35% of UK Adults Help Someone Else Get Online

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology published Informal and proxy support for digital inclusion on 29 September 2026. The research, carried out by The Social Agency, looks at the help people get online from family, friends and neighbours rather than from formal schemes. For many people facing digital exclusion, that informal help is their main, and sometimes only, route online. The report separates three modes of help: teaching ("doing with"), proxy support, where the helper does the task for the other person ("doing for"), and advisory support, where the helper checks something the person has done themselves. It works from the definition in the government's Digital Inclusion Action Plan: everyone having the access, skills, support and confidence to take part in modern digital society.

The scale is larger than most brands assume. Around 35% of UK adults helped another adult use or access the internet in the past 12 months. Most help goes to family (78% of helpers have helped a relative, and mothers are the people most often supported), and the people being helped have a median age of 70. Money is where help is most often needed: 65% of helpers have assisted with at least one financial task, whether buying online (38%), online banking (36%) or paying a bill (29%). Buying products or services online is also the single task helpers most often help with (14%), just ahead of online banking (13%).

The report's sharpest finding concerns security. Official ways to act for someone online are limited, hard to navigate or little known, so people improvise: 31% of helpers have used someone else's login details to manage their banking or financial accounts, while only 7% have been formally added to that person's bank account as a third party. The same gap shows up in healthcare, where 26% have used another person's login and 8% have been added to their NHS App. It sits alongside our earlier report on digital ID adoption in the UK, which found 77% of adults have used a digital identity service: proving who you are online is now routine, but proving you are allowed to act for someone else is not.

The Social Agency ran a four-stage, mixed-methods study for DSIT. It began with 24 interviews with expert stakeholders (academics, national and local government, private companies and voluntary organisations) and a rapid evidence assessment. In-person qualitative interviews followed with 36 people receiving informal support and 36 people providing it, across all four UK nations, including observation of real support sessions. The quantitative core is a 15-minute online panel survey of 2,261 UK adults who had helped another adult to use or access the internet in the previous 12 months, outside paid work or formal volunteering, carried out between 12 and 20 January 2026. A final co-creation workshop with stakeholders and supporters tested policy ideas.

The 35% prevalence figure comes from a separate nationally representative UK online omnibus of 2,090 adults (29 to 31 August 2025), which was also used to set quotas for the main survey by nation (with boosts for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), age, gender, ethnicity, socio-economic group and English region. Results were weighted to the same profile, and the report gives a sampling tolerance of around plus or minus 2 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. Two caveats matter when quoting it. People receiving help were not surveyed directly, so figures about their age, barriers and motivation are as reported by their helpers. And where a helper supports several people, answers refer to the person they help most.