QR codesA 2D matrix barcode that encodes data in a square grid of black and white modulesA single black or white square in the QR grid. The number of modules per side scales with the QR versionThe size of a QR code, numbered 1 (21×21 modules) through 40 (177×177). Higher versions store more data but require more printed space. Read more →, from 21×21 modules for version 1 up to 177×177 for version 40. Read more →. Read more → are mainstream consumer behavior in 2026. About 68% of U.S. adults used a QR code at least once in the past year, 71% say they are genuinely helpful in daily life, and Mordor Intelligence values the global QR code market at $13.04 billion in 2025 on its way to $33.14 billion by 2031.
This guide pulls together verified numbers behind QR adoption, payments, retail use, restaurant scanning, and the security threat landscape. Every figure links to its primary source. Where data is thin, dated, or vendor-only, the prose flags it.
How many people are scanning QR codes?
Adoption is wide and frequency is high. A 2024 TEAM LEWIS survey of 1,000 census-balanced U.S. adults found that 68% had used a QR code at least once in the previous twelve months. A separate Brij survey from 2023 found 94% of respondents were aware of QR codes, 90% of the aware group knew how to scan one, and 66% had scanned a code in the prior month, a tighter window that confirms scanning is recent rather than historical.
Generational skew is sharp. TEAM LEWIS reports 83% of Gen Z and 81% of Millennials used a QR code in the past year, and roughly half of each cohort (49% of Gen Z, 51% of Millennials) scan at least weekly. Older cohorts trail meaningfully but are not absent.
Volume forecasts back up the survey reads. eMarketer projects U.S. smartphone QR scanners to grow from 83.4 million in 2022 to 99.5 million in 2025, reaching 102.6 million in 2026. Globally, the We Are Social / DataReportal Digital 2023 report places monthly QR scanning at 44.6% of internet users aged 16-64.
Sentiment matches behavior. Uniqode’s State of QR Codes 2026 survey, based on 1,000 U.S. consumers (October 2025) and 188 million scans across 796,000 codes, finds 71% say QR codes are helpful in daily life. The same dataset shows 98% of marketers report a positive impact from QR campaigns, drawn from 524 marketers across retail, hospitality, CPG, financial services, healthcare, and technology. Information is the dominant scan intent: 75% of consumers scan QR codes for information, with discounts and payments as secondary motivators. That has practical consequences for landing-page design, covered in the scan-tracking guide.
The market: size, payments, and dominant segments
Mordor Intelligence’s February 2026 industry report values the global QR code market at $13.04 billion in 2025, rising to $15.23 billion in 2026 and $33.14 billion by 2031 at a 16.82% CAGR. The same report breaks the market down by format, region, and end-user application, and the segmentation tells the more interesting story.
| Mordor Intelligence — QR code market | Value |
|---|---|
| Market size 2025 | $13.04 billion |
| Market size 2026 | $15.23 billion |
| Market size 2031 (forecast) | $33.14 billion |
| CAGR 2025-2031 | 16.82% |
| Dynamic QR share of format revenue (2025) | 64.92% |
| Asia-Pacific share of regional revenue (2025) | 37.59% |
| Payments share of end-user revenue (2025) | 45.19% |
Two segmentation takeaways stand out. First, dynamic QR codes already hold 64.92% of format revenue. Static codes still dominate by count, but dynamic codes capture most of the spend because they let publishers repoint destinations, track scans, and run campaigns. The trade-offs between the two are covered in static vs dynamic QR codes.
Second, payments are now the largest single application: 45.19% of QR code market revenue in 2025 flows through payments and transactions. Mordor’s dedicated payments segment alone is valued at $14.7 billion in 2024, projected to reach $38.2 billion by 2030 at roughly 17% CAGR. The structural shift from “QR as marketing” to “QR as payments infrastructure” is now visible in the revenue composition.
Juniper Research adds scale to the user count. The firm projects more than 2.2 billion QR payment users globally in 2025, up from 1.5 billion in 2020 (roughly 29% of all mobile users) and $3 trillion in QR payment value in 2025, up from $2.4 trillion in 2022. Both Juniper figures are press-release-cited rather than directly fetched, but they appear consistently across corroborating sources. For businesses publishing payment links, this means the operational stack (short URLs, tracking parameters, redirect domains) needs to be solid before a code goes to print.
Where QR adoption is densest: Asia leads, with Brazil as the outlier
Country-level data confirms what the regional split suggests. India, Japan, China, Indonesia, and Vietnam are running well ahead of most Western markets, both in raw transaction volume and in everyday consumer behavior. Brazil is the major non-Asian counterpart with comparable density.
India’s UPI system processed over 74 billion transactions worth $1.54 trillion in 2022, with deployed UPI QR codes growing from 152 million in January 2022 to 237.94 million by December 2022, a 65% rise in twelve months. By the end of that year, 54% of UPI transactions by volume and 23% by value were person-to-merchant, the QR-heavy flow that pulls in small shops and street vendors. PwC’s Indian Payments Handbook 2024-2029 documents over 352 million QR codes deployed by offline merchants in FY2023-24, a 34% year-on-year increase, and the BIS Quarterly Review March 2024 places India as the world’s largest fast-payment market with 48.6 billion fast-payment transactions in 2022. Government broadcaster DD News, citing RBI/NPCI data, reports UPI QR codes growing 91.5% to 657.9 million in FY2024-25.
Japan’s data shows QR payments crossing into default behavior. Statista counted around 8.2 billion QR code and barcode payments at physical stores in Japan in 2023. A 2025 Kufu Holdings survey reported by Nippon.com found that 84.2% of respondents use code payments, surpassing the 76.3% who use physical credit cards. The sample skews toward digitally engaged household-budgeting-app users, so it is not nationally representative, but the directional signal is clear. Barkoder, citing Japanese government statistics, reports that Japan’s QR code scans in 2023 reached 26.95 million, a 433% jump over the prior two years.
China’s QR-payment dominance is well-documented but the per-statistic provenance is uneven. The cleanest primary figure is the 2020 China UnionPay annual mobile-payment survey, conducted jointly with 17 commercial banks and payment institutions across about 65,000 respondents: 85% of Chinese mobile-payment users paid by scanning QR codes in 2020, up six percentage points from 2019, with 98% naming mobile payments as their primary channel. The BIS Quarterly Review March 2024 records 16.6 billion fast-payment transactions in China in 2022. The widely repeated “users scan 10-15 QR codes per day” figure circulates only in vendor blogs without a People’s Bank of China primary citation; treat it as anecdotal.
Indonesia’s QRIS, the unified QR-payment standard launched by Bank Indonesia on 17 August 2019, reached 57 million users and 39.3 million merchants by H1 2025, processing 6.05 billion transactions worth IDR 579 trillion, with about 93% of those merchants classified as micro, small, or medium enterprises. Bank Indonesia reported QRIS volume growing 139.45% year-on-year in October 2025, and cross-border QRIS links are live with Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. Worldpay/FIS Global Payments Report data places cash at 77% of point-of-sale spending in Indonesia in 2020 and roughly 38% by 2024, one of the steepest documented cash-displacement trajectories in any major emerging market.
Vietnam is the fastest-growing QR market currently documented. The State Bank of Vietnam reported QR-code transaction value rising 150.67% year-on-year (volume +61.63%) in the first nine months of 2025, with around 337 million QR transactions worth VND 288 trillion in that window. Cross-border QR links to Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia are operational.
Brazil’s Pix is an instant account-to-account system rather than a pure QR scheme, but QR codes are one of its main initiation channels for in-store and merchant flows. The Banco Central do Brasil’s 2024 “O Brasileiro e sua Relação com o Dinheiro” survey found that 76.4% of Brazil’s adult population uses Pix, ahead of debit cards (69.1%) and cash (68.9%). Pix processed roughly 63 billion transactions in 2024 per the BCB SPI Annual Report, a 53% year-on-year increase, and the BIS placed Brazil second in the world for fast-payment per-capita usage at 27 transactions per person per month in 2022. The “68.7 billion transactions” figure that circulates in some industry reports comes from the Brazilian Banking Federation rather than the central bank; the BCB-canonical number sits closer to 63 billion.
UK data is older but useful as a baseline. Back in 2021, Ivanti found 96% of UK respondents had scanned a QR code on their mobile in restaurants or retail in the previous six months, with 58% having scanned in a bar or restaurant. That captures what UK adoption looked like at the start of the post-pandemic period, not a 2026 reading. Newer UK-specific data with comparable methodology is not yet available.
How people actually use QR codes
The most common scenarios are concentrated in a handful of categories. The 2024 TEAM LEWIS survey breaks consumer use down by use case:
- Restaurant menus: 48%
- Mobile app downloads: 47%
- Product information: 43%
- Guest Wi-Fi access: 32%
- Event tickets: 31%
Retail and packaging draw heavy engagement. 1WorldSync’s 2024 consumer benchmark reports that 64% of consumers have scanned a QR code while shopping in-store and 61% have scanned a code on a product after purchasing it. Among frequent online grocery shoppers, 75% scan QR codes during in-store visits. The 1WorldSync URL now redirects to a Syndigo navigation page after acquisition, but the figures appear corroborated by Bitly’s QR statistics blog citing the same underlying study.
GS1 US data on packaging is even more direct about willingness-to-pay. Their 2025 consumer survey found that 79% of consumers are more likely to purchase products with scannable QR codes that provide additional information, 77% say product information is important to a purchase decision, and 62% are willing to spend more for products with detailed information. For brands shipping retail packaging, the implication is that QR codes are not auxiliary decoration. They shape purchase intent and unlock pricing room.
Restaurants are a category of their own. The National Restaurant Association’s Technology Landscape Report 2024 found 57% of limited-service customers said they would access menus via a smartphone QR code, 70% would use an app to place an order, and 65% would use an app to pay. Platform analytics from Menu.Miami across more than 850 restaurants show 60% of all scans come from table-mounted codes, 25% from sticker codes, 10% from digital LED displays, and 5% from promotional materials. Table-side codes are central, not fringe.
The Wi-Fi best practices guide and restaurant menu playbook cover the operational specifics. Both depend on the choices in QR code design best practices.
What scan-rate data actually shows
Adoption surveys ask whether people would scan; behavioral telemetry measures whether they did. Both views matter, but the behavioral data is where the most actionable benchmarks live. The two largest publicly-disclosed first-party QR datasets are Bitly’s and Uniqode’s, and they tell consistent stories about scan-volume direction and per-code intensity.
Regional scan growth (Bitly first-party, 2024-2025)
Bitly’s State of QR Code Scans 2026 report (published 10 March 2026) measures scan volume across their platform globally:
| Region | YoY scan growth | YoY code-creation growth |
|---|---|---|
| Europe | +42% (codes from same period: +53%) | as low as +7% |
| Latin America | +40% (codes from same period: +41%) | as low as +0.5% |
| Asia-Pacific | +21% | not disclosed |
| MENA | +18% | not disclosed |
| Sub-Saharan Africa | +10% | not disclosed |
| North America | +8% | not disclosed |
The signal in that table is the gap between code creation and scan growth. Bitly summarizes it as “in most markets, QR Code creation grew as little as 0.5-7%, while scans jumped 20-50% or more.” Existing codes are being scanned harder, not just multiplying. Behavior is intensifying per asset.
Per-code intensity by industry (Uniqode first-party, 2025)
Uniqode’s State of QR Codes 2026 is built on 188 million scans across 796,000 QR codes in 2025. Average annual scans per QR code, by industry of the deploying customer:
| Industry | Average scans per QR code (2025) |
|---|---|
| Transportation | 1,300 |
| Software | 478 |
| Insurance | 447 |
| Hospitality | 328 |
| Finance | 263 |
| CPG | 253 |
| Business Services | 206 |
| Non-profit | 134 |
| Education | 112 |
| Consumer Services | 105 |
The variance is roughly 12x between the highest and lowest verticals. Transportation (transit signage, ticketing, fleet operations) gets repeat scans from the same person across the day. Consumer Services and Education are typically one-and-done lookups. The implication for ROI math: a QR campaign in transit signage carries fundamentally different unit economics than one on a college brochure, and copying a “good scan rate” benchmark across industries misleads.
Uniqode also reports that platform-wide peak scanning runs 4 PM-9 PM UTC, with 57 million scans in that window in 2025, and December was the highest single month at 17 million scans (70 scans per code on average) — useful seasonality for retail and consumer-product timing.
Where stated intent fits
Surveys of stated intent do useful work even though they are not directly comparable to scan rates. They indicate disposition. The strongest are:
- 71% of U.S. consumers say QR codes are helpful in their daily life (Uniqode, 1,000-respondent survey, October 2025).
- 79% of consumers say they are more likely to purchase products with scannable QR codes that provide additional information; 62% would spend more for products with detailed information (GS1 US, 2025 consumer survey).
- 57% of limited-service restaurant customers say they would access menus via a QR code on a smartphone (NRA Restaurant Technology Landscape Report 2024, n>1,000).
These numbers are not directly comparable to the per-code averages above (different metrics, different populations, different methods). What they do is establish that consumer willingness is broad. The Bitly + Uniqode telemetry then confirms that the willingness is converting into rising volume — not at every QR code, but at enough of them that the overall trajectory is unambiguous.
The cleanest practical takeaway: per-code performance varies dramatically by deployment context, peak engagement is concentrated in narrow time windows, and scan intensity is climbing faster than the number of codes being created. The QR code design best practices guide covers the placement, microcopy, and destination-friction levers that pull a per-code number up.
QR security and trust in 2026
Two trends are running in opposite directions, and both are real. Consumer trust in QR codes is rising. So is the volume of QR-based phishing. The reconciliation is that growing trust is largely justified (most QR traffic is benign) but the threat is concentrated in a small fraction that platforms can detect with the right pre-publication checks.
Uniqode’s 2026 survey shows 58% of U.S. consumers feel confident QR codes are safe to scan, 26% trust them more than a year ago, and 29% remain neutral. TEAM LEWIS’s 2024 survey found 29% of consumers want companies to ensure their QR codes are safe — QR safety is a brand-trust surface, not just an IT problem. Back in 2021, Ivanti found 85% of UK respondents felt secure using QR codes for financial transactions, with 53% unable to distinguish a malicious QR code. That 2021 reading is a baseline rather than a current claim, but the recognition gap remains.
On the threat side, Keepnet Labs’ published telemetry tells a clear story:
| Year | QR payloads as share of all phishing attacks |
|---|---|
| 2021 | 0.8% |
| 2023 | 22% |
| Early 2024 | 10.8% |
| 2025 | 12% |
Volume is climbing inside that share. Keepnet reports that QR-based phishing emails surged from approximately 47,000 in August 2025 to over 249,000 in November 2025, with more than 4.2 million QR phishing threats identified in early 2025 and roughly 89.3% of incidents aimed at credential theft. Barracuda corroborates the trend, detecting more than 500,000 QR-in-PDF phishing emails in a three-month window from mid-June to mid-September 2024.
The harder question is what fraction of all QR traffic is actually malicious. QRLynx published a QR Code URL Security Report 2026 covering 5 million scans, 49,000 tracked dynamic events, 152 days of continuous production data, and 500 creators. Their findings:
- 87.3% of QR destination URLs pass automated security screening on first submission
- 12.7% are flagged for additional review
- 1.6% score Moderate risk or higher
- 0.3% score High risk (50+)
The risk concentration is striking. 6.9% of URL-type QR codes are flagged due to newly registered domains, 69% of those flagged new domains were registered less than 7 days before QR code creation, and 25% were registered the same day. Domain-age filtering catches a meaningful share of the threat before any user sees the code. The findings are scoped to QRLynx’s platform but represent one of the larger first-party datasets publicly available.
The consumer-side guide to QR safety lives at are QR codes safe, which translates these statistics into practical scan-time judgment.
Regulatory landscape: ESPR, Batteries Regulation, GS1 Sunrise, US DSCSA
Four regulatory and industry initiatives shape 2D-barcode-on-product use cases over the next several years. Each is verified against primary sources.
EU Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR). The ESPR entered into force on 18 July 2024. The regulation introduces the Digital Product Passport, which carries product lifecycle and material data through a machine-readable carrier (typically a QR code on the product itself). Specific product-by-product DPP rollout dates live in the separately adopted ESPR Working Plan 2025-30 and should be confirmed against that Working Plan rather than quoted in aggregate.
EU Batteries Regulation (Regulation 2023/1542). The regulation entered into force on 17 August 2023. It mandates a Battery Passport, a data carrier (in practice a QR code) on industrial batteries above 2 kWh, EV batteries, and light-means-of-transport batteries, linking to lifecycle and material composition data. Article 77 specifies the battery-passport effective date for in-scope categories, which should be confirmed against EUR-Lex before any prose cites it.
GS1 Sunrise 2027. This is a global retail-industry transition from 1D UPC barcodes to 2D barcodesAny matrix-style barcode that encodes data along both axes — QR codes, Data Matrix, Aztec, PDF417. Read more → (including QR codes) at point of sale, positioned by GS1 US as a “milestone” rather than a strict deadline. GS1 US explicitly clarifies that 2027 is “not a mandate to implement all 2D capabilities by that date” but a milestone encouraging early adoption with a “crawl-walk-run” approach. The supporting 2025 GS1 US consumer survey produced the 79% / 77% / 62% figures cited in the retail section above.
US Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA). The DSCSA requires every prescription drug package sold in the United States to carry a 2D barcode encoding the National Drug Code, serial number, lot number, and expiration date, with trading partners exchanging transaction information electronically using the GS1 EPCIS standard recommended by FDA. The original 27 November 2023 enhanced-distribution-security deadline was followed by a one-year FDA stabilization period through 27 November 2024 covering all trading partners; small dispensers, defined by FDA as pharmacies whose owning company has 25 or fewer full-time licensed pharmacists or qualified pharmacy technicians measured on 27 November 2024, received additional exemptions through 27 November 2026 to reach full compliance. Important nuance for this page: FDA’s Product Identifiers Q&A names the carrier specifically as a “2D data matrix barcode” (a GS1 DataMatrix, ISO/IEC 16022), not a QR Code (ISO/IEC 18004The international standard that defines the QR code format. First published in 2000 and revised in 2015, it specifies module structure, finder/alignment patternsSmaller square patterns scattered through QR codes from version 2 onward. They help scanners correct for perspective distortion when the code is photographed at an angle, on curved surfaces, or with a wide-angle lens. Read more →, error correctionMathematical redundancy built into every QR code that lets it scan correctly even if part of the matrix is damaged, dirty, smudged, or covered (for example by a logo). Read more →, encoding modesHow a QR code packs its payload — numeric (most efficient for digits), alphanumeric (digits + uppercase + a few symbols), byte (8-bit, used for URLs and Unicode), or Kanji (Japanese characters in Shift JIS). Read more →, and reading procedures. Read more →). The two are distinct ISO standards even though both are square 2D matrix symbologies, and they are not interchangeable in DSCSA workflows. DSCSA still belongs in a discussion of regulated 2D barcodes because it sits in the same regulatory wave as GS1 Sunrise 2027, ESPR, and the Batteries Regulation, all converging on machine-readable product identification at scale.
For brands publishing 2D codes on packaging today, scan support is broadening: POS systems, consumer apps, and regulatory data carriers are converging on the same scannable format. Why 2D codes (QR specifically) work for these applications is covered in QR code error correction explained.
What the data does not tell us yet
A few honest gaps are worth flagging before any team treats QR statistics as a settled topic.
Africa-region data and the long tail of Southeast Asia. Indonesia, Vietnam, Brazil, India, Japan, and China now have credible primary-source-backed numbers in the regional section above. Africa, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Bangladesh remain weakly documented. Country-level adoption figures across these regions are referenced in vendor blogs but rarely tied to central-bank or BIS primary sources with disclosed methodology. Treat aggregator estimates as directional only.
Scan-to-conversion at scale outside vendor data. Aside from RAVEN5’s illustrative funnel and TAGLAB’s vertical heuristics, no large-sample, neutral statistics exist publicly for scan-to-purchase rates. Vendors with first-party telemetry tend to publish best-case examples rather than full distributions. Engagement varies enormously by placement and microcopy, and published averages should be read as benchmarks, not forecasts.
Device and operating-system shares. A single secondary aggregator reports that more than 95% of QR scans happen on mobile and that U.S. iOS scans run roughly 60/40 against Android. No first-party telemetry from Apple, Google, or major QR platforms is publicly available to corroborate. Treat as illustrative.
Healthcare and authentication use cases. Published headline percentages exist, but detailed breakdowns by sub-segment (patient identification, prescription tracking, clinical-trial enrollment) are scarce. Statistics for industrial QR use, ticketing scale, and ID verification are similarly thin.
Restaurant penetration globally. Widely circulated vendor figures claiming most of the world’s restaurants use QR codes appear without a clear denominator or methodology. Verifiable data is limited to country-level surveys and platform-specific samples like Menu.Miami’s.
These gaps are not reasons to discount QR data. They are reasons to read each statistic in context and trace it to its primary source rather than passing it along through aggregators.
Sources
- TEAM LEWIS — Research Roundup: Consumer Perceptions of QR Codes — 2024 survey of 1,000 census-balanced U.S. adults; the strongest U.S. consumer-adoption dataset cited.
- Brij — 2023 QR Code Adoption & Perception Survey Report — U.S. awareness and past-month scanning data.
- Uniqode — The State of QR Codes 2026 — 2025 survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers and 524 marketers, plus 188 million scans across 796,000 codes; per-industry scan averages from the Industry Benchmarks chapter.
- Bitly — State of QR Code Scans 2026 — first-party regional scan growth and code-creation comparisons, 2024-2025, published 10 March 2026.
- U.S. Chamber of Commerce — Marketers from Kellogg to Walmart Optimize QR Codes — eMarketer / Insider Intelligence forecasts for U.S. smartphone QR scanners through 2026.
- Scanova — QR Code Analytics blog — secondary citation for We Are Social / DataReportal Digital 2023 monthly scanning data.
- Mordor Intelligence — QR Codes Market Size & Share Analysis — 2025-2031 market sizing, format split, regional split, and end-user application revenue.
- Juniper Research — QR Code Payments report — global QR payment user forecasts.
- Nasdaq / BusinessWire — Juniper Research QR payments press release — global QR payment value forecasts ($2.4T 2022, >$3T 2025).
- IBEF — UPI is Continuing to Dominate Digital Payments — Worldline India transaction and QR deployment data for 2022.
- PwC India — Indian Payments Handbook 2024-2029 — RBI/NPCI-derived QR deployment data for FY2023-24.
- Statista — Japan in-store QR code payment transaction number — 2023 Japan in-store QR / barcode payment volume.
- Nippon.com — Code Payments Surpass Credit Cards in Japan — Kufu Holdings 2025 survey of 2,559 household-budgeting-app users.
- Barkoder — QR Code Payments in Japan — Japanese government statistics on QR scan growth.
- Ivanti / BusinessWire — QR Codes Lure Brits into a False Sense of Security — 2021 UK consumer survey, used as historical baseline.
- 1WorldSync — Consumer Survey Data on QR Codes and AI in In-Store Shopping — 2024 retail and post-purchase scanning data.
- GS1 US — What is GS1 Sunrise 2027? — 2025 consumer survey on packaging QR information and the Sunrise 2027 milestone framing.
- National Restaurant Association — Restaurant Technology Landscape Report 2024 — limited-service restaurant customer survey data.
- Menu.Miami — QR Code Usage Patterns in Restaurants — platform-level scan distribution across 850+ restaurants.
- TAGLAB — QR Code Engagement Rate Calculator — vertical-level engagement-rate ranges.
- RAVEN5 — QR Codes Drive Engagement, Retail Example — illustrative retail funnel; framed by RAVEN5 as a sample dashboard, not measured data.
- Keepnet Labs — QR Code Phishing Trends — share of phishing using QR payloads (2021-2025) and 2025 volume telemetry.
- Barracuda Networks — Threat Spotlight: Evolving QR Code Phishing Attacks — 2024 QR-in-PDF phishing volume telemetry.
- QRLynx — QR Code URL Security Report 2026 — first-party security analysis of 5M+ scans.
- European Commission — Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation — primary EU source for ESPR and Digital Product Passport.
- European Commission — Batteries and Accumulators — primary EU source for the Batteries Regulation 2023/1542.