TikTok statistics 2026: users, demographics and search

About 1.59 billion adults could be reached by ads on TikTok at the start of 2025, and roughly 37 in 100 US adults say they use the app. Those are the two most defensible numbers for TikTok's size, and this page keeps a source and a date next to every figure.

Most TikTok statistics on the web get copied and rounded up until nobody can say where they started. We dropped anything we could not trace to a named study or to TikTok's own data. Where two trustworthy sources disagree, both are shown. The search numbers in the last two sections come from TikTok's own Creator Search Insights, pulled on 22 September 2026.

How many people use TikTok

TikTok reached 1.59 billion adults through its ad tools at the start of 2025, according to DataReportal, which builds its figures from the numbers TikTok itself shows advertisers. That is a reach figure for people aged 18 and over, not a full count of everyone on the app, so the real audience is larger.

ByteDance, TikTok's parent, has not published an official worldwide user count since 2021. Many pages quote 1.9 billion or more for 2026, but none trace that back to TikTok or to a survey, so there is no reliable 2026 monthly-user figure. The largest single audiences sit in the United States, Indonesia and Brazil.

This also settles a question people ask a lot: TikTok is not bigger than Instagram. On the same DataReportal measure, Instagram's ad reach was about 1.74 billion in January 2025, ahead of TikTok's 1.59 billion, and Instagram reported passing 3 billion monthly users during 2025. TikTok wins on time spent and on search, not on head count.

Data: DataReportal, "Essential TikTok Stats", January 2025. See the report. Figures are TikTok's advertising reach, not total active users.

How many TikTok users are in the US

Two solid numbers describe the US audience, and they measure different things. Pew Research Center found that 37% of US adults use TikTok, from a survey of 5,022 adults run between February and June 2025. DataReportal put TikTok's US ad audience at about 153 million people aged 18 and over in late 2025, up from 136 million at the start of the year.

Sources: Pew Research Center, November 2025; DataReportal, Digital 2026: United States.

Age and gender: who is on TikTok

The clearest answer is that TikTok skews young but is no longer a teen-only app. In the US, 63% of adults aged 18 to 29 use TikTok, against 44% of those 30 to 49, 30% of those 50 to 64 and 12% of those 65 and over. So the single age group that uses TikTok the most is adults under 30.

Data: Pew Research Center, November 2025 (survey of 5,022 US adults, Feb–Jun 2025).

Worldwide, the picture comes from TikTok's own ad audience. DataReportal reports that the biggest slice of that adult audience is 25 to 34 (about 35%), just ahead of 18 to 24 (about 31%). These shares only cover users aged 18 and over, so under-18s, a real part of TikTok, are not in them.

Data: DataReportal, January 2025. Shares add the female and male figures TikTok reports for each band.

TikTok's teen audience is real but easy to overstate. Pew found that 68% of US teens aged 13 to 17 use TikTok, from a survey of 1,458 teens run in late 2025, and that 21% of teens say they are on it almost constantly. Because the global age table above only counts adults, teen use sits on top of it rather than inside it.

On gender, TikTok's global adult ad audience was about 56% male and 44% female in January 2025. In the US it is closer to even, at roughly 52% male and 48% female in late 2025. Both come from TikTok's advertising data via DataReportal.

How much time people spend on TikTok

TikTok holds attention better than any rival app. Sensor Tower estimated that users spent an average of about 95 minutes a day in the app in 2025, more than on any other social network. In the United States, eMarketer put adult users at about 52 minutes a day, lower because it counts a wider, older group. Business of Apps adds that a typical user opens the app around ten times a day, in sessions of under ten minutes each, which is why the daily total climbs so high without any single long sitting.

These are panel-based estimates, not figures TikTok publishes, so read them as best guesses that different firms measure differently.

Downloads and money: what TikTok earns

TikTok does not release financial results, so every money figure here is an outside estimate. Business of Apps, drawing on ByteDance estimates, put TikTok's 2025 revenue at about 33 billion dollars, up roughly 40% on the year, with advertising as the bulk of it. App trackers counted around 437 million downloads in the first half of 2025 alone.

TikTok Shop, the in-app store, is the fast-growing piece. Momentum Works estimated its global sales at about 64 billion dollars in 2025, nearly double the year before, with roughly 15 billion of that in the United States. Most of the global total still comes from Southeast Asia, where TikTok Shop launched first, so the US share is smaller than its user base might suggest. Treat all of these as estimates, not audited numbers.

Sources: Business of Apps, 2026; Momentum Works, 2025. GMV means gross merchandise value, the total value of goods sold.

Who owns TikTok now

On 22 January 2026, ByteDance closed a deal moving TikTok's US operations into a new joint venture that is roughly 80% owned by US investors, led by Oracle, Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi's MGX, with ByteDance keeping a minority stake of about 20%. The change satisfies a US law that would otherwise have banned the app, and Oracle acts as the security partner for US user data.

Source: TechCrunch, January 2026.

Who is searching, by topic

Most stats pages stop at the whole platform. TikTok also publishes who searches for a given topic, through its Creator Search Insights tool, and that is data you cannot get from a survey. We pulled the audience split for four everyday topics on 22 September 2026. The shares below are of searchers TikTok could classify on its own search data, and TikTok keeps an "unknown" group it never labels.

Data: TikTok Creator Search Insights via TokConnect, pulled 22 September 2026. Open the snapshot. Shares are of searchers TikTok classified; "unknown" and "others" are kept as reported.

The pattern holds across topics: the 18 to 24 group leads in every one except skincare, where most searchers went unclassified. But the gender lean flips hard by subject, from a mostly female budgeting audience to a mostly male fitness one. That is the level of detail an agent can pull for your own niche.

TikTok as a search engine

One of the biggest shifts behind these numbers is that people now search on TikTok, not just scroll it. Surveys put the share of consumers who use TikTok as a search engine near half, and TikTok's own search demand for a single topic can run into the millions in a week. We keep that evidence, with each study and its year, on the TikTok search statistics page so it does not crowd out the numbers here. The short version: search adoption is wide but shallow, and almost nobody has swapped Google for TikTok, yet the raw search demand on individual topics is large enough to matter to anyone making videos.

Where TikTok statistics come from

Four kinds of source sit behind good TikTok statistics, and it helps to know which you are reading. DataReportal packages the numbers TikTok shows advertisers, so its reach figures are consistent but count only adults. Pew Research Center runs probability surveys of US adults and teens, which is the gold standard for "what share of people use it". Firms like Sensor Tower, Business of Apps and Momentum Works publish estimates of time, downloads and money that TikTok never confirms. And TikTok's Creator Search Insights is the only place TikTok publishes its own search demand. When a stat has no named source and no date, it is usually a copy of a copy.