* Windows 11 jumps 21.84 pts to 72.57% worldwide (Dec 2025-Feb 2026).
* Windows 10 falls 18.23 pts to 26.45%, losing most users to Windows 11.
* Windows 7’s tiny 3.83% share nearly evaporated, feeding Windows 11.
Well, it finally happened. For a little while, it seemed that Windows 10 and Windows 11 would have somewhat similar shares of the Windows userbase. Back in March 2025, we saw a 50/40 split between Windows 10 and Windows 11, respectively. Then, in June, it flipped so that Windows 11 had a 50% share and Windows 10, 40%.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that this trend would continue for a little while, or, at the very least, show Windows 11 slowly drift away from Windows 10 as it gains a trickle of users over time. Well, that trickle ended up being a seemingly huge exodus, giving Windows 11 over 21 percentage points of the market share between December 2025 and February 2026.
Windows 11 just hit 1 billion users 130 days faster than Windows 10
Are people embracing Windows 11, or are they being shoved onto it?
Posts 12
By Simon Batt
Windows 11 begins leaving Windows 10 behind as 2026 shows a huge rift opening up
And it likely won’t go back down
Whenever we want to check out how the OS market is doing, we check out StatCounter. It’s not a perfect way to get an idea as to how the Windows ecosystem is shifting, but it’s the best we have without Microsoft revealing usage information publicly.
For the worldwide stats in the Windows market, we’re seeing a 21.84 percentage point increase in Windows 11’s market share from December 2025 to February 2026, starting at 50.73% and ending at 72.57%. Meanwhile, Windows 10 toppled 18.23 percentage points from 44.68% to 26.45%.
Eagle-eyed readers will notice that these statistics leave a 3.61 percentage point remainder between Windows 11 and Windows 10. That remainder was held by Windows 7, which, in December, was still holding onto 3.83% of the market share. Since then, it has lost the vast majority of its share to Windows 11.
It’s worth remembering that these statistics are just measuring how much of a share each Windows operating system has in the Windows ecosystem. As such, that drop in Windows 10 usage doesn’t necessarily imply that all of those people moved to Windows 11; some may have migrated to another operating system.
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Sure enough, if you look at the market share of each OS family, iOS gained 1.45 percentage points since December, while the ‘Unknown’ category (which is likely made up mostly of Linux distros) gained 0.56 percentage points. So there were likely some people who moved from Windows 10 to those OSes since December last year.
