The Bahamas online in 2026: internet, mobile and social media use

The national figures here are the latest published: DataReportal’s data runs to October 2025. Most come from its Digital 2026 report on The Bahamas, which came out on 8 November 2025. Others come from the ITU, the 2022 census and URCA, the telecoms regulator. The business figures come from the 2026 edition of this index.

How many people in The Bahamas use the internet

DataReportal counted 383,000 internet users in The Bahamas in October 2025, or 94.8% of the population. That left about 20,900 people offline, 5.2% of the population.

Two official sources point the same way. The ITU, the United Nations body for telecoms, puts internet use at 92.5% of the population in 2024. It counts anyone who went online in the last three months. The 2022 census found that 92.3% of people aged 3 and over had internet access, up from 64.7% in 2010. People aged 65 and over were the least connected, at 80.4%.

The three sources use different methods and years. Still, they agree within about three percentage points. So “more than nine in ten people in The Bahamas use the internet” holds under any of them.

The national figures in one table

Mobile phones and broadband in The Bahamas

GSMA Intelligence, the research arm of the mobile industry’s trade body, counted 390,000 mobile connections in October 2025, equal to 96.7% of the population. Some of those connections may carry only calls and texts. So it isn’t a count of people using mobile internet.

URCA’s own count for 2024 was 387,960 mobile phone subscribers, or 95.56 for every 100 people. That was 2.92% fewer than in 2023. Fixed broadband (a home or office internet line) grew 6.58% to 101,396 subscribers, or 24.98 per 100 people.

Broadband is counted by subscription, and one home line can serve a whole house. In the 2022 census, home was the main place people went online (82.1%), with cellphones next (12.4%).

URCA published no market data for 2025. Its 2025 annual report, released in April 2026, says complete data “was not received from all relevant licensees”. It held back figures that could be “incomplete, non-comparable, or potentially misleading”. So the 2024 figures are the latest official ones.

How many people in The Bahamas use social media

DataReportal reports 273,000 “social media user identities” in The Bahamas in October 2025, equal to 67.5% of the population. It is easy to read as the number of Bahamians on social media. DataReportal itself advises caution with it.

DataReportal’s Bahamas report explains why. User identities “may not represent unique individuals”, since one person can hold more than one account. Its method also “may sometimes only factor users of the social media platform that has the largest active audience in the respective country”.

In the Bahamas report, the figure matches TikTok’s adult advertising audience line for line: 273,000 users aged 18 and over, 86.4% of adults and 71.2% of internet users. So the safest reading is one platform’s audience of adults. It leaves out everyone under 18, and it counts accounts.

To quote it accurately, write “273,000 social media user identities, according to DataReportal”. Avoid turning it into a share of Bahamians.

Why Facebook audience figures are not a count of people

Meta’s advertising tools showed 234,000 Facebook users in The Bahamas in late 2025. DataReportal also reports, from Meta’s data, that 73.8% of adults aged 18 and over used Facebook at the end of 2025.

Meta warns how to read these numbers: “Estimated audience size is not a proxy for monthly or daily active users, or for engagement.” It adds that the estimates may differ with “how many temporary visitors are in a particular geographic location at a given time”.

The figures also move a great deal. NapoleonCat, a social media analytics company, read Meta’s tools in August 2026. It reported 411,600 Facebook users in The Bahamas, which it called “95.9% of its entire population”. That is far above the 234,000 of late 2025, from the same kind of source less than a year apart. Platforms also revise these figures. DataReportal noted a major Meta revision in late 2025 and warns that its figures may not compare with earlier ones.

Most adults in The Bahamas can be reached on at least one large platform.

Is The Bahamas less online than the United States?

About the same. DataReportal measured both countries with the same method in the same month: 94.8% in The Bahamas and 93.1% in the United States in October 2025, with 324 million US users. The ITU’s 2024 figures put the US slightly ahead, at 94.7% against 92.5%. On either measure the two countries are within about two percentage points.

Some owners hear that selling online “works in the States” and doubt it works here. On internet use, people in The Bahamas are about as online as people in the United States.

What about WhatsApp in The Bahamas?

URCA, the communications regulator, measured WhatsApp use in a survey across The Bahamas from 14 July to 2 August 2021. Of the people asked, 93% said they had used WhatsApp to call or send messages in the past month, and only 3% used no internet calling or messaging app. The survey counts use among the people it asked in 2021, not the number of WhatsApp users. DataReportal’s Bahamas report and the census give no WhatsApp figure. WhatsApp shares quoted on vendor websites don’t show how they were measured, so they aren’t safe to cite.

The index can speak to the business side. It records whether a business shows a WhatsApp number in public sources, and the figure below includes that door.

Where Bahamian businesses are, by comparison

The 2026 edition of the index checked every business it could confirm was trading in eight industries. It looked for four public doors: a Google Business Profile, a website, a Facebook Page and WhatsApp. A business can have several doors open, so the four shares overlap.

About four businesses in five had at least one door found open in public sources, and a Google listing was the most common door. The other 21.2% had no door found open. A door that was not found may still exist, for example a WhatsApp number shared only by word of mouth.

The figures for people and for businesses describe different groups, measured at different times. Set them side by side, but don’t subtract one from the other. Read together, they show that nearly everyone a business might serve is online. Each door a business opens gives those customers one more place to find it. The Four Digital Doors guide explains why that matters for a Bahamian business, and which doors each trade is expected to have open.

How to cite these figures

• National figures: “DataReportal, Digital 2026: The Bahamas (Kepios), data to October 2025, published 8 November 2025.”
• Index figures: use the Cite this as line under Sources.

Three habits keep a quote safe. Give the data date beside each number. DataReportal’s report is named for 2026, but its data runs to October 2025. Write “user identities” for the social media figure. And use DataReportal’s own change figures, because it asks readers not to work out growth by comparing its reports from different years.