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How Many People Use PayPal in 2023?

Have you ever wondered how many people use PayPal? As one of the world’s most popular tools for peer-to-peer transactions, PayPal has a huge audience. Every year, more customers sign up to make secure purchases online and deliver cash to loved ones. But how many active PayPal accounts are there?

Rebekah Carter
Author 
Rebekah Carter
Nikola Djordjevic
Editor 
Nikola Djordjevic
Nikola Djordjevic
Fact Checker 
Nikola Djordjevic
4 minutes
October 10th, 2023
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Read on to learn more about the latest usage figures for PayPal, and discover how significant the financial company’s impact really is on the payment market.

How Many People Use PayPal?

The exact number of PayPal users accessing the technology at any given time is difficult to track, but we can get an insight from the company’s recent financial reports. As of the first quarter of 2022, PayPal announced it has added around 2.4 million new accounts to its customer list for the new year. This brought the total number of active users to 429 million.

(PayPal Holdings)

Exploring PayPal’s Growth: Is PayPal Still Popular Today?

The increase of PayPal accounts in 2022 has been slightly lower than in 2021 when PayPal added 9.8 million new accounts in Q4 following the Paidy acquisition. However, the company does forecast the addition of at least another 10 million PayPal active users by the end of 2022.

The number of PayPal users has grown consistently over the last year.

According to PayPal’s Q4 financial report, PayPal usage has continued to grow over 2021 and 2022. 429 million people are active on PayPal today, which is a 9% increase in newly added accounts compared to the previous year’s Q1 results.

Notably, the growth in new accounts per quarter is dropping slightly. The percentage increase between March 2020 and 2021 was around 21%, while the increase between June 2020 and 2021 was 16%. These numbers have continued to drop all the way up to only a 9% increase between March 2021 and March 2022.

(PayPal Holdings)

87% of online shoppers used PayPal in 2021.

While the number of PayPal monthly active users might not be growing as aggressively as it was a few months ago, the service remains extremely popular. Around 87% of customers leveraging online payment methods managed transactions via PayPal in 2021.

PayPal also remains the most popular online payment service for customers in the United States, while other countries may be more likely to use solutions like WeChat Pay or AliPay.

(Ecommerce DB)

Around 93% of Italian stores offer PayPal as a payment method.

While PayPal is a popular payment option in many regions around the world, Italy, in particular, appears to have one of the largest share of PayPal users by country. Approximately 93% of Italian stores offer PayPal as a payment option. 92% of Australian companies offer PayPal, followed by 88% of German brands and 86% of Spanish businesses.

Serbia is the region where PayPal has the fewest users (excluding countries which don’t use PayPal at all), with only 1% of stores offering the payment option. Only 12 countries have single-digit usage rates when it comes to offering PayPal services.

(Ecommerce DB)

58% of Americans have a PayPal account in 2018.

In 2018, a study found that around 58% of Americans have an active PayPal account. This report on PayPal usage also found the service accounted for around 14% of online payments made in the US.

Americans with PayPal in the study also reported having an average of $485 in their accounts, suggesting US consumers keep more than twice as much cash in their PayPal accounts as their physical wallets. Most people keep only $196 on average in their wallets.

(Logica Research)

55% of PayPal users keep their PayPal account active for online payments.

According to the same study, 55% of the Americans who use PayPal regularly maintain their account to ensure they have a way to pay for other online transactions. 1 in 5 of the growing PayPal’s number of users said they prefer having a PayPal account to a traditional bank account.

A further 25% said they find it easier to track expenses in PayPal, and 21% simply said they hold onto cash in their account because they haven’t gotten around to moving it.

(Logica Research)

Exploring PayPal Growth

Today, PayPal is far from the only option available for managing online transactions, but it remains one of the most popular. As the company continues to roll out new features and functionality, we could see its users and earnings continue to grow.

Sources:

Contributors

Rebekah Carter
Rebekah is a prolific writer with a keen focus on financial technology and consumer financial behavior. Her expertise is evident in her insightful analysis of digital payment platforms and consumer spending trends.
Nikola Djordjevic
Fact Checker
Nikola Djordjevic