- Windows 11 has gained 2.5% market share in January 2025
- That’s a sizeable uptick that’d usually take two months
- Expect the pace of upgrades to increase as the October 2025 End of Life deadline for Windows 10 comes nearer
Windows 11 gained a large number of converts over the past month, according to a fresh batch of stats from an analytics firm.
Statcounter recorded a big gain for Windows 11 with its January 2025 market share (of all Windows versions worldwide), namely a 2.53% uptick. Windows 11 is now on a share of 36.65% compared to the previous month when it was on 34.12%.
We’ve seen recent gains coming up to 2%, but a 2.5% increase is a fresh high here (an uptick that’d typically happen over the course of two months, as witnessed last year).
Windows 10 dropped from 62.7% to 60.33%, so don’t be under any illusions that the older operating system has been dethroned yet – it’s still the reigning monarch by quite some margin (away from PC gamers, who’ve adopted Windows 11 much more swiftly).
The margin between Windows 11 and Windows 10 is steadily decreasing though, and now stands at a lead of only 23.7% for the latter.
Windows 7 fell by 0.17%, but most of the people migrating to Windows 11 came from Windows 10, as the numbers rising and falling for both operating systems clearly illustrate.
It’s not surprising that more folks are shifting over to Windows 11, however, given that the deadline for Windows 10 End of Life, when updates are no longer delivered to the OS, is October 2025 – which is only eight months away now.
Analysis: An inevitable migration
Given how time flies seemingly faster and faster these days (don’t tell me I’m the only one who has noticed), six months will be gone before you know it, and that Windows 10 support deadline will be right on the horizon like a big, red, flashing warning sign. (One that proclaims: “Upgrade now, or put your PC at risk due to new vulnerabilities in Windows 10 that won’t be patched by security updates”).
Well, outside of defecting to another OS entirely, there is another choice rather than upgrading to Windows 11, and that’s paying for an extra year of support for Windows 10 – it’s the first time consumers have been offered this option, in fact. However, in some ways, that’s just putting off the inevitable.
What we’re starting to see here, I believe, is the first signs of the rush just to get the upgrade done – something I have advised is the best course of action at this point in time. After all, why hang around, especially if you need to sort something in order to make your PC eligible for the upgrade, which might be as simple as flipping an option in the BIOS to enable TPM 2.0.
Windows Latest, which spotted the release of the new stats for Windows versions, observes that businesses – which obviously need much more planning for an upgrade across a fleet of computers – are already making the move to Windows 11. And that activity will represent some big boosts for the newer OS. An IT admin who has over 1,500 PCs in their care told the tech site: “We’ve been testing Windows 11 for months now, and we think it’s the [right] time to move away from Windows 10.”
In theory, there should be even bigger tips in market share towards Windows 11 as 2025 progresses. Indeed, I’d be worried if this wasn’t the case. Given how slow Windows 11 adoption has been overall across its existence, we’re likely to witness some 5% shifts, month-to-month, moving to Microsoft’s newest OS, or even greater.