Media and Publishers sites post the highest cookie consent rate of any tracked industry at 82.7%, while Energy and Utilities sits lowest at 69.6%, according to Didomi's 2026 State of Data Privacy Benchmark, based on hundreds of millions of consent interactions collected across European markets throughout 2025. That 13-point spread across 16 tracked industries shows that a site's category, not just its banner design, shapes how visitors respond to a cookie prompt.
Below is how all 16 industries compare, why consent rate and true opt-in rate tell two different stories, how much geography matters within Europe, and when a business is legally required to show a granular consent banner at all.
Which industries have the highest and lowest cookie consent rates in 2026?
Media and Publishers leads every tracked industry at 82.7%, followed by Home Equipment (80.7%), Beauty and Cosmetics (80.3%), and a near tie between Gaming and Sports and Entertainment and Leisure at 79.3% each, per Didomi's benchmark. Publisher sites benefit from a straightforward value exchange: readers understand that accepting cookies supports free content, and years of programmatic advertising have normalized the prompt itself.
At the other end, Energy and Utilities posts the lowest consent rate of any industry at 69.6%, just behind Public Sector and Charity (70.4%) and Healthcare and Pharma (72.3%). Utility and public-sector visitors tend to be on a task-focused visit, such as paying a bill or checking a service alert, where the cookie prompt reads as an unwelcome interruption rather than an exchange for content.
Figure 1: Cookie consent rate for the eight highest and lowest tracked industries in Europe, 2025. Source: Didomi, 2026 State of Data Privacy Benchmark.
How do all 16 tracked industries compare?
The full spread runs from Media and Publishers at the top to Energy and Utilities at the bottom, with most industries clustered between 72% and 80%. The table below lists every industry Didomi tracked, alongside its opt-in rate, the share of visitors who actively accepted tracking rather than merely resolving the banner one way or another.
| Industry | Consent rate | Opt-in rate |
|---|---|---|
| Media & Publishers | 82.7% | 64.4% |
| Home Equipment | 80.7% | 56.4% |
| Beauty & Cosmetics | 80.3% | 54.6% |
| Gaming & Sports | 79.3% | 60.2% |
| Entertainment & Leisure | 79.3% | 52.9% |
| Food, Beverages & Consumer Staples | 78.3% | 54.7% |
| Fashion & Jewelry | 78.0% | 55.4% |
| Travel & Transport | 75.8% | 56.1% |
| High Tech & Telecom | 75.4% | 49.8% |
| Services | 75.3% | 54.5% |
| Real Estate | 75.1% | 56.5% |
| Automotive | 75.0% | 57.6% |
| Finance & Insurance | 72.8% | 52.8% |
| Healthcare & Pharma | 72.3% | 52.0% |
| Public Sector & Charity | 70.4% | 53.8% |
| Energy & Utilities | 69.6% | 50.6% |
Two patterns stand out. First, consumer categories where people browse for enjoyment, media, gaming, beauty, fashion, consistently outperform categories tied to an obligation, such as paying for utilities or managing insurance. Second, every single industry converts fewer visitors to real opt-in than its headline consent rate suggests, which is the subject of the next section.
What's the difference between a consent rate and a true opt-in rate?
Consent rate counts every visitor who makes an active choice on the banner, accept, reject, or customize, rather than abandoning it unresolved. Opt-in rate counts only visitors who accepted tracking cookies. The two numbers get conflated constantly in casual reporting, but they answer different questions: consent rate measures banner engagement, while opt-in rate measures how many visitors actually agreed to be tracked.
The gap between the two matters for revenue forecasting. Media and Publishers has the highest consent rate at 82.7%, but only 64.4% of visitors opt in, an 18.3-point gap. Some industries show a far wider spread: Entertainment and Leisure converts a 79.3% consent rate into just 52.9% opt-in, a 26.4-point drop, the widest gap of any tracked industry.
Figure 2: Consent rate compared with true opt-in rate for six tracked industries, 2025. Source: Didomi, 2026 State of Data Privacy Benchmark.
Figure 3: The eight industries with the widest gap between consent rate and true opt-in rate, in percentage points. Source: Didomi, 2026 State of Data Privacy Benchmark.
A business relying on the headline consent-rate figure alone, rather than the opt-in figure, risks overestimating how much first-party tracking data it will actually collect. Anyone building a privacy policy that describes cookie-based tracking should describe the opt-in outcome, not the consent-engagement number, since that is the figure that determines how much data is genuinely collected under a lawful basis.
For a broader look at how consent banners perform overall, independent of industry, see Cookie Consent 2026: Accept Rates, Reject Rates and Trends.
Does consent rate vary by region within Europe?
Yes, and the regional spread is almost as wide as the industry spread. Didomi's 2026 benchmark found consent rates ranging from 75.1% in Western Europe, a figure pulled down by France's comparatively low 71% rate, to 89.3% in Eastern Europe. The British Isles (87.3%), Northern Europe (84.8%), and Southern Europe (82.5%) all sit closer to the Eastern European end of the range.
That means an industry's position in the table above is only part of the picture: a Finance and Insurance site operating primarily in Eastern Europe likely sees a meaningfully higher consent rate than the 72.8% cross-regional average suggests, while the same business operating primarily in France likely sees a lower one. Didomi's report notes that European consent rates have stayed broadly consistent across the past four years, even as individual regions and industries shift relative to one another.
When is a cookie consent banner legally required?
Whether a granular, opt-in-first banner is legally required depends on which law applies to a given visitor, not on industry. The EU's ePrivacy rules and GDPR require prior, freely given consent before setting most non-essential cookies, while US state privacy laws like the CCPA generally take an opt-out approach instead.
Figure 4: How the legal basis for a cookie banner differs between EU-style consent regimes and US-style opt-out regimes. Source: GDPR, ePrivacy Directive, and CCPA statutory text, as commonly summarized by regulators.
Regulators enforce the EU side of that split aggressively: cookie-specific fines across Europe have already reached hundreds of millions of euros. See ePrivacy Enforcement: Cookie Fines by Country for the full country-by-country tracker.
What regulatory changes are reshaping consent in 2026?
Consent management is entering a period of active regulatory revision rather than settling into a stable pattern. The European Commission's proposed Digital Omnibus Package, under discussion through 2025 and into 2026, would let sites tailor consent requests more specifically to their own use cases and ecosystems rather than following one uniform banner format, according to Didomi's own commentary on the changes.
Figure 5: Recent milestones affecting how cookie consent is requested and measured in Europe. Source: GDPR statutory text; Didomi, 2026 State of Data Privacy Benchmark.
Third-party cookies themselves are also becoming less central to this picture as browsers phase them out unevenly across markets; see Third-Party Cookie Phase-Out: Adoption Statistics 2026 for how that shift is changing what a consent banner even needs to ask permission for.
The Bottom Line
Industry benchmarks matter because a single cross-industry consent-rate average hides a 13-point spread and, more importantly, hides an even wider gap between how many visitors engage with a banner and how many actually opt in to tracking. A media site and a utility site cannot be held to the same consent-rate expectations, and neither figure should be confused with the opt-in rate that actually determines lawful data collection. Any business documenting its cookie practices should generate a privacy policy that accurately describes what it collects after consent, based on real opt-in behavior rather than an optimistic industry average.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which industry has the highest cookie consent rate? Media and Publishers, at 82.7%, according to Didomi's 2026 State of Data Privacy Benchmark, which tracked consent interactions across 16 industries in Europe throughout 2025. Home Equipment (80.7%) and Beauty and Cosmetics (80.3%) follow closely behind.
Which industry has the lowest cookie consent rate? Energy and Utilities, at 69.6%, the lowest of the 16 industries Didomi tracked in its 2026 benchmark. Public Sector and Charity (70.4%) and Healthcare and Pharma (72.3%) are the next lowest; a 13-point spread separates the highest and lowest industries.
What is the difference between a consent rate and an opt-in rate? Consent rate measures how many visitors make any active choice, accept, reject, or customize, rather than abandoning the banner unresolved. Opt-in rate measures only visitors who accept tracking. Media and Publishers converts an 82.7% consent rate into just 64.4% opt-in, and several industries show gaps above 25 percentage points between the two figures.
Do cookie consent rates vary much within Europe? Yes. Didomi's benchmark found regional consent rates ranging from 75.1% in Western Europe, pulled down by France's 71%, to 89.3% in Eastern Europe, a gap almost as wide as the spread between the highest and lowest individual industries.
Where the Numbers Come From
- Didomi. (2026). "Consent Rate by Industry in Europe: Data Privacy Benchmark 2026." Consent rate and opt-in rate across 16 industries, based on interactions collected throughout 2025.
- Didomi. (2026). "Average Consent Rate in Europe: Data Privacy Benchmark 2026." Regional consent rate breakdown, Western Europe through Eastern Europe.
- Didomi. (2026). "2026 Data Privacy Benchmark Report." Full methodology and Digital Omnibus Package commentary.
Note: All figures verified as of September 2026. Didomi's benchmark draws on hundreds of millions of consent interactions across European markets collected throughout 2025; the underlying methodology does not disclose an exact site or domain count. Industry and regional averages will shift as Didomi publishes later benchmark editions, and this post's figures are refreshed at least twice a year to track the newest edition.
