Windows Market Share 2026: Windows 11 vs Windows 10 Adoption

Windows 11 now runs on 69.9% of desktop Windows PCs worldwide, while Windows 10 has fallen to 28.2%, according to StatCounter data for June 2026. That gap matters because Windows 10 left mainstream support in October 2025, and every point of remaining share represents machines running on borrowed time or paid Extended Security Updates. This page tracks the full picture: the month-by-month Windows 11 vs Windows 10 timeline, regional differences, Windows vs macOS vs Linux, gamer adoption from the Steam Hardware Survey, and what enterprise migration data says about the road ahead.

Worldwide Windows Version Share

StatCounter, which measures operating system share from page views across millions of websites, is the standard public reference for Windows version share. Its June 2026 snapshot shows a market that has largely completed the shift Microsoft spent four years pushing for.

1. Windows 11 holds 69.9% of worldwide desktop Windows version share as of June 2026 (StatCounter).
2. Windows 10 has declined to 28.2% — down from roughly 49% a year earlier, before its October 2025 end of support (StatCounter).
3. Windows 7 still registers 1.65% of desktop Windows PCs, more than six years after its January 2020 end of extended support (StatCounter).
4. Windows 8.1, Windows XP, and all other legacy versions combined account for less than 0.5% of the desktop Windows base (StatCounter).
5. Windows as a whole runs on more than 1.4 billion monthly active devices, the figure Microsoft cites in its official Windows disclosures (Microsoft).
6. At 28.2% share against a 1.4 billion device base, the out-of-support Windows 10 population still numbers in the hundreds of millions of machines — a larger unsupported fleet than Windows 7 ever left behind (StatCounter, Microsoft).
7. Windows 10 lost roughly 21 points of share in the 12 months from June 2025 to June 2026, the steepest annual decline StatCounter has recorded for any Windows version (StatCounter).
8. StatCounter's numbers measure web activity, not installed base; Microsoft telemetry and the Steam Hardware Survey show the same direction with different magnitudes, which is why this page cites each source by name throughout.

Windows 11 vs Windows 10: The Adoption Timeline

Windows 11 launched in October 2021 and needed almost four years to catch Windows 10. The crossover finally came in July 2025, when StatCounter recorded Windows 11 passing Windows 10 worldwide for the first time. The October 14, 2025 end-of-support deadline for Windows 10 then accelerated the shift through the winter. The table below tracks the twelve months around that inflection point. Figures are StatCounter worldwide desktop Windows version share, rounded to one decimal.

9. Windows 11 overtook Windows 10 worldwide in July 2025 — 45 months after launch (StatCounter).
10. By comparison, Windows 10 needed only about two years to overtake Windows 7 after its 2015 launch, helped by a free-upgrade offer with no hardware cutoff (StatCounter).
11. The single largest monthly jump in the period came in July 2025, when Windows 11 gained 5.5 points in one month as the end-of-support deadline entered its final quarter (StatCounter).
12. Between the October 2025 deadline and June 2026, Windows 10 shed another 9.4 points of share (StatCounter).
13. Windows 11's month-over-month gains have slowed from over 2 points in late 2025 to about 0.6 points by June 2026, a sign the easy upgrades are done and the remaining Windows 10 base is stickier (StatCounter).
14. At the current pace, Windows 10 would still hold above 20% share well into 2027 — context that matters for the Windows 12 rumors, since Microsoft would be launching a new version onto a base that never finished leaving the old one (StatCounter trend).
15. Windows 10 end of support was October 14, 2025: no more free security updates, quality fixes, or standard technical support (Microsoft).
16. Interest in staying put remains real: activation demand for both operating systems is covered in our guide to Windows 10 and Windows 11 keys, one of the most-read pages on this site.

Windows 11 Market Share

Windows 11 market share crossed two symbolic lines within a year: majority share of desktop Windows in July 2025, and the one-billion-user mark that Microsoft reported in early 2026. The version's growth curve was slow for its first three years, then compressed four years of migration into twelve months.

17. Microsoft reported Windows 11 reaching 1 billion users in early 2026, four and a half years after launch (Microsoft).
18. Windows 10 hit the same billion-device milestone in under five years too — but did it without a hardware compatibility wall; Windows 11's TPM 2.0 and CPU requirements excluded a large slice of the installed base from day one (Microsoft).
19. Canalys estimated that roughly 240 million PCs could not upgrade to Windows 11 because of those hardware requirements — machines that had to be replaced, moved to Linux or ChromeOS Flex, or enrolled in ESU (Canalys).
20. Gamers adopted Windows 11 faster than the general population: the Steam Hardware Survey shows Windows 11 running on roughly 8 in 10 Steam Windows machines by mid-2026, about ten points ahead of StatCounter's all-desktop figure (Valve Steam Hardware Survey).
21. Windows 11 crossed 50% on Steam in September 2024 — ten months before it crossed 50% on StatCounter — because gaming hardware skews newer and TPM-compliant (Valve Steam Hardware Survey, StatCounter).
22. The 2025 PC refresh cycle fed the curve: IDC reported worldwide PC shipment growth of about 5% in 2025, attributing much of it to Windows 10 end-of-support replacements (IDC).
23. New hardware now ships almost exclusively with Windows 11, including the Copilot+ PC category Microsoft launched in 2024; our Microsoft Copilot adoption statistics track how far the AI layer on top of Windows 11 has actually spread (Microsoft).
24. Windows 11 version 25H2, released in late 2025, became the fastest-adopted feature update in the version's history as enterprises consolidated migration and update waves into one project (Microsoft release health data).

Regional Differences: US, Europe, Asia

Windows 11 adoption is not evenly distributed. Wealthier markets with faster hardware refresh cycles run ahead of the global average; regions with older installed bases and higher price sensitivity lag it. All figures below are StatCounter regional desktop Windows version data for mid-2026, rounded.

25. North America leads major regions with Windows 11 at roughly 73% of desktop Windows, a few points above the worldwide 69.9% (StatCounter, mid-2026, rounded).
26. Europe tracks close behind at about 71%, with Northern and Western European markets ahead of Southern and Eastern ones (StatCounter, rounded).
27. Asia trails the global average at about 66%, reflecting an older installed base and longer device lifecycles in several large markets (StatCounter, rounded).
28. Windows 7's residual share is concentrated regionally: most of the remaining 1.65% sits in Asian and African markets, where StatCounter has long recorded the highest legacy-version persistence (StatCounter).
29. The regional spread has narrowed since the crossover: in mid-2025 the gap between the leading and lagging major regions was over 12 points; by mid-2026 it had compressed to single digits as end-of-support pressure applied everywhere (StatCounter).
30. Regional Windows 10 stragglers are disproportionately unmanaged consumer and small-business machines — the same population least likely to have enrolled in ESU, which security researchers flagged as the largest unpatched attack surface since Windows XP's retirement (Microsoft, industry security reporting).

Desktop OS Overall: Windows vs macOS vs Linux

Version share tells you which Windows people run. Operating system share tells you whether they run Windows at all. Here the story is stability: Windows has ceded ground to macOS and Linux slowly, but it still powers about seven in ten desktops worldwide.

31. Windows holds roughly 70% of worldwide desktop operating system share in StatCounter's 2026 data — down only modestly from the mid-70s it held a decade ago (StatCounter).
32. macOS sits at about 15–16% of desktops worldwide, with a far higher share in North America than in Asia (StatCounter).
33. Desktop Linux reached about 4%, its highest sustained level in StatCounter's records, helped in part by users abandoning unsupported Windows 10 hardware rather than replacing it (StatCounter).
34. ChromeOS accounts for under 2% of desktops worldwide, concentrated heavily in the US education market (StatCounter).
35. The desktop itself is the shrinking arena: StatCounter's all-platform data has mobile at more than half of total web traffic, which is why Microsoft frames Windows strategy around the 1.4 billion active devices rather than share percentages (StatCounter, Microsoft).
36. On the desktop that remains, the practical duopoly is intact: Windows and macOS together account for about 86% of desktop operating systems worldwide (StatCounter).

Enterprise Adoption and Windows 10 ESU

Consumer share flipped fast. Enterprise fleets moved earlier but finished slower, because migration there means application testing, imaging, and hardware budget cycles — not a Windows Update prompt. The Extended Security Updates program is the pressure-release valve for everything that did not finish in time.

37. Windows 10 consumer ESU is free with Windows Backup settings sync to a Microsoft account, redeemable with 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, or a one-time $30 purchase — the first time Microsoft has offered consumers paid post-EOL patches (Microsoft).
38. Consumer ESU covers security updates only, and only through October 13, 2026 — it buys one year, not a reprieve (Microsoft).
39. Commercial ESU starts at $61 per device for year one and doubles each year, up to three years — about $427 per device for the full term, which is deliberately priced to make migration cheaper than delay (Microsoft).
40. ControlUp's analysis of over a million enterprise endpoints found roughly half of enterprise Windows devices had migrated to Windows 11 by mid-2025, with the pace concentrated in the final year before the deadline (ControlUp Windows 11 readiness research).
41. Hardware readiness was the binding constraint for years: Lansweeper's scans of enterprise fleets repeatedly found that around 4 in 10 tested workstations failed at least one Windows 11 requirement — most often the CPU generation or TPM 2.0 check (Lansweeper).
42. The TPM 2.0 requirement forced hardware replacement rather than in-place upgrades for a large share of fleets; IDC and Canalys both tie the 2024–2025 commercial PC refresh wave directly to the Windows 10 deadline (IDC, Canalys).
43. Cloud desktops absorbed part of the overflow: Windows 365 lets organizations run Windows 11 Cloud PCs on hardware that fails local requirements, and Gartner forecasts sustained double-digit growth for desktop-as-a-service through the decade (Gartner, Microsoft).
44. Most organizations bundled the OS migration with a broader Microsoft 365 move; teams planning that combined project use our Microsoft 365 migration services to handle tenant, identity, and endpoint work in one pass.
45. Windows 11 Enterprise licensing rides on Microsoft 365 E3/E5 subscriptions — adoption economics covered in our Microsoft 365 statistics for 2026, alongside the 400M+ paid Office 365 seat base it attaches to (Microsoft).

What It Means for IT Teams

The numbers translate into a short list of decisions for anyone running a Windows fleet in the second half of 2026.

46. 28.2% of desktop Windows is now unsupported or on paid life support. If any of it is yours, the consumer ESU window closes October 13, 2026, and commercial ESU doubles in price at each renewal (StatCounter, Microsoft).
47. Windows 11's slowing growth curve — 0.6 points a month by June 2026, down from 2+ — means the remaining Windows 10 base is dominated by blocked hardware and unmanaged machines, not procrastinators; budget for replacement, not persuasion (StatCounter).
48. The roughly 240 million upgrade-blocked PCs Canalys identified are the refresh pipeline for 2026–2027; hardware lead times and trade-in programs matter more than upgrade tooling now (Canalys).
49. Teams consolidating the endpoint refresh with a cloud move can test the productivity stack first — a Microsoft 365 free trial covers the full E-series workloads before any licensing commitment (Microsoft).
50. Watch headcount pressure alongside platform work: OS migrations compete for the same budget as staffing, and the 2026 tech layoffs tracker shows IT departments doing this refresh with fewer people than they had in 2024 (industry layoff data).

The Windows market in 2026 is a settled race with an expensive tail. Windows 11 won; the cost now sits in the 28.2% that has not moved. For fleets still carrying Windows 10, the practical path is a combined endpoint and Microsoft 365 project — start with a Microsoft 365 free trial, then plan the migration wave around ESU expiry rather than after it.

Sources

These statistics are compiled from the following sources:

• StatCounter Global Stats — Desktop Windows Version Market Share Worldwide (June 2025 – June 2026)
• StatCounter Global Stats — Desktop Operating System Market Share Worldwide (2026)
• Microsoft — Windows 10 end of support and Extended Security Updates (ESU) program documentation
• Microsoft — Windows devices and Windows 11 user milestone disclosures (2025–2026)
• Valve — Steam Hardware & Software Survey (2024–2026)
• Canalys — Windows 11 hardware compatibility and PC refresh estimates
• IDC — Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker (2025)
• ControlUp — Windows 11 enterprise readiness and migration research (2025)
• Lansweeper — Windows 11 hardware readiness audits
• Gartner — Desktop-as-a-Service forecast

Statistics are updated as new StatCounter data is published. Last updated: July 2026.