// SOURCED DATA · UPDATED JULY 2026
26 figures on QR codes. Every one links to the page it was read off, states the period it covers, and says what it does not prove. Most QR statistics posts are longer than this one because they repeat numbers that have no source — we checked those too, and list what we threw out.
The largest QR number by far is money, not marketing — and it is the one area where a forecast from a paid research house is the best public figure available.
Global value of payments made by scanning a QR code.
What it doesn’t prove: A research-house estimate, not a settled total. The methodology behind it sits inside a paid report, so it cannot be independently recomputed from the press release.
Forecast value of QR code payments by 2029.
What it doesn’t prove: A forecast published in early 2025 — it predates the market it describes.
Forecast growth in QR payment value between 2025 and 2029.
What it doesn’t prove: Derived from the two forecast endpoints above, so it inherits their uncertainty.
Countries covered by the dataset the payment forecasts are drawn from — the scope figure that tells you how global “global” is here.
What it doesn’t prove: Scope, not a market measurement. Included so the forecasts above can be read in context.
India publishes its real-time payment volumes as official statistics, which makes this the most solid tier of evidence on this page. UPI is the rail; a very large share of its in-person use is a QR scan.
UPI transactions processed in a single month.
Average daily UPI transaction count across the month.
Year-on-year growth in UPI transaction volume.
Year-on-year growth in UPI transaction value, against ₹28 lakh crore for the month — value is growing more slowly than volume, i.e. the average payment is getting smaller.
The interesting question is not how many codes exist but whether people still scan them. The strongest available signal is a provider comparing scans against codes created on its own platform: if scans outrun creations, the installed base is getting more use, not less.
Change in scan rate in Europe — the fastest-growing region in the report.
What it doesn’t prove: Counted on one provider's platform. It measures how that provider's customers behave, not the world's QR traffic.
Change in scan rate in Latin America.
What it doesn’t prove: Counted on one provider's platform. It measures how that provider's customers behave, not the world's QR traffic.
Change in scan rate in Asia-Pacific.
What it doesn’t prove: Counted on one provider's platform. It measures how that provider's customers behave, not the world's QR traffic.
Change in scan rate across the Middle East and North Africa.
What it doesn’t prove: Counted on one provider's platform. It measures how that provider's customers behave, not the world's QR traffic.
Change in scan rate in Sub-Saharan Africa.
What it doesn’t prove: Counted on one provider's platform. It measures how that provider's customers behave, not the world's QR traffic.
Change in scan rate in North America — the slowest of the six regions, which reads as a mature market rather than a declining one.
What it doesn’t prove: Counted on one provider's platform. It measures how that provider's customers behave, not the world's QR traffic.
Europe created barely more QR codes but scanned them far more often — the clearest published evidence against the “QR fatigue” story.
What it doesn’t prove: Counted on one provider's platform. It measures how that provider's customers behave, not the world's QR traffic. The same report also gives Europe as +42% in its regional table; the published text does not make clear whether the two figures measure the same thing, so both are reproduced here as printed.
Latin America added almost no new codes while scans of the existing ones grew by two fifths.
What it doesn’t prove: Counted on one provider's platform. It measures how that provider's customers behave, not the world's QR traffic.
Source: Bitly, “The State of QR Code Scans in 2026” (10 March 2026). These are growth rates on one provider’s platform — they show which regions are accelerating, not how large each region is.
These come from a survey run by a QR code vendor among marketers. That is worth knowing before quoting any of them: the sample is people who already buy this category, asked by the company selling it. Read them as a picture of practice inside the industry, not as evidence that QR codes work.
Marketers surveyed who say they use QR codes.
What it doesn’t prove: Vendor survey of an audience that self-selects into the category. Treat as directional only.
Say they increased their use of QR codes over the previous 12 months.
What it doesn’t prove: Self-reported change, with no baseline volume published alongside it.
Believe consumer sentiment toward QR codes improved over the previous 12 months.
What it doesn’t prove: This measures what marketers believe consumers think — not what consumers think.
Plan to increase QR code use over the next 12 months.
What it doesn’t prove: A stated intention, not a spend commitment.
Update or redirect a dynamic QR code at least monthly — the single most useful number here, because it explains why dynamic codes exist at all.
What it doesn’t prove: Asked of marketers already using dynamic codes, so it cannot be read as adoption of dynamic codes.
Name exclusive content as the strongest reason a person will scan.
What it doesn’t prove: An opinion about what works, not a measurement of scan rates.
Name a discount or promotional offer as the strongest reason to scan.
What it doesn’t prove: Same survey question as above; the two options split the field roughly evenly.
Say unique users is the QR metric they value most, ahead of raw scan counts.
What it doesn’t prove: Preference, not practice — the survey does not report what they actually track.
Name understanding what happens after the scan as their biggest measurement problem — the honest admission buried in a promotional survey.
What it doesn’t prove: Self-reported difficulty. Included because it cuts against the survey's own interest.
Say they plan to combine QR codes with AI or machine learning.
What it doesn’t prove: A 2025 intention question about AI, asked of marketers. Intention questions about AI in 2025 ran high across every category.
QR phishing — “quishing” — is the fastest-moving QR story and the worst-documented. The percentages that circulate (“12% of phishing attacks carry a QR code”, “68% target mobile users”) trace back to a roundup listing 69 such statistics that names an original report for three or four of them. The attacks are real; the public numbers describing them are not checkable, so none appear above.
What is citable is that consumer regulators now publish QR-specific warnings. The US Federal Trade Commission has an alert on codes arriving on unexpected packages — a scam that works precisely because a printed code hides its destination until you have already opened it.
US Federal Trade Commission — consumer alert on QR codes in unexpected packages · January 2025If you want to see where a code actually points before you follow it, our QR scanner decodes the payload in your browser and shows you the URL as text instead of opening it.
These are the QR statistics you will meet most often. Each one failed the same test: we could not find the study underneath it. They are listed here so that this page is checkable in both directions — what it contains, and what it deliberately doesn’t.
No primary source. It appears in roundup after roundup with no study behind it, and several of the same pages also print an annual worldwide scan total far smaller than 2 billion a day would imply. A figure that contradicts its own page cannot be repeated.
Quoted as a global census. A count to the single digit can only come from one platform's logs, which makes it that platform's number, not the world's — and it sits on pages that simultaneously claim billions of scans per day.
We could not identify the survey: no sample size, no fieldwork date, no publisher named anywhere in the chain of pages repeating it.
Traced to a roundup listing 69 quishing statistics that attributes only three or four of them to a named report. The underlying vendor telemetry may well be sound, but nothing published lets a reader check which vendor measured what, over what period.
A static QR code stores its destination inside the pattern itself, which is why the codes counted above keep working for years and why no one can produce a global scan count. This generator runs entirely in your browser — the URL you type is never sent anywhere.
Nobody credibly knows, and anyone who gives you a single worldwide number is guessing. QR codes are decoded by the phone itself, so there is no central counter — a static code can be scanned a million times without anyone being able to observe it. The honest figures are narrower: a payment network's transaction count, or one provider's scans of the codes it hosts. That is why this page reports regional growth rates and payment volumes rather than a global daily total.
India's UPI figures. They are published as official government statistics rather than marketing material, they count completed transactions rather than impressions, and they are released monthly — 21.63 billion transactions in December 2025, growing 29% year on year. The caveat is that UPI includes payments made without scanning anything, so it is an upper bound on QR-driven volume, not a measure of it.
The best available evidence says scans are growing faster than new codes are being created — in Europe, codes created grew 7% while scans grew 53% over the same period. That pattern is the opposite of a fad: it means the codes already in the world are being used more, not that more codes are being printed and ignored. North America is the slowest region at +8%, which reads as maturity rather than decline.
Because the longer lists include numbers we could not stand behind. "Over 2 billion QR codes are scanned every day" has no primary source and contradicts the annual totals printed on the same pages that carry it. A widely-quoted set of QR phishing percentages traces back to a roundup of 69 statistics that names a source for three or four of them. We list what we rejected, and why, at the bottom of this page.
Yes. Quote the figure, and please link to the original source listed beside it rather than to us — every entry names the report it came from and the date that report was published. If you cite this page as well, link to qrixtools.com/qr-code-statistics. The one thing we would ask is that you carry the caveat along with the number, because most of these measure something narrower than they sound like.
It is re-checked when a load-bearing source publishes a new edition — the payment forecasts and the annual scan report are the two that move. Each figure carries its own period and its source's publication date, so you can see how fresh any individual number is instead of trusting a single "updated" stamp at the top.