For most of the internet's history, a country's connection rate was a straightforward function of its wealth. Laying fixed-line infrastructure is expensive, so rich countries got online and poor countries waited.

That relationship has weakened considerably. Across the 185 countries with both figures, internet penetration and GDP per capita now correlate at 0.47 — meaning income explains only about 22% of the variation in who is online.

The global average is 72.6% of the population, with 119 of 186 countries above it. The spread runs from Bahrain at 100% down to Burundi at 8.6%.

Countries far more connected than their income suggests

• Kyrgyz Republic — 92.0% online, GDP per capita $2,420
• Jordan — 95.6% online, $4,618
• Bhutan — 91.3% online, $3,831
• Morocco — 91.2% online, $4,153
• Uzbekistan — 89.5% online, $3,162
• Kiribati — 89.4% online, $2,289

Jordan reaches 95.6% connectivity on an income under $5,000 per person. That is a higher penetration rate than several European countries with more than five times the income.

The mechanism is mobile leapfrogging, and it is the single biggest story in global connectivity over the past fifteen years. Countries that never built out fixed-line telephone networks skipped that step entirely and went to mobile broadband, where the per-user cost of adding a subscriber is a fraction of trenching cable to a house. A network that would have taken decades and enormous capital to build as copper got built in years as cell towers.

Kiribati is the extreme version — a Pacific island state, geographically about as expensive to wire as anywhere on earth, at 89.4% connectivity on one of the smallest incomes in the dataset.

Countries less connected than their income suggests

• Barbados — 70.4% online, GDP per capita $26,545
• Antigua and Barbuda — 72.7% online, $23,542
• St. Kitts and Nevis — 76.9% online, $23,961
• Panama — 72.8% online, $19,161
• St. Lucia — 68.2% online, $14,182
• Israel — 88.2% online, $54,177

The Caribbean cluster is striking. Barbados has a solidly high-income economy and a connection rate roughly matching countries at a tenth of its income. Small island markets are genuinely hard: a few hundred thousand people cannot support much competition between providers, so prices stay high and penetration stalls short of where income alone would put it.

Israel is the odd one out — a technology exporter of global significance sitting at 88.2%, below Morocco. Population composition explains part of it; measurement of "individuals using the internet" across different community structures explains some more.

What the number actually counts

Two caveats that matter for how you read this:

"Internet users" means anyone who used the internet in the last three months. It does not mean daily use, adequate speed, or affordable access. A country can post a high number while most of its users are on expensive, capped, intermittent mobile data.

The four countries reporting 100% — Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — are reporting a rounded ceiling, not literal universal coverage. Treat the very top of this table as "effectively saturated" rather than as a precise ranking.

For the depth-of-access question rather than the reach question, fixed broadband subscriptions is the more honest indicator, and it still tracks income closely.

The bottom of the table

The countries still under 15% — Burundi at 8.6%, Uganda at 8.9%, Chad at 12.6% — are a reminder that leapfrogging is not automatic. It requires spectrum policy, competition, electricity and enough disposable income to buy a handset and data. Where those are missing, mobile does not rescue connectivity on its own.

Explore the full maps for internet users by country and GDP per capita, or test your instincts in the daily map game. Sources: World Bank Open Data, 2025 and 2024.