Research Center (opens in new tab), survey of August 18 to 24, 2025).

Reels and video

Video is where Instagram’s growth comes from, and Meta reports it in more detail than anything else.

• Video time on Instagram grew more than 30% year over year by the third quarter of 2025 (Q3 2025 call (opens in new tab)).
• Reels watch time in the U.S. grew more than 30% year over year in the fourth quarter of 2025 (Q4 2025 call (opens in new tab)).
• Nearly 10% of the Reels people watch each day were made in Edits, Meta’s video editing app, at the end of 2025, almost three times the share a quarter earlier (Q4 2025 call (opens in new tab)).
• New posts get shown sooner. Posts from the same day made up more than 30% of recommended Reels in the first quarter of 2026, more than double a year earlier (Q1 2026 call (opens in new tab)). By the second quarter, over half of all recommended content in Instagram Feed was less than a day old (Q2 2026 call (opens in new tab)).
• Original content gets the reach. 75% of Instagram’s recommendations in the U.S. came from original posts at the end of 2025, up 10 percentage points in a quarter (Q4 2025 call (opens in new tab)). Reposting other people’s videos is a weak growth plan.

DMs and recommendations

When Instagram announced 3 billion users, Mosseri said that almost all of its growth in the last few years had come from DMs, Reels and recommendations, and that the app would be reorganized around them (TechCrunch, September 24, 2025 (opens in new tab)).

In July 2026 Meta said it was rolling out AI business agents, which answer customers in messages, on Instagram (Q2 2026 call (opens in new tab)).

For creators, that makes the DM inbox a sales channel: someone comments a keyword, gets a DM with a link, and joins your list. How to set that up within Meta’s rules is in my guide to Instagram for bloggers.

Instagram creator statistics: brand deals and creator income

Instagram doesn’t publish what it pays creators, and the influencer market is measured mostly by agencies and analysts with their own methods. These are the numbers with the clearest source.

• $10 billion a year in partnership ads. Partnership ads are creator posts that brands run as ads. Meta said their revenue run rate more than doubled year over year to $10 billion in the first quarter of 2026, across its apps, “with brands increasingly turning to creators to promote their products” (Q1 2026 call (opens in new tab)).
• Affiliate links are coming to Instagram. In March 2026 Meta opened its affiliate test on Facebook to more partners, so creators can tag products from participating retailers and earn a commission on sales, and it said it had started testing the same on Instagram (Q1 2026 call (opens in new tab)).
• U.S. brands spend about $10.5 billion a year on influencer marketing. eMarketer forecast $10.52 billion for 2025, the first year above $10 billion, and growth of 15.7% in 2026. Its figure counts payments from brands to creators and leaves out the ad spend behind their posts (eMarketer, March 2025 (opens in new tab)).
• Facebook pays Instagram creators to cross over. Facebook paid creators nearly $3 billion in 2025, 35% more than in 2024. Its Creator Fast Track program, launched in March 2026, pays $1,000 a month for three months to creators with at least 100,000 followers on Instagram, TikTok or YouTube, and $3,000 a month above one million (Meta, March 18, 2026 (opens in new tab)).

Instagram’s own payouts (subscriptions, gifts and invite-only bonuses) have follower thresholds and country limits; the current rules are on Instagram’s Creators site (opens in new tab).

For all seven ways creators earn from an Instagram audience, and the order to build them in, see how to make money on Instagram. For brand deals at a smaller size, see how to become a micro-influencer.

Instagram advertising statistics

Meta doesn’t report Instagram’s revenue on its own, only for all its apps together. What it does report points one way: more ads, at higher prices, that are better at driving sales.

• Reels earn more than $50 billion a year. Meta said Reels had an annual revenue run rate of over $50 billion in the third quarter of 2025, across its apps (Q3 2025 call (opens in new tab)).
• More ads, at higher prices. Ad impressions across Meta’s apps grew 14% year over year in the second quarter of 2026, and the average price per ad rose 12% (Meta Q2 2026 results (opens in new tab)). If your cost per result is rising, part of it is the market.
• Better targeting. A new ads model across Instagram Feed, Stories and Reels raised conversion rates by 3% in the fourth quarter of 2025 (Q4 2025 call (opens in new tab)).
• Instagram is now Meta’s bigger U.S. ad business. eMarketer forecast that Instagram would earn $32.03 billion in U.S. ad revenue in 2025, 50.3% of Meta’s U.S. total and the first time above half (eMarketer, December 2024 (opens in new tab)).

For the audience you can reach with ads in each country, see the ad reach table above.

Shopping has shifted too. Since September 2025, Shops on Facebook and Instagram use checkout on the seller’s own website (opens in new tab), so product tags now send buyers out of the app to pay.

For creators, the commerce opportunity is in partnership ads and affiliate tags, above, rather than in running a shop inside Instagram.

Instagram engagement rate benchmarks

Engagement rates only compare when they’re calculated the same way. The benchmark below divides likes and comments by followers.

Tools that divide by reach or views show rates several times higher, so check which one your analytics tool uses before you compare.

• Carousels and Reels beat single images. Images lost the most engagement between 2024 and 2025, and pages now post more Reels than images.
• The latest quarter is a little lower. Socialinsider’s quarterly update puts the average post at 0.45% in the third quarter of 2026, with carousels still ahead at 0.50%.
• Compare like with like. Rates tend to drop as an account grows, so compare yourself with accounts of your size, or better, with your own median over the last three months.
• Your rate: (likes + comments) ÷ followers × 100, averaged over your recent posts. At 0.5% or more you’re at or above the average page in Socialinsider’s data.

Likes and comments are only part of what Instagram ranks on, though. Instagram’s own Creators FAQ (opens in new tab) says that what matters most for how far a post travels is engagement per viewer (watch time, shares, follows, likes, comments and profile visits) and how likely each viewer is to watch and engage.

So the per-viewer numbers in your insights, like average watch time and shares, tell you more than an engagement rate based on followers.

How to earn those signals is in my guide to growing on Instagram, and why engagement pods distort all of these numbers is in my look at engagement groups.

Where these numbers come from, and how often they change

I use primary sources wherever they exist and say so when I can’t. This is when each one updates, and so when this page does:

Some numbers you’ll still find on other statistics pages (and on this one, until 2026) aren’t here on purpose. “500 million people use Stories every day” is a figure Meta last gave in 2019.

Claims that faces, blue tones or location tags add a fixed percentage of likes come from studies more than five years old that nobody has repeated on today’s Instagram.

If a number has no current source, I leave it out.

More free data for creators is in the free tools and data hub, and more guides like this one are in Creator growth.

Instagram statistics: frequently asked questions