The share of households in Romania that had home internet access reached 88.6% of the total this year, up 2.9 percentage points compared to 2023, according to data published on Monday by the National Institute of Statistics (INS).

According to the official statistics, the proportion of people aged 16-74 who have ever used the internet was 94.7%, up 2.2 percentage points from the previous year.

The INS data shows that, 92.5% of households in urban areas are connected to the Internet, 9.3 percentage points more than the 83.2% share of households in rural areas. In terms of territorial profile, Internet connection was more widespread among households in the Bucharest-Ilfov region (95.2% of households have access to the Internet at home), followed by the West (92%) and North-West (90.2%) regions.

The lowest share of households connected to the Internet are recorded in the North-East (85.1%) and South-East (85.2%) regions. The number of persons in the household is an important influencing factor in terms of internet connectivity. Compared to the year 2023, the share of households with Internet access increased among one-person households by 4.8 percentage points, among two-person households by 3.9 percentage points and among households with 3 or more persons by 0.6 percentage points.

Of all persons aged 16-74 years, the share of persons who use or have ever used the internet was 94.7%, up by 2.2 percentage points from 2023, of whom 96.4% have used the internet in the last 3 months. By internet use frequency, of those aged 16-74 who used the internet in the last 3 months, 74% used the internet several times a day and 19.5% used the internet once a day almost every day.

By development regions, the highest share of 16-74 years of age who use or have ever used the Internet was 97.7% in the Bucharest-Ilfov region, followed by the North-West region with 96.6% and the West region with 96.5%. At the opposite end was the South-East region with 92.2%.

The share of people using the internet decrease with age. Thus, in the year 2024, the share of individuals who use or have ever used the Internet in the 16-34 age group was 98.9%, while for the 55-74 age group it reached 86.2%.

In 2023, the share of people in Romania aged 16-74 who had used the internet in the last 12 months was 91.6%, 0.8 percentage points below the EU average.

In 2023, there was a 2.7 percentage point increase in internet use over the last 12 months in Romania, among people aged 16-74.