Government · UK · Ofcom - Online Nation 2025 Report
UK Mobile Internet 2025: 77% of Adult Online Time on Smartphones
Ofcom's Online Nation 2025 report (published 10 December 2025) finds UK adults spend 77% of their online time on smartphones, against around 12% on computers and 11% on tablets, with average daily online time rising to 4 hours 30 minutes. The report draws on Ipsos iris Online Audience Measurement Service data covering 250,000 UK adults plus Ofcom's own adult media-use survey, and confirms that mobile, not desktop, is the primary surface for UK consumers' digital lives in 2025, including retail browsing across the country's largest online stores.
Source published Summarised
Key findings at a glance
- 77% Share of UK adult online time spent on smartphones in 2025, against roughly 12% on computers and 11% on tablets across the wider adult population.
- 4h 30m Average daily online time for UK adults (excluding work), up 10 minutes year-on-year from the 2024 Online Nation dataset.
- 95% Share of UK adults aged 16+ with home internet access, leaving 5% offline overall and 20% of over-75s without a home connection.
- 43.2M Monthly visits to Amazon, the UK's top retail site in May 2025, with eBay (30.7M) and Temu (28.4M) the second and third largest, illustrating that mobile-led browsing is now anchored on a handful of global apps.
- 6h 20m Daily online time for UK 18 to 24 year olds, versus 3h 20m for over-65s, with smartphone share of online time holding above 75% across both genders.
- 41 apps Average number of apps a UK smartphone user opens in a typical month, up by three since 2024, with WhatsApp (90% reach) and YouTube (94%) the most-used individual services.
What the report covers
Ofcom's 2025 Online Nation report is the regulator's annual baseline on how the United Kingdom uses the internet. It is built primarily from the Ipsos iris Online Audience Measurement Service, a passively-tracked panel of around 10,000 UK adults whose browsing and app behaviour is monitored across mobile, computer and tablet devices, and from Ofcom's own Adults' Media Use and Attitudes survey. The 115-page 2025 edition was published on 10 December 2025 with data current to mid-2025, and the panel results have been weighted to be representative of the UK adult online population (roughly 50 million people aged 16 and over).
The single headline finding for any UK business with an online storefront is the device split. Smartphones now account for 77% of all adult time spent online in the UK, with men averaging 75% smartphone share and women 79%. Computers account for the remaining minority share, sitting around 15% of online time for men and 8% for women, with tablets making up the balance. Average daily online time has crept up another 10 minutes year-on-year to 4 hours 30 minutes, and the under-25 segment now sits at 6 hours 20 minutes per day, against 3 hours 20 minutes for over-65s. Smartphone share holds above three-quarters of online time across every adult age band in the dataset.
The retail picture in the report is consistent with the device picture. Amazon retains the top spot at 43.2 million UK monthly visitors in May 2025, with eBay (30.7 million), Temu (28.4 million), Apple (22.7 million), Tesco (19.4 million) and Argos (18.0 million) filling out the top six. Temu has nearly doubled its UK reach since 2023 (from 13.8 million to 28.4 million) and Vinted has grown roughly 53% in the same window. The retail leaders are exactly the kind of mobile-first, app-anchored experiences that the broader 77% smartphone share would predict, and they have taken share from desktop-anchored incumbents during a period in which average UK online time has continued to rise.
What this means for UK marketers
For any UK business publishing a website, the practical read of this report is that mobile-first design is no longer a strategic upgrade, it is the baseline assumption. A site that loads acceptably on a mid-range Android handset over a domestic 4G connection is the floor of what UK adults will tolerate in 2025. The data goes further than the often-cited "more than half" framing: 77% is a very different number to plan against than 51%, because it means desktop optimisation is now a secondary concern for the long tail of pages on most UK retail and lead-generation sites, including FAQ pages, blog posts, product detail pages and checkout. The implication for design briefs is that wireframes should be drawn on a 390 pixel viewport first and reviewed on desktop second, not the other way round.
The retail concentration on a small number of mobile-first marketplaces (Amazon, eBay, Temu, Vinted) is the second-order finding UK ecommerce operators should plan against. Independent ecommerce sites are competing for attention against apps that the average smartphone user has already installed and is using 41 times a month. The strategic response is not to imitate marketplace UX (which depends on scale and selection that an independent retailer cannot match) but to specialise on category authority, returns experience, and proprietary range. The retail mix that does grow in the Ofcom data, like Vinted and SHEIN, succeeds by owning a niche the marketplaces cannot serve cleanly, not by competing head-to-head with Amazon on breadth.
The third implication is for paid search and social. With YouTube reaching 94% of UK adults at 51 minutes per user per day and WhatsApp reaching 90% at 17 minutes, the case for vertical video creative inside a UK paid media plan is now a numerical one rather than an aesthetic preference. The same Ofcom data shows that 18 to 24 year olds are spending 6 hours 20 minutes a day online, almost twice the 65+ figure, which means brands serving younger audiences should expect their performance media costs to skew further toward mobile-first creative formats every year. The flip side is that older audiences, who are the higher-value customer for a meaningful slice of UK SMBs, are also now on smartphones for 70%+ of their online time. There is no UK customer segment left for which desktop-first creative is the right default.
How they got the data
The Online Nation report combines two main data sources. The Ipsos iris Online Audience Measurement Service is a passively-tracked, single-source measurement panel of around 10,000 UK adults aged 18+, each of whom installs metering software on every device they use (smartphone, computer, tablet) so that all of their online activity is captured at the device level rather than self-reported. Iris is the UK industry-standard digital audience measurement service since its 2022 launch, replacing Comscore as the cross-media currency. Visit, time and reach figures in the report are projected from the panel to the UK adult online population using demographic weighting.
The second data source is Ofcom's own Adults' Media Use and Attitudes (AMUA) survey, a 4,000-respondent annual quota survey conducted in person and online, used for the report's self-reported figures on internet access, online concerns, and topic-specific behaviours such as scam exposure and AI search. Iris and AMUA are designed to be complementary: Iris gives objective device-level behaviour, AMUA gives attitudinal context. Where the two disagree (for example, AMUA respondents typically under-report time spent on social media compared with Iris's passive measurement), Ofcom uses the Iris figure as the headline and notes the AMUA gap.
Ofcom's figures should be read as UK-only and time-bound. The May 2025 retail site data, for instance, will not project cleanly to other quarters because retail browsing is seasonally skewed toward Q4. The smartphone share figures are more stable: the 77% device-time number has trended upward roughly one to two percentage points a year since the 2022 launch of Iris and is in line with parallel measurement from Statista and the Office for National Statistics (ONS retail sales internet share series J4MC), which puts online sales at roughly 28% of total UK retail spend through Q3 2025.
Government · UK
Read the full report
From Ofcom - Online Nation 2025 Report · published 10/12/2025