Most QR code statistics on the web are copies of copies. A vendor survey from 2019 becomes “studies show” in a blog, then a fact in a slide deck, then a number nobody can trace. This page lists only figures we can follow to a source, says who produced each one, and gives the date we checked. All figures were retrieved on 7 September 2026.
Payments
QR payments are where the biggest and best-sourced numbers live, because central banks count them.
India. The Reserve Bank of India’s data, reported by Business Standard in May 2025, shows 657.9 million UPI QR codes deployed at merchants by the end of the 2024 to 2025 financial year, a rise of 91.5% on the year before. Over the same period debit card numbers grew 2.7% to 991 million. By August 2025 UPI as a whole was handling about 20 billion transactions a month (Wikipedia). Most of those start with a QR code at a shop counter.
China. A 2019 study by CGAP, a World Bank-hosted research group, found Alipay and WeChat Pay controlled about 93% of the mobile payment market, and that the “vast majority” of the roughly 5.5 trillion US dollars of annual mobile payments ran through QR codes on those two apps (CGAP). The figure is old but well sourced; treat the market shares as a snapshot from 2019.
Brazil. Pix, the central bank’s instant payment system launched in November 2020, accounted for 47% of financial transactions in Brazil by the end of 2024 and had over 175 million users by May 2025 (Wikipedia). Pix payments can be started from a static or dynamic QR code.
- UPI QR codes, FY24 343 M
- UPI QR codes, FY25 658 M
- Debit cards, FY25 991 M
The FY24 bar is derived: 657.9 million divided by 1.915 is about 343.6 million. The source gives only the FY25 total and the growth rate.
Security
These figures come from security vendors, whose business benefits from alarm. They are still the only counts that exist.
- Microsoft’s threat intelligence, as cited by Keepnet Labs, recorded QR-based phishing attempts rising from 7.6 million in January 2026 to 18.7 million in March 2026, an increase of about 146%, with roughly 70% of them delivered as PDF attachments.
- The same Keepnet page (updated 28 August 2026) says QR codes appeared in about 12% of phishing attacks in 2025.
The FBI and FTC advisories on QR scams give no counts at all, which is itself informative. Our security article explains the attacks behind the numbers.
Consumer behaviour
GS1 US, the not-for-profit body that runs barcode standards in the United States, surveyed consumers in 2025 and reported that 79% were more likely to buy a product with a QR code giving more information, and 62% were willing to pay more for detailed product information (GS1 US). GS1 is promoting a move to 2D barcodes, so the survey serves its case. It is an industry-body figure, not an independent one.
Records and one-offs
Some numbers are simply facts about a single event:
- Coinbase’s Super Bowl advert in February 2022 drew more than 20 million hits in a minute (CNN).
- The largest QR code recognised by Guinness covered about 29,000 square metres of cornfield in Alberta, 2012 (CBC).
- 3,029 people formed a scannable human QR code in Jinhua, China, in 2019 (Guinness World Records).
- NaviLens says its Accessible QR marker reads at up to 12 times the distance of a plain code (NaviLens). Vendor figure.
More of these are in the gallery.
Numbers we could not source
You will see these often. We could not trace any of them to a primary source and so do not repeat them as facts:
- A worldwide count of QR scans per year.
- The share of restaurants using QR menus.
- The percentage of smartphone users who “have scanned a QR code in the last month”.
- Any global “QR code market size” in dollars.
If you find a primary source for one of these, tell us and we will add it.
How to read QR statistics
- Who counted? A regulator or central bank counts everything in its system. A vendor counts its own customers. A survey counts what people say they do.
- What was counted? Codes deployed, scans made, or people who say they scanned? These differ by orders of magnitude.
- When? QR payment numbers double in a year or two in fast-growing markets. A 2019 share is history by 2026.
- Is it a percentage of something you know the size of? “12% of phishing” needs a phishing total to mean anything.
- Does the source gain from the number? Security vendors sell fear; generator platforms sell growth; standards bodies sell adoption. That does not make the number wrong, but it tells you which way any rounding went.
Note
We do not publish first-party numbers about QR Studio users. The app sends nothing about scans or codes to a server, so there is nothing to count, and we would rather say that than invent a figure.
▸Why static scans cannot be counted
A static QR code contains the destination itself. Your phone reads it and goes straight there; nobody in between sees the scan. Only a dynamic code, which passes through a redirect server, can be counted, and only by the company running that server. So every “scans per year” figure is a vendor’s own traffic scaled up by a guess about everyone else. Payment systems are different: every payment is a transaction the operator must record, which is why India and Brazil can publish exact numbers.
Try it yourself
The capacity figures on this site are computed, not quoted. Open the capacity calculator and confirm that version 40 at level L holds 2,953 bytes, then compare with any capacity claim you read elsewhere.