Windows 11 overtakes Windows 10 to become most used desktop OS — 4 years after its controversial debut

It was inevitable, but as of July 2025, Stat Counter is reporting that Windows 11 is now the most dominant version of Windows, surpassing Windows 10 after four years on the market. With Windows 10's end of support fast approaching, Windows 11 has started really gaining momentum in the last few months.

As of today, Stat Counter reports that Windows 11 now has 50.88% of the Windows market, with Windows 10 dropping to 46.2%, giving it a comfortable lead over its predecessor. Windows 11 has been on the market since 2021 but had only amassed less than 10% of the market by 2022.

It's been a slow but steady climb since then, growing from 18% to 28% in 2023, with similar growth to 36% in 2024. It's this year where Windows 11 really started taking off, likely aided by the fact that Microsoft is now pushing Windows 10's end of support hard.

Now that Windows 11 is in use by over 50% of the Windows userbase, that should translate to around 700 million monthly active devices using the platform. Of course, Stat Counter isn't an entirely accurate metric, but it does give us a generalized representation of how the market is moving.

Windows 10 will exit mainstream support on October 14. Just recently, Microsoft announced that it would let Windows 10 users receive a further year of security updates for free in exchange for signing into a Microsoft Account and backing up your PCs settings data to the cloud.

Ultimately however, Microsoft wants as many users to switch to Windows 11 as possible. It will be interesting to see if that additional year of free security updates on Windows 10 flattens the upward trajectory that Windows 11 is enjoying currently. For gamers, Windows 11 recently became the most used Windows OS using Steam.

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it was pushing for 2025 to be a big PC upgrade cycle year, which meant it wasn't going to make any significant changes to Windows 11 from a platform perspective. The company has confirmed that version 25H2, coming this fall, will be based on the same platform release as version 24H2 as to not introduce any compatibility issues.

Windows 11 has been a controversial release of Windows for a number of reasons. It's the first version of Windows in years to up the system requirements, which left a large chunk of the Windows 10 userbase in-eligible for Windows 11.

I understand that a large percentage of the remaining Windows 10 PCs on the market don't meet these requirements, and so those users will have no choice but to buy a new Windows 11 PC if they want to move to Windows 11. It's likely that the oldest Windows 10 PCs are finally starting to show their age, being 10 years old this year.

Windows 11 was also the first version of the OS to require a Microsoft account and an internet connection during the out of box setup phase, which involves downloading and installing the latest updates before you can even use your computer. Users have also been unhappy with the number of ads and bloat that comes pre-loaded on Windows 11.

With that said, much of those ads and bloat were already present on Windows 10 too, and so users upgrading to Windows 11 will likely not notice much of a difference. That's not an excuse, but it's something to keep in mind if you've been cautious about moving away from Windows 10 for that reason.

Windows 11 is available as a free upgrade for Windows 10 PCs that meet the system requirements. Otherwise, Microsoft recommends users go out and buy a new Copilot+ PC, which has access to exclusive AI features that are only available on devices with a dedicated NPU that can output at least 40 TOPS of power.