The State of Paywalls 2026
Based on 21,394 real attempts across 230 publications, RemovePaywall returned a readable article 77% of the time. Here's what the data says about which paywalls are hardest, which are readable, and how free tools actually fare in 2026.
📊 New: the Paywall Index, September 2026 — which news sites are hardest to read for free, by outlet and language.
The hardest paywalls
Lowest success — hard subscription walls and bot protection that no free tool beats without a public archive.
The most readable
Highest success — soft/metered walls where the article text is present and reader extraction clears it.
How paywalled articles get freed
Most paywalls leak the article text to the page; hard subscription walls don't.
Most-sought paywalled publications
The outlets readers most often try to read past.
Paywall reading is global
Demand for reading past paywalls, by visitor language.
Methodology
Figures are from RemovePaywall's own logs since 19 September 2026 — real, anonymous attempts by real users — and refresh continuously. “Readable” means we delivered the article's text, from the page itself or from a public archive (archive.today, the Wayback Machine); a preview, a framed page or a block does not count, and for outlets that never send non-subscribers the article (WSJ, The Times, the Washington Post and others), a read of the live page never counts. Per-site figures include only publications with at least 12 attempts. The data starts on 19 September because before then our wall detector only recognised English subscriber notices. For fixed, citable monthly figures, see the Paywall Index.
Cite this report
Free to reuse and quote with a link back — CC-BY 4.0.
RemovePaywall (2026). “State of Paywalls 2026.” Retrieved 2 Oct 2026 from https://removepaywall.co/state-of-paywalls
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🔓 Remove a paywallMore data: the monthly Paywall Index, the live success-rate leaderboard, the hardest paywalls, or the best free paywall removers.