- Windows 11 now holds 72.78% market share of Windows versions
- According to StatCounter, it has jumped 22% in the last two months.
- Windows 10 fell from 44.68% at the end of last year to 26.45%
It looks like Windows 10 is finally firmly on the sidelines, as Windows 11’s market share has increased significantly since the start of 2026.
According to the latest February 2026 Windows market share figures from StatCounter, Windows 11 reached 72.78%. This was up from 62.41% in January, and OS was only at 50.73% at the end of December 2025.
In short, Windows 11 has gained a mammoth 22% market share in just two months since the start of this year.
Unsurprisingly, the analytics company saw a similar decline for Windows 10, which stood at 44.68% at the end of 2025, and now plummets to 26.45%, a decline of over 18%.
Windows 11’s other gains came at the expense of Windows 7, which fell to almost nothing (finally), falling to 0.6% (it was at 3.8% at the end of 2025).
Analysis: Rising PC prices likely a driving factor
This is a telling change for Windows 11, after serious wobbles for the operating system last year in terms of market share. Of course, we need to keep the usual caveats in mind: This is just a set of numbers from a single source, and the way StatCounter gathers its data does not directly reflect the number of PCs available. (This is based on website visits; any Windows system that is very active online will have a disproportionate influence on the statistics, as I discussed recently).
Yet even accounting for these nuances, something significant has clearly happened over the past two months for Windows 11, with a lag of more than 20%. But why now? I think that might well represent a lot of companies that needed hardware upgrades to get Windows 11 – because their fleets of Windows 10 computers weren’t compatible with the new OS – and they upgraded now, to avoid the bigger price hikes on PCs that may well come into play later this year (triggered by the RAM crisis).
The same is likely true for consumers, who may have pulled the trigger on a new Windows 11 laptop over the past couple of months to get a decent price, rather than being further hit by the mentioned price hikes related to the memory crisis.
Either way, businesses and consumers will have to decide what to do before October 2026, because that’s when Microsoft’s free year of support for Windows 10 expires for the latter (and the price of extended support is increased for businesses). I suspect March will be another big increase in Windows 11 adoption, before things slow down until October.
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