Megan Shamas, CMO, FIDO Alliance
On World Passkey Day 2026, we are announcing that an estimated 5 billion passkeys are now in active use worldwide.
A decade ago, that scale would have been hard to imagine. In 2016, there were just over 100 FIDO Certified products, limited platform support, and only a small number of deployments. “Passkeys” was not a term we used, and moving beyond passwords at internet scale was still an open question.
That shift, from limited support to billions of real-world uses, is what progress looks like.
We published the State of Passkeys 2026 report today to assess that progress and what we need to do to grow adoption to an even broader scale.
Awareness has reached 90% globally. 75% of people have enabled at least one passkey. Nearly half the world’s population, 49%, use them whenever they can or most of the time. In the workforce, a growing share of organizations are either live or actively rolling out passkeys for employee sign-ins.
Passkeys are no longer emerging. They are being used at scale.
This progress reflects sustained work across the FIDO Alliance and its global community. Together, the FIDO ecosystem has built standards, published implementation and UX guidance, and shared data and what works in practice. Platform providers and credential managers have expanded support and improved the experience. Vendors have innovated around the specifications, and relying parties have contributed data and results that help others move faster. That industry commitment made passkeys viable.
The report also highlights where gaps remain. Passwords are no longer the best available option, but they are still the most widely used. Nearly half of consumers have abandoned a purchase because they could not remember a password. 57% of organizations still rely on password-based methods as the primary way employees sign in.
Closing these gaps is the next phase, building on the enablement and user experience work that has driven progress so far, and now focusing it more precisely based on what the data and deployments are showing.
For consumer services, we have learned that deployment is not the end state. Many relying parties see strong initial uptake but need clearer guidance to drive sustained, everyday usage through UX patterns, messaging, and ongoing optimization. Getting from enabled to default behavior is the next challenge, and our focus is helping relying parties scale usage after deployment.
In the enterprise, the need is more practical. As deployment expands, organizations are looking for clear implementation guidance on how to roll out across environments, manage devices and recovery, and ensure employees use passkeys in daily sign-ins. Getting from rollout to habitual use remains a work in progress, and our focus is providing more concrete implementation guidance across these areas.
The next enablement phase is clear: scaling usage after deployment and making passkeys the default way people sign in.
Five billion passkeys in use reflects years of coordinated effort across the industry to build, deploy, and improve how passkeys work in practice. On World Passkey Day, this milestone belongs to the entire community that has made passkeys a reality at global scale.
