How Many Americans Actually Listen to Podcasts, and Is the Audience Still Growing?

How many people listen, and how is that counted?

Edison Research, which has tracked American audio behaviour since 1998, reported that 58% of Americans aged 12 and over consumed a podcast in the month before being surveyed. Edison puts that at roughly 167 million people. It is the highest monthly figure the study has recorded.

The weekly number is the more demanding test, because it asks about habit rather than trial. That figure was 45%, or about 130 million people. The gap between monthly and weekly reach — thirteen percentage points, some 37 million people — is the population that listens sometimes but has not built the format into a routine.

The widest measure is lifetime: 80% of Americans aged 12 and over, about 230 million people, have ever listened to or watched a podcast. On that measure podcasting is no longer a subculture with room to expand into the mainstream. It has already arrived there, and the remaining growth has to come from converting occasional listeners into weekly ones.

The distinction between those three numbers is the whole of the audience question, and it is routinely collapsed in marketing material into a single figure. A lifetime number measures whether a format has been sampled. A monthly number measures whether it has been retained. A weekly number measures whether it has become a habit, and habit is what determines whether an advertisement or a guest appearance is heard by the same person more than once.

Edison has run this series since 1998 using random-digit dialling to mobile and landline numbers, which is a more expensive method than online panels and a more defensible one: it reaches people who do not join survey panels. The 2026 wave interviewed 2,050 Americans aged 12 and over in January, weighted to the national population of that age.

Is the audience still growing, or has it plateaued?

Both things are true depending on which measure is used. Monthly and lifetime reach are at record highs, which is the growth story. But a format that 80% of the population has already tried cannot keep growing by finding people who have never heard of it.

The more instructive movement is in online audio generally, where Edison reports that listening among Americans aged 55 and over rose from 52% in 2024 to 70% in 2026. That is an eighteen-point move in two years in the demographic that adopted digital audio last. It is a figure about online audio as a whole rather than podcasts specifically, and it should not be quoted as a podcast number, but it describes the pipeline.

For anyone deciding whether to appear on podcasts, the relevant question is not whether the audience is growing. It is whether the particular audience being sought is inside it, which a national figure cannot answer.

There is a structural reason to expect the weekly figure to keep rising even if the monthly one flattens. Audio consumption is bounded by available attention rather than by available content, and the attention it competes for — commuting, exercising, household work — is time in which almost no other medium can be consumed. Radio held that time for eighty years. What has changed is not the amount of listening time but who supplies the programming inside it.

The counter-argument is that podcasting is now competing with itself. Roughly five million podcasts exist, most of them inactive, and the listening is concentrated in a small number of shows. Aggregate audience growth does not distribute evenly across that catalogue, and a report of record national listening tells an individual show nothing about its own prospects.

Concentration is the part a national figure hides most effectively. Edison's number describes how many people listen to something; it says nothing about how that listening is distributed across roughly five million titles, most of which are dormant. The industry does not publish a public distribution curve, so the honest position is that concentration is widely reported and not precisely measured.

Who is listening, and has that changed?

The assumption that podcasting is a young person's format no longer holds. Monthly podcast consumption among Americans aged 35 to 54 reached 68%, ten points above the national figure of 58%.

That matters commercially in a specific way: 35 to 54 is the band containing most business decision-makers, most people at the height of their earnings, and most people with purchasing authority inside organisations. A format whose strongest cohort is that band is a different proposition from one whose strongest cohort is 18 to 24.

Edison's public release gives the 35 to 54 figure and the national figure, and does not publish comparable monthly podcast percentages for the other age bands. Figures circulating for those bands generally describe online audio as a whole rather than podcasts, and the two are not interchangeable: online audio includes streaming music, which has a very different age profile.

The separate online audio series is where the clearest generational movement appears. Listening among Americans aged 55 and over rose from 52% in 2024 to 70% in 2026, an eighteen-point move in two years. That cohort adopted digital audio last and is now adopting it fastest, which is the demographic argument for the format's durability — but it is an argument about digital audio, not about podcasts specifically, and it should not be quoted as though it were the latter.

There is a second reason the 35 to 54 figure matters more than it appears. Advertising rates in podcasting are set largely by download volume, not by audience composition, which means a show reaching decision-makers is often priced the same as a show reaching the same number of teenagers. Where that holds, the buyer with a business audience is getting a better rate than the market has priced.

Why is a podcast increasingly not an audio product?

Fifty-seven percent of Americans aged 12 and over have both listened to and watched podcasts. That single figure undermines the category's own definition.

It also has a measurement consequence. The IAB and PwC note that their podcast advertising figures reflect the traditional, audio-based definition of the medium, while roughly 71% of US podcast creators now produce video versions. A category counted as audio while its output migrates to video will understate itself, and the size of that understatement is not currently quantified by any source reviewed here.

For a guest appearance, the practical implication is that the recording is likely to exist as video, be clipped for social platforms, and be indexed as both. The appearance is not a radio spot.

The definitional problem runs into the money. If the advertising figures count a medium as audio while a growing share of its consumption is video, the category is measuring itself with a shrinking ruler. Neither the IAB nor PwC quantifies the size of that gap, and no source reviewed here does, so the honest statement is that podcast advertising revenue is understated by an unknown amount rather than by a specific one.

For anyone weighing a guest appearance, the practical consequence is about where the appearance lives afterwards. A video recording is clipped for social platforms, transcribed, indexed by search engines, and quoted by answer engines. The interview is the raw material; the derivative assets are what most people actually encounter, and they persist far longer than the episode's release week.

None of this settles whether an individual appearance is worth making. It establishes the size and shape of the available audience, which is the necessary first question and not the sufficient one. The measures that would answer the second question — what share of a given show's listeners finish an episode, act on it, or remember it a week later — are held by individual publishers and are not published in aggregate by any source reviewed here.

Methodology and limitations

Figures are drawn from The Infinite Dial 2026, produced by Edison Research at SSRS and sponsored by SiriusXM Media, fielded in March 2026, as reported in the study's public release. Advertising figures referenced are from the IAB and PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report published 16 April 2026. Three limits bound this report. First, the Infinite Dial public release does not state a sample size, sampling frame or margin of error, so differences of a point or two between years cannot be treated as meaningful. Second, the study is sponsored by a company that sells audio advertising, which is disclosed by Edison and noted here; the figures are widely used across the industry but they are not an independent census. Third, monthly podcast figures by age are published for the 35 to 54 band only in the release reviewed; no figures for other bands are estimated or inferred here.

Conclusion

Podcast listening in the United States is at a record by every measure the largest tracking study publishes, and the format's strongest age band is now 35 to 54 rather than the youngest cohort. The growth that remains is conversion rather than discovery, since four in five Americans have already tried the format. The measurement itself is the weaker part of the picture: the headline release omits sample size and margin of error, and the industry's advertising figures still count a medium as audio while most of its creators produce video.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

1. vendor research Edison Research at SSRS, 2026. The Infinite Dial 2026, fielded March 2026, sponsored by SiriusXM Media. Released via Podnews, 2026.
2. trade body Interactive Advertising Bureau and PwC Advisory Services, 2026. Internet Advertising Revenue Report, Full Year 2025, published 16 April 2026.
3. trade press Radio Ink, 2026. “IAB: Digital Audio Grew 10% In 2025 as Podcasts Near $3B”, 16 April 2026.