33 Data Breaches Happen Every Day Worldwide in 2026

Worldwide, confirmed data breaches averaged 33.4 a day in 2025, a figure calculated by dividing the 12,195 confirmed breaches in Verizon's 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report by the 365 days in the year. In the United States alone, the Identity Theft Resource Center tracked a record pace of 9.1 data compromises a day, up from 8.6 a day in 2024. Both counts are lagging indicators: many of the breaches counted in a given year actually began months before anyone noticed.

Neither figure is a live counter, and no tracker publishes a true real-time breach feed. What follows is the daily pace worked out from the two most-cited annual datasets, broken down by country, sector, and year, with every number traced back to the report that measured it.

How many data breaches happen per day worldwide?

Verizon's 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report confirmed 12,195 data breaches out of 22,052 security incidents it analyzed globally, drawing on contributors across 139 countries. Divide the confirmed count by the days in the year and the daily pace works out to 33.4 confirmed breaches worldwide. The wider set of all analyzed security incidents, which includes intrusion attempts and events that were never confirmed as an actual data disclosure, works out to a higher 60.4 a day.

The gap between those two daily figures is not a rounding issue. Verizon only counts an incident as a confirmed breach once investigators establish that data was actually accessed or disclosed, so the smaller 33.4-a-day number is the more defensible answer to "how many breaches happen," while 60.4 a day describes the full volume of security events investigators reviewed to reach that count.

Figure 1: Three different daily rates from the same 2025 datasets, depending on what gets counted. Sources: Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report, Identity Theft Resource Center 2025 Annual Data Breach Report.

Takeaway: the honest worldwide answer is a range, 33.4 to 60.4 a day, because "confirmed breach" and "security incident" are measuring two different things.

How many data breaches happen per day in the US?

The Identity Theft Resource Center tracked 3,322 US data compromises in 2025, a record high, which works out to 9.1 a day, according to its Annual Data Breach Report published in January 2026. That is up from an average of 8.6 a day in 2024 and 8.8 a day in 2023, the previous record year, and it caps five straight years of growth from a 2021 average of 5.1 a day.

Figure 2: The daily pace nearly doubled between 2021 and 2025. Source: Identity Theft Resource Center, Annual Data Breach Report 2026 (covering 2025), annual totals divided by 365.

Figure 3: The same climb charted year over year. Source: Identity Theft Resource Center, Annual Data Breach Report 2026.

For the full annual breakdown behind these daily figures, including cause and cost data broken out by year, see data breach statistics for 2026. Takeaway: the US daily pace is not just high, it is accelerating, nearly doubling in five years.

Which industry is breached the most each day?

Financial services logged the most US compromises of any sector tracked by the ITRC in 2025, at 739 for the year, which works out to about 2 a day. Healthcare followed at 534 for the year, roughly 1.5 a day, even though healthcare remains the single most expensive sector per breach at USD 7.42 million on average, per IBM's separate cost research. Professional services logged 478 (1.3 a day), manufacturing 299 (0.8 a day), and education 188 (0.5 a day).

Figure 4: Financial services and healthcare together account for more than one US compromise a day between them. Source: Identity Theft Resource Center, Annual Data Breach Report 2026.

Sector	2025 US compromises (ITRC)	Average per day
Financial services	739	2.0 a day
Healthcare	534	1.5 a day
Professional services	478	1.3 a day
Manufacturing	299	0.8 a day
Education	188	0.5 a day

Takeaway: no single sector is breached even once a day on average, which means the worldwide 33.4-a-day figure is spread across dozens of industries and jurisdictions rather than concentrated in one.

Why is the daily count a lagging indicator, not a live feed?

A compromise counted on any given day in these reports did not necessarily happen that day. IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025 found it took organizations 241 days on average to identify and contain a breach in 2025, the fastest pace in nine years, and breaches that started with stolen credentials took closer to 292 days. A breach that becomes part of the 2025 annual count may have started well into 2024.

Figure 5: Why an annual breach count published in January can include incidents that began the year before. Source: IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025, ITRC Annual Data Breach Report 2026 methodology.

The reporting lag also shows up in how much data reaches the public per day. US victim notices totaled 278,827,933 in 2025, about 763,912 people a day on average, down sharply from roughly 3.75 million a day in 2024, according to the ITRC, because 2025 lacked the handful of billion-record mega-breaches that inflated the prior year. More breaches counted per day, far fewer people notified per breach, is the clearest read of the shift. Site owners handling personal data can close part of that transparency gap on their own side by keeping their disclosures current: a privacy policy generator that reflects current breach-notification commitments and data-handling practices takes less time to update than most organizations spend just detecting an incident.

How does the daily pace compare across trackers and years?

Source	2025 annual total	Average per day	Coverage
Verizon confirmed breaches	12,195	33.4 a day	Global, 139 countries
Verizon all analyzed incidents	22,052	60.4 a day	Global, 139 countries
ITRC data compromises	3,322	9.1 a day	United States only

The three rows are not competing answers to the same question. Verizon's confirmed-breach figure is the closest thing to a global "how many breaches happen a day" number, but it depends entirely on which incidents made it into Verizon's contributor dataset that year. The ITRC's US-only figure has a narrower scope but a clearer trigger: a public notification obligation under US state law. Neither number is complete, and both undercount breaches that never get publicly disclosed at all.

The Bottom Line

There is no single correct answer to how many data breaches happen per day, but 33.4 confirmed breaches worldwide and 9.1 compromises in the US alone are the two most defensible daily figures available for 2025, both derived directly from named, dated primary research rather than a live tracker. The US number is the more useful one for planning purposes because it is climbing fastest, up 79% since 2021, and because the sector breakdown shows the risk concentrated unevenly, with financial services and healthcare together accounting for more than one compromise a day. The 241-day average detection lag behind every one of these figures is the real headline: whatever the daily count says today describes breaches that mostly started months ago, which is exactly why keeping breach-notification language and data-handling disclosures current matters more than trying to watch the number in real time.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many data breaches happen per day worldwide? An average of 33.4 confirmed data breaches happened per day worldwide in 2025, calculated by dividing Verizon's 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report count of 12,195 confirmed breaches by the 365 days in the year. Verizon's broader dataset of 22,052 analyzed security incidents works out to 60.4 a day, though not every incident was confirmed as an actual breach.

How many data breaches happen per day in the United States? About 9.1 data compromises a day in 2025, based on the Identity Theft Resource Center's record annual total of 3,322 compromises, up from roughly 8.6 a day in 2024. The daily pace has nearly doubled since 2021, when it averaged 5.1 a day.

Which industry is breached the most each day? Financial services, at an average of about 2 compromises a day in 2025 (739 for the year), the most of any sector the Identity Theft Resource Center tracked. Healthcare followed at roughly 1.5 a day, even though it remained the single most expensive sector per breach.

Is the daily rate of data breaches increasing or slowing down? Increasing. The US daily pace climbed from 5.1 compromises a day in 2021 to a record 9.1 a day in 2025, a 79 percent rise over five years, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center. Verizon's confirmed-breach count also grew year over year worldwide.

Where the Numbers Come From

1. Verizon. (2025). "2025 Data Breach Investigations Report." 22,052 security incidents analyzed, 12,195 confirmed breaches, contributors across 139 countries. Daily averages in this post are calculated by dividing these annual totals by 365.
2. Identity Theft Resource Center. (2026). "2025 Annual Data Breach Report." 3,322 US data compromises, 278,827,933 victim notices, sector breakdown by compromise count, published January 2026.
3. IBM. (2025). "Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025." 241-day average time to identify and contain a breach, based on 600 breached organizations studied by the Ponemon Institute.
4. Identity Theft Resource Center. (2026). "2025 Annual Data Breach Report, Year-Over-Year Compromise Counts." 1,862 compromises in 2021, 1,802 in 2022, 3,202 in 2023, 3,152 in 2024, used to calculate the year-over-year daily pace trend.

Note: All figures verified as of July 2026. Daily averages throughout this post are calculated from named annual totals, not published as standalone daily statistics by either source, and are refreshed at least twice a year alongside the Verizon and ITRC report cycles.