France recorded the lowest cookie consent rate of any European market in 2025, at just 71%, according to Didomi's 2026 Data Privacy Benchmark. The United States, by contrast, averaged 94.2% acceptance in the same year, per Didomi's companion US benchmark. The 23-point gap is not a difference in culture so much as a difference in law: Europe requires an active opt-in before cookies are set, while most US state privacy laws default to allowing them unless a visitor opts out.
Which countries have the lowest cookie consent rates?
France sits at the bottom of Didomi's European benchmark, with a 71% consent rate across 2025, the lowest of any single market the report names. That figure sits even below Western Europe's regional average of 75.1%, itself the lowest of the five regions Didomi tracks. Eastern Europe leads at 89.3%, followed by the British Isles at 87.3% and Northern Europe at 84.8%.
Figure 1: Cookie consent rate by European region and France, 2025. Source: Didomi 2026 Data Privacy Benchmark, hundreds of millions of consent interactions across European markets.
The regional spread understates how thin actual opt-ins run. Didomi separates "consent rate" (which includes visits where no active choice was made but cookies were still set under a permissive default) from "opt-in rate," a stricter measure counting only visitors who actively clicked accept. Opt-in rates across Europe range from 55.7% in Western Europe to 67.6% in Eastern Europe, meaning close to half of Western European site visits do not end in an active yes even on sites that ultimately count as "consented" under the looser metric.
How does the United States compare to Europe on cookie consent?
The United States averaged a 94.2% national cookie acceptance rate across 2025, with just 5.8% of visitors opting out, according to Didomi's US benchmark of thousands of websites, published in May 2026. That acceptance figure combines active opt-ins with visits where no choice was made, since most US state privacy laws treat a lack of action as implied consent rather than a lack of consent.
Figure 2: US state cookie acceptance rate against the 94.2% national average, 2025. Source: Didomi 2026 US Data Privacy Benchmark.
State-level acceptance still varies, just within a narrower band than Europe's country-level spread. Wyoming recorded the lowest acceptance at 90.6%, followed by Maryland at 91.2% and California at 91.3%, the three states with the most privacy-active populations and, in California's and Maryland's cases, their own state consumer privacy laws layered on top of the federal baseline. Iowa recorded the highest acceptance at 99.2%, with South Dakota close behind at 97.5%. Didomi's report also notes that average acceptance declined in every state compared with the prior year's benchmark, a small but consistent drift toward more visitors saying no even under an opt-out default.
Why do so many Europeans reject cookies?
Germany and France are the two European markets most likely to reject all cookies outright, according to Advance Metrics' 2024 Cookie Behaviour Study, which analyzed more than 1.2 million users on international B2B websites between January and June 2023. Across that sample, only 25.4% of visitors accepted all cookies on the first banner layer, 33.6% ignored or closed the banner without making a choice, and the United States again showed the highest acceptance of any country studied.
Survey data from Germany points to why. A Bitkom Research poll of 1,013 German internet users, conducted in January 2024, found that 76% consider cookie banners annoying and 68% would rather not deal with cookie settings at all. Only 24% said they accept everything simply because they cannot be bothered to review the options, while 33% said they selectively choose which cookies to allow. That is frustration translating into rejection, not indifference translating into acceptance, which is the opposite pattern from what shows up in the US data.
France's own regulator has tracked this shift directly. CNIL's June 2022 study of 1,000 popular French websites found a 59% accept rate and a 39% refusal rate on compliant banners, a period covered in more depth in PrivacyTerms' cookie consent statistics for 2026. Measured against Didomi's broader 71% consent-rate figure for France in 2025, the two studies use different methodologies and cannot be compared point for point, but both place France well below the acceptance levels seen in the US or Eastern Europe.
Figure 3: How banner design shapes the consent outcome. Source: EDPB Cookie Banner Taskforce Report, etracker Consent Benchmark Report 2025.
Does cookie banner design change how many people say yes?
Banner design is the single biggest lever site owners control, and it shows up directly in the numbers. Compliant designs, meaning banners that give reject equal visual weight to accept, lose an average of 60% of visit data compared with non-compliant designs, and run about 14 percentage points lower in consent, according to etracker's Consent Benchmark Report 2025. Consent also varies by as much as 36% for the same site depending on the traffic channel a visitor arrives from, which etracker attributes to different audience intent between, for example, a direct visit and an ad-driven click.
None of that variation shows up if a site's underlying privacy disclosures are unclear in the first place. Regulators reviewing a cookie banner also check whether the linked privacy policy actually explains what each cookie category does, and a mismatch between the two is one of the fastest ways to turn a routine audit into an enforcement case, the pattern behind the fines tracked in PrivacyTerms' ePrivacy cookie fines by country. If your own cookie disclosures have not been reviewed since your banner was last redesigned, you can generate a GDPR-ready privacy policy that plainly states what cookies you set, why, and for how long, the first thing most consent audits check.
Figure 4: Regulatory and enforcement milestones shaping European consent behavior. Source: CNIL, Data Protection Commission Ireland, UK Data (Use and Access) Act 2025.
Consent rates by region and country, 2025
| Region / country | Consent rate (2025) | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Eastern Europe | 89.3% | Didomi 2026 Data Privacy Benchmark |
| British Isles | 87.3% | Didomi 2026 Data Privacy Benchmark |
| Northern Europe | 84.8% | Didomi 2026 Data Privacy Benchmark |
| Southern Europe | 82.5% | Didomi 2026 Data Privacy Benchmark |
| Western Europe | 75.1% | Didomi 2026 Data Privacy Benchmark |
| France | 71% | Didomi 2026 Data Privacy Benchmark |
| United States (national average) | 94.2% | Didomi 2026 US Data Privacy Benchmark |
At least some of that US-Europe gap will likely narrow rather than widen. Google's own decision to keep third-party cookies enabled in Chrome, covered in PrivacyTerms' third-party cookie phase-out statistics, removed one of the pressures that might have pushed US sites toward clearer, more GDPR-like consent flows, so the current 20-plus-point gap between US and European consent rates has little reason to close on its own.
The Bottom Line
Consent rates are not a single global number, they are a function of which law applies and how a banner is built under it. Europe's opt-in regime produces consent rates from 71% in France to 89.3% in Eastern Europe, all of them well below the 94.2% the US posts under an opt-out default, and the gap is regulatory, not cultural: German and French users reject cookies at some of the highest rates in the developed world specifically because their law requires a real choice, and survey data shows that choice is exhausting rather than empowering for most people asked about it directly. For a site operator, the practical lesson from Didomi's and etracker's numbers is the same one: reject-equal-to-accept banner design costs you consent rate in the short term but is the only design that survives a regulator's review, and pairing it with a privacy policy that actually matches the banner's disclosures is what keeps a lower consent rate from turning into a fine.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which country has the lowest cookie consent rate in 2026? France has the lowest cookie consent rate of any European market tracked, at 71% in 2025, according to Didomi's 2026 Data Privacy Benchmark. Western Europe as a whole averages 75.1%, the lowest of five European regions in the same report.
How does the US cookie acceptance rate compare to Europe? The United States averaged a 94.2% cookie acceptance rate nationally in 2025, per Didomi's US benchmark published in May 2026, more than 20 percentage points above France's 71% consent rate and Western Europe's 75.1% regional average. The gap largely traces back to opt-out banner defaults under US state privacy laws versus the opt-in requirement under GDPR.
Why do German and French users reject cookies more than Americans? Under GDPR's opt-in rule, EU users must actively click accept before non-essential cookies are set, and German and French visitors are consistently the most likely in Europe to decline, according to Advance Metrics' 2024 Cookie Behaviour Study of over 1.2 million users. A 2024 Bitkom Research survey of 1,013 German internet users found 76% consider cookie banners annoying, and 24% accept everything only because they cannot be bothered to review the settings.
Does cookie banner design change how many people consent? Yes. Compliant banners with an equally visible reject option lose an average of 60% of visit data compared with non-compliant designs, and consent rates run about 14 percentage points lower on compliant banners, according to etracker's Consent Benchmark Report 2025.
Where the Numbers Come From
- Didomi. (2026). "Average consent rate in Europe, 2026 Data Privacy Benchmark." Regional consent rates 75.1% to 89.3%, France at 71%, opt-in rates 55.7% to 67.6%, no-choice rates 21.7% to 27.4%, based on hundreds of millions of consent interactions across European markets in 2025.
- Didomi. (2026). "What is the average acceptance rate in the United States in 2026?" National average 94.2% acceptance, 5.8% opt-out, state range 90.6% to 99.2%, published 6 May 2026 from 2025 data across thousands of websites.
- Advance Metrics. (2024). "Cookie Behaviour Study, 5 Years After GDPR." Sample of over 1,200,000 users on international B2B websites, data collected January to June 2023.
- Bitkom Research. (2024). "Drei Viertel sind von Cookie-Bannern genervt." Survey of 1,013 German internet users aged 16 and over, conducted January 2024.
- etracker. (2025). "Consent Benchmark Report 2025." Compliant banner designs show an average 60% data loss and a 14 percentage point lower consent rate versus non-compliant designs, with up to 36% variation by traffic channel.
- CNIL. (2022). "Evolution of Practices on the Web Regarding Cookies." 1,000 top French websites monitored January 2021 to August 2022; 59% acceptance, 39% refusal as of June 2022.
Note: All figures verified as of September 2026. Didomi's consent and acceptance rate figures are drawn from its own customer base of live consent management deployments and are refreshed annually; this post's regional and country figures will be revisited when Didomi's next benchmark edition publishes.
