- Each person spends 6 hours and 38 minutes a day online, a figure that has grown slightly over the last ten years: in 2014, people spent 6 hours and 23 minutes online.
- South Africa, Brazil and the Philippines are the countries where people spend the most time using the Internet.
- By age group, the younger the person, the more they use the Internet.
- Although only slightly, and except among people aged 55 to 64, women use the Internet more than men.
While digital life is not just about connecting to the Internet, knowing how much time we spend each day surfing the web can be an interesting indicator to give us an idea.
According to the Digital 2025 report, which among many other things explains how many Internet users there are currently in the world (more than 5.5 billion), it also breaks down the data on daily usage time.
How much time do we spend on the Internet each day?
While other data collected in this report, such as the number of Internet users, reasons for using the Internet, and access devices, show notable variations, the time spent online has remained fairly stable over the last decade.
In 2024, the average time spent online was 6 hours and 38 minutes, very much in line with the 6 hours and 40 minutes in 2023 and the 6 hours and 36 minutes in 2022.
The analysis of the last ten years started from 6 hours and 23 minutes in 2014, a figure that fell – the lowest in the series – to 6 hours and 20 minutes in 2015.
These figures rose slightly and fluctuated, peaking in 2020 and 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic: in those years, the time spent surfing the Internet rose to 6:54 and 6:58 respectively.
Internet usage time by country
Although we have seen that the trend over the last ten years has fluctuated up and down, but without major changes and with an increase of just a quarter of an hour over the entire period analysed, where we do find more than notable differences is in the scrutiny of data by country.
The three countries with the highest Internet usage times belong to three different continents, with South Africa in first place (9 hours and 37 minutes), followed by Brazil (9 hours and 9 minutes) and the Philippines in third place (8 hours and 52 minutes).
At the bottom of the table, Japan stands out with 4 hours and 9 minutes, one hour less than Denmark, which precedes it in the table with 5 hours and 10 minutes. Greece follows with 5 hours and 21 minutes.
Other countries worth mentioning are Spain, the United Kingdom and Germany, all of which are below average, with usage times of 5 hours and 40 minutes in the former, 5 hours and 36 minutes in the latter and 5 hours and 28 minutes in the third.
Internet usage time by gender and age
As with countries, if we take age groups as a reference, we find considerable differences, although these are not very significant by gender.
If we begin the analysis in the 16-24 age group, we find that women spend 7 hours and 35 minutes using the Internet, while men spend 7 hours and 11 minutes.
In the next age group, 25 to 34, women spend 7 hours and 17 minutes, almost identical to men, who spend 7 hours and 13 minutes.
In the 35 to 44 age group, the time drops to 6 hours and 43 minutes for women and 6 hours and 37 minutes for men.
Moving on to the 45-54 age group, we see that the times are also very similar, with 6:07 and 6:04 respectively for women and men.
Until the next age group, we find a notable difference of almost an hour, with the figure dropping to 5 hours and 18 minutes for women. In this section, we find a peculiarity: it is the only one in which men spend more time than women, specifically 5 hours and 21 minutes.
Finally, for the over-65s, we find a decrease of more than an hour compared to the previous age group, with women spending 4 hours and 7 minutes and men 3 hours and 59 minutes.
Thus, we can see that the common feature is that as age increases, Internet usage time decreases, with the sole exception of men between the ages of 16 and 24 and 35 and 44, where it increases by two minutes.
Total number of Internet users worldwide
In addition to this analysis of Internet usage time worldwide, we could also add the evolution of Internet users over the last few decades.
The current figure of 5.56 billion mentioned at the beginning of the article has grown from 2.61 million users in 1990.
