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What happens after the scan?
16 years of first-party platform data — one of the longest-running QR datasets in the market — told as a scrolling data story. Every number on this page comes from the report's verified public data extracts.
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From 5,813 scans to mainstream infrastructure
QR codes did not arrive with the pandemic, and they did not leave with it. The 17-year scan record tells a longer, steadier story.
Dynamic QR scans per year, 2009–2025
Source: QRStuff platform scan logs (aggregate hits). Download data (JSON)
2009–2013: the slow build
QRStuff's scan log starts with 5,813 dynamic scans in 2009. Four years later, annual volume passed 11 million — early adopters were already using QR at scale, a decade before restaurant menus made it famous.
2014–2017: the plateau years
The mid-2010s flattened out at 11–14 million scans a year. This is the era pundits declared QR dead. The data says: dormant, not dead.
2018–2021: native camera support changes everything
Scans jumped to 31.1M in 2018 and kept climbing through the pandemic to 66.4M in 2021 — phones could finally scan without an app, and contactless became a necessity.
2024: the peak
100.5M2024 set the all-time record: 100,470,117 dynamic scans in a single year.
2025: maturity, not collapse
Scans normalised to 88.2M in 2025 — down 12.2% from the peak, but still 2.7× the 2018–19 pre-pandemic average.
16.1% CAGRsince 2018. The long arc reads as established infrastructure, not a 2020 fad. Q4 2025 was the only quarter to grow year over year (+10.6%) — a stabilisation signal.
New code creation also normalised: 2.11M codes (2024) → 1.40M (2025, −33.4%), excluding Visualead-linked accounts.
Mine this data — yearly & quarterly scan tables
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Downloads: yearly scans (JSON) · quarterly 2024–25 (JSON) · code creation (JSON)
Types, trackability, and geography waves
Scan volume is only half the story. QRStuff's creation log (2009–2025) shows how payloads diversified, dynamic tracking became the default, and scan geography spread beyond North America.
QR code type mix by creation year (streamgraph)
Source: qrcode table by creation year, ex-Visualead (`data_type_mix_by_year.json`). Types below 0.5% folded into Other. Download data (JSON)
Beyond the website URL
Website URLs still lead every year, but their share of new codes has fallen as WiFi, vCard, plain text, and PDF payloads grew. QR moved from "link to a homepage" toward everyday utility — menus, credentials, forms, and files.
Each band is a published type (≥0.5% of that year or ≥100 codes). Long tail types are folded into Other in the extract only (~4% in 2025) — not re-collapsed in this chart.
Geography adoption waves
Full-year scan extracts at 2012, 2016, 2020, 2022, and 2025 show the US leading throughout — but India, Indonesia, and broader Asia-Pacific share expand in the 2020s panels, echoing the 2024→2025 rank-change story in the geography act.
Top eight of fifteen published countries per milestone year; k-anonymity ≥100 scans.
Mine this data — type mix, geography waves & dynamic/static split
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Downloads: type mix by year (JSON) · dynamic vs static (JSON) · geo 2012 (JSON) · geo 2016 (JSON) · geo 2020 (JSON) · geo 2022 (JSON) · geo 2025 (JSON)
101.9 million geolocated scans, 239 country codes
Full-year 2025 scan geography. Hover or tap a country for exact figures; the table below has the full top 30.
Dynamic QR scans by country, full-year 2025
Source: full-year 2025 geolocated scan extract (top 30 shown; smaller countries suppressed for privacy). Download data (JSON)
The 2025 scan map
101,880,546 geolocated dynamic scans across 239 country codes. The top 10 countries account for 72.6% of all scans — global reach, concentrated weight.
The rise of India and Indonesia
The 2025 surprise: India (7.0%) and Indonesia (5.7%) rank #2 and #3 — ahead of Germany, the UK, and China. On comparable full-year data, India's scans grew 40% year over year (from #3 and 4.8% in 2024), while Indonesia held a top-3 slot both years — education publishing and mobile-first commerce are pulling the QR map east.
Who moved, 2024 → 2025
Comparing two full-year extracts (same method, same bi-weekly windows): India took the #2 slot from Indonesia on a 40% scan jump, Germany climbed #6 → #4, China slipped to #6, and Turkey fell out of the top 10 entirely (#10 → #24). The US share eased from 40.1% to 36.3%. Hover any line for both years' exact counts.
Full-year 2024 (107.1M geolocated scans) vs full-year 2025 (101.9M), both via bi-weekly chunked extracts.
Regions: a three-block world
North America 38.7%, Asia-Pacific 28.2%, Europe 21.0% — then the Middle East & North Africa at 7.1%, where Oman alone (2.2%, rank #10) reflects a national education deployment.
Region labels are editorial macro-regions; see methodology.
Mine this data — top 30 countries & regions
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Downloads: countries 2025 (JSON) · regions 2025 (JSON) · countries 2024 (JSON) · regions 2024 (JSON)
QR codes almost never point at a homepage
Most industry reports stop at scan counts. We classified 63,691 external destinations from a Q1 2025 sample to answer the question that actually matters: where do QR codes send people?
Where 63,691 external QR destinations point
Source: Q1 2025 100k creation sample, deterministic classifier (QA signed off). Download data (JSON)
Picture 100 freshly created QR codes
Each square is 1% of the 63,691 external destinations in the sample. The common assumption: QR codes are a shortcut to a company's website — the front door.
The front door is almost never the destination
82.7%of external QR destinations are deep pages — a specific URL with a meaningful path. Only 11.8% point at a homepage. QR is a bridge from a physical surface to a specific experience, not generic web entry.
What those experiences are
Beyond owned websites (65.8%), the biggest destination categories are social profiles (9.6%), cloud documents (8.7%), and forms & surveys (5.9%) — workflows, not brochures.
The volume map
Size every destination type by its actual volume across the four 2025 sample months — 26,808 classified external destinations — and the deep-page block dwarfs everything else. Inside it, documents & files, video & media, forms, and maps are the biggest named use cases. Hover any box for exact counts.
Counts are exact within the combined Jan/Apr/Jul/Oct 10k samples — sample volumes, not platform-wide totals.
High-traffic codes behave differently
Weight the same analysis by scans instead of codes and the picture shifts: among the top 1,000 January 2025 links, homepages nearly triple to 31.5% and deep pages ease to 61.3%. Mature, high-volume programmes favour simpler entry points.
The rising use case: lead capture
Across four 2025 sample months, forms & lead capture destinations rose steadily from 7.5% (Jan) to 11.0% (Oct) of deep pages — the only theme with a consistent upward trend.
Real estate tours spiked to 12.3% in January only — a segment discovery, not a year-round trend.
Mine this data — page shapes, categories, scan-weighted view, use cases
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Downloads: page shape (JSON) · categories (JSON) · scan-weighted (JSON) · use cases (JSON) · volume treemap (JSON)
QR codes are living longer
Cohort survival analysis on registered-account dynamic codes, 2019–2024 — plus a clustering of 112,621 codes into four lifecycle archetypes.
Share of ever-scanned codes still active, by month since creation
Source: January creation cohorts, registered accounts, observed through Dec 2025 (no extrapolation). Download data (JSON)
2019: the disposable era
Of the January 2019 cohort's ever-scanned codes, activity decayed fast — a half-life of just 5 months. A QR code was a campaign asset: print, scan, discard.
2020–2022: volatile pandemic cohorts
2020 codes died fastest (half-life 2 months — emergency menus and signage). The 2022 curve is distorted by one 98k bulk-PDF batch; its honest URL-only half-life is 16 months.
2024: durable infrastructure
5 → 13 monthsThe half-life of a registered user's dynamic code rose from 5 months (2019 cohort) to 13 months (2024). At month 22, 12.6% of 2024 codes were still being scanned — roughly 1.5× any 2019–2022 cohort at the same age.
Four lives of a QR code
Clustering 112,621 codes by the shape of their first year reveals four archetypes: the one-month wonder, the evergreen workhorse, and two campaign-burst patterns peaking in months 1 and 2.
The evergreen 30% earns 74% of scans
30.6% → 74.0%Evergreen workhorses are 30.6% of ever-scanned codes but earn 74% of all first-year scans. One-month wonders are the majority (54.2%) yet earn just 11.6%.
Benchmarks: the median ever-scanned code earns 5 first-year scans; the top 10% earn 98+; only 48.4% of created codes are scanned at all in year one.
Mine this data — survival curves, half-lives, archetypes, benchmarks
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Downloads: survival curves (JSON) · half-life summary (JSON) · archetypes (JSON) · benchmarks (JSON)
Everyone scans. Almost nobody measures.
The gap between QR activity and QR measurement is the report's most actionable finding for marketers.
Campaign tracking & the two-population contrast
Sources: Q1 2025 100k creation sample; top 1,000 January 2025 links; cohort half-life summaries. Download data (JSON)
The 3.9% problem
3.9%Only 3.9% of external QR destinations carry visible campaign tracking parameters (UTM, gclid, fbclid...) at creation. The other 96.1% generate scans that no analytics platform can attribute.
Winners measure
3.2× liftAmong the top 1,000 most-scanned January 2025 links, tracking jumps to 12.5%. The codes marketers bother to instrument are the ones that earn the most scans — measurement and performance travel together.
Two populations, two outcomes
Split the platform into registered accounts versus everyone (including anonymous/guest codes) and the 2024-cohort half-life contrast is stark: 13 months vs 6 months. Codes made by accountable owners live twice as long.
Platform-wide scope includes the anonymous/guest creation bucket; registered scope excludes it. Both exclude Visualead-linked and internal accounts.
Mine this data — campaign tracking & half-life contrast
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Downloads: creation tracking (JSON) · scan-weighted tracking (JSON) · platform-wide half-life (JSON)
Eleven organisations that run on scans
From a 3.7-million-code restaurant estate to a national curriculum. All platform figures verified on a full-year 2025 basis. Read the full case-study collection on the report hub.
Denny's
~3.76M QR codes generated all-time — the largest estate on the platform; ~1.3M scans in 2025CZEview
5.4M scans in 2025 from fewer than 150 in-box codes — one code alone passed 11.7M lifetime scansIntan Pariwara
~4M scans in 2025 across ~19,300 textbook codes — the phygital book at national scaleTai Kwun
2.1M+ scans in 2025, active 365 days — a fully QR-native visitor journeyMinistry of Education, Oman
1.5M+ scans in 2025 from fewer than 2,700 codes embedded in national textbooksJEM Global
900K+ scans in 2025 from fewer than 150 on-pack routing codesValetTickets.com
~1.08M codes created since 2012, none deleted — QR as a manufacturing inputBAT Nigeria
~532K operational codes wiring field reps, retailers, and enterprise systemsPagemaker
~457K codes over 10+ years — generation as a production-line capabilityGutenberg Print Pack
~379K codes for variable-data packaging runs — a QR code factoryCoca-Cola
~285K codes across the system for retail execution & planogram deliveryAll platform data (code counts, scan volumes, destinations) is first-party QRStuff measurement; company context comes from cited public sources. Business outcomes are not measured by QRStuff. Browse all case studies →
Built to be checked
Every figure on this page is generated from the report's verified public data extracts — the same files you can download from each chart.
Data sources
- Dynamic scan logs, 2009–2025 (aggregate hits)
- Full-year 2025 geolocated scan extract (101.9M scans)
- Q1 2025 destination sample (100k codes; 63,691 external)
- January creation cohorts 2019–2024 (survival analysis)
- 2024 H1 lifecycle cohort (112,621 ever-scanned codes)
What's excluded
- Visualead-linked accounts (code-creation & destination cohorts)
- Internal/test accounts
- Raw URLs, customer names, device IDs — aggregates only
- Countries below privacy suppression thresholds
Honest caveats
- Bot/prefetch filtering: first-generation methodology (≈3% bot traffic in a one-day diagnostic), approved 2026-06-12
- Destination stats are creation-window samples, not a census
- Lifecycle analysis covers registered accounts; the platform-wide contrast is published alongside it
- Platform data describes QRStuff usage, not the entire QR market
Cite this report
QRStuff (2026). The State of QR Codes Report 2026: What Happens After the Scan. QR Code Generator Inc. https://www.qrstuff.com/scan-report/
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