Newsletter Statistics 2026: Readership, Opens, Clicks, and Churn

Three in ten U.S. adults get news from email newsletters at least sometimes, but most newsletter recipients do not read most of what they receive. On the publisher side, two large 2025 datasets put measured open rates around 41–43%, click rates near 2%, and unsubscribes near 0.2% per campaign. Those figures are useful benchmarks, not universal truths: the datasets cover different platforms, and Apple Mail Privacy Protection makes opens an imperfect proxy for human attention.

This reference uses original research and first-party platform data available on July 30, 2026. We include the study population, collection period, and limitation next to each important number. That matters because a percentage without its denominator is decoration, not evidence.

Newsletter statistics at a glance

Question	Best current figure	Population and period
U.S. adults who get news from newsletters at least sometimes	30%	5,153 U.S. adults surveyed Aug. 18–24, 2025
Average open rate on beehiiv	41.24%	Newsletter sends on beehiiv during 2025
Median open rate on MailerLite	43.46%	3.6M campaigns from 181,000 approved accounts, Dec. 2024–Nov. 2025
Median click rate on MailerLite	2.09%	Same 3.6M-campaign dataset
Median unsubscribe rate on MailerLite	0.22%	Same 3.6M-campaign dataset
Spam complaint rate on beehiiv	0.02%	Newsletter sends on beehiiv during 2025
beehiiv newsletters sent weekly	46.67%	Active sending patterns on beehiiv during 2025

The honest headline is not “newsletters average a 42% open rate.” It is that two substantial but different platform datasets landed in the same low-40s neighborhood. Your own result can be much higher or lower because list source, niche, cadence, inbox placement, and tracking rules all change the denominator.

How many people read newsletters?

The strongest public readership estimate comes from the Pew Research Center's 2026 newsletter study. Pew surveyed 5,153 members of its nationally representative American Trends Panel from August 18 to 24, 2025. Three in ten U.S. adults said they get news from email newsletters at least sometimes.

The more important finding was attention, not reach: even among Americans who receive news newsletters, a majority said they do not read most of the newsletters they get. That result explains why list size is a weak measure of actual audience. A subscription records a past decision; a read records present value.

This study concerns news newsletters and U.S. adults. It should not be generalized to every company update, ecommerce promotion, local bulletin, or international audience. It does provide a rare reader-side counterweight to platform reports, which usually measure delivered messages and tracking pixels rather than people.

What is a good newsletter open rate in 2026?

Two current first-party datasets provide a defensible range:

• beehiiv reported a 41.24% average open rate in 2025, up from 37.98% in its prior comparison.
• MailerLite reported a 43.46% median open rate across more than 3.6 million campaigns sent by 181,000 approved accounts from December 2024 through November 2025.

Do not average those two numbers. “Average” and “median” are different statistics, and the platforms serve different mixes of creators and businesses. A practical benchmark is therefore a band: a measured open rate in the low 40s is normal in these two datasets, not a guarantee across email.

Open rate also no longer means exactly what its name suggests. Apple says Mail Privacy Protection prevents senders from seeing whether a recipient opened a message. It does this partly by loading remote content privately, which can register an “open” without a person reading the email. MailerLite explicitly warns that its observed opens are inflated for this reason.

Use opens for trends inside the same account with the same measurement setup. Use clicks, replies, conversions, and retained subscribers when you need evidence of human action.

What is a good newsletter click rate?

MailerLite's median click rate was 2.09% across its 3.6 million-campaign dataset. Its click-to-open rate was 6.81%, but that second metric inherits every ambiguity in the open denominator.

beehiiv's 2026 report found that click-through rates varied substantially by subject: high-intent categories such as space and poetry exceeded 7% in its category table, while the platform-wide story was that clicks had fallen as newsletters became more complete reading experiences. A reader who consumes an essay entirely inside the email may be highly engaged and produce zero clicks.

That produces a useful measurement rule:

1. For a link-led newsletter, optimize unique clicks and downstream conversions.
2. For a full-text publication, add replies, forwards, survey answers, and direct visits.
3. For a paid newsletter, prioritize renewal and paid conversion over either opens or clicks.

How often are newsletters sent?

On beehiiv in 2025, 46.67% of observed newsletters sent weekly, 27.15% sent monthly, and 1.37% sent daily. Weekly was the dominant cadence.

This is a platform distribution, not an experiment proving that weekly causes growth. Publishers choose cadence based on resources and topic; stronger teams may both publish more consistently and grow faster. The decision should start with the smallest schedule that can repeatedly deliver something worth opening.

More frequency creates more opportunities for both value and exit. If 0.22% of delivered recipients unsubscribe from each campaign, a weekly program exposes its list to that decision roughly four times as often as a monthly one. That does not make weekly wrong. It means cadence and email list churn must be planned together.

What is a normal unsubscribe rate?

MailerLite measured a 0.22% median unsubscribe rate per campaign in 2025, up from 0.08% in its 2024 comparison. The company attributes part of the increase to Gmail making subscription management and one-click unsubscribe more visible.

At 0.22%, about 2.2 recipients per 1,000 delivered messages leave after a typical campaign. That is not the same as annual list churn. To estimate cumulative unsubscribe exposure across repeated sends, use:

remaining share = (1 - unsubscribe rate per send) ^ number of sends

At a constant 0.22% across 52 weekly sends, the mathematical result is about 89.2% remaining, or 10.8% removed by unsubscribes alone. Real lists also gain subscribers, lose invalid addresses, suppress inactive people, and vary by campaign, so this is a scenario—not a forecast.

An unsubscribe is often healthier than silent disengagement or a spam complaint. Google's sender rules expect bulk senders to support one-click unsubscribe, while Flick's List-Unsubscribe explainer shows how the header lets a mailbox provider handle the request without a dark-pattern landing page.

Are newsletter statistics reliable?

They are reliable when kept inside their measurement boundary:

• Pew measures people. Its weighted panel tells us about U.S. adults and news consumption.
• beehiiv measures its platform. Its report describes newsletters sent through beehiiv, not the whole internet.
• MailerLite measures campaigns on its platform. It reports medians across approved accounts and names the collection window.
• Open tracking measures image loading. Privacy protection, image caching, and text-only clients weaken the link between a recorded open and a human read.

The safest way to use an external benchmark is to compare direction, not self-worth. A newsletter with a 25% measured open rate and strong paid retention can be healthier than one with a 55% rate built on an aggressively pruned list. Newsletter fatigue begins when publishers optimize visible dashboard numbers instead of the reader's reason to stay.

Editorial methodology

We reviewed public primary sources on July 30, 2026. We selected reports that disclose a sample or first-party platform population, kept averages and medians separate, and rejected unsourced market-size roundups. No Flick customer inbox data was used for this page. Vendor datasets can be large and still carry selection bias; the platform chooses which accounts qualify and how events are counted.

FAQ

What is the average newsletter open rate in 2026?

Large 2025 platform datasets place measured opens in the low 40s: beehiiv reported 41.24% and MailerLite reported a 43.46% median. Apple Mail Privacy Protection means a measured open is not always a human read, so clicks, replies, and retention should accompany it.

What percentage of people read email newsletters?

Pew found that 30% of U.S. adults get news from newsletters at least sometimes. The study covered news newsletters and a nationally representative U.S. sample; it is not a global estimate for every newsletter type.

What is a good newsletter click-through rate?

MailerLite's 2025 median was 2.09% across 3.6 million campaigns. A useful target depends on whether the email's job is to deliver a complete article, generate a reply, or drive a click and conversion.

Is a high unsubscribe rate always bad?

No. A clear unsubscribe is better than a spam complaint and can remove people who no longer want the publication. Investigate sudden changes, but do not make exit difficult to protect a vanity list size.