Windows 11’s Market Share Is Dropping Again, With Windows 10 Gaining

Windows 11 is once again losing market share after a solid few months when it seemed to be gaining ground. And which operating system is Windows 11 losing out to? Yep, you guessed it: Windows 10. Which, given that we’re now in 2025, the same year Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10, is rather bizarre.

Windows 11 Is Losing Market Share… Again

After finally gaining some ground on Windows 10 through the middle part of 2024, Windows 11 is once again losing market share. This is according to StatCounter, which tracks how many people are actively using each operating system.

As you can see in the chart below, the last two months of 2024 showed usage of Windows 11 dropping, with Windows 10 appearing to reclaim some of the users it had previously lost.

Windows 11’s market share peaked in October 2024, when 35.58 percent of people using Windows were using Windows 11. However, this dropped to 34.94 percent in November, and then dropped again to 34.12 percent in December. In that same period, Windows 10 rose from 60.95 percent in October to 62.7 percent in December.

From April to October, things seemed to be heading in the right direction, with Windows 11 consistently gaining market share over its older brother. But the last two months of the year have shown a reversal of that trend, with Windows 10 once again on the rise.

In September, Steam announced that Windows 11 is now the most popular operating system on the platform. Which was, and still is, good news for Microsoft and its efforts to get us all to upgrade to Windows 11 or buy new hardware that supports it. However, these latest stats are clearly bad news for Microsoft.

The End of Windows 10 Is Fast Approaching

As a reminder, Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10 in October 2025. And now that it’s January 2025, that means most Windows 10 users have less than nine months to take action.

We assume that most people who can upgrade their PCs from Windows 10 to Windows 11 without needing to use a workaround will have done so already. So the vast majority of those people still using Windows 10 will need to either use Windows 10 without official support, pay for an extra year of support for Windows 10, install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware, or buy a new PC running Windows 11.

Which all means that 2025 could be an interesting year for Microsoft, Windows 10 and 11, and PC users around the world.