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There are 4,711,475 podcasts in the Podcast Index, and 437,693 of them published an episode in the last 90 days.
Source: Podcastquery, August 2026
Updated 21 October 2026
754,899 podcasts published an episode in the last 12 months, 16.0% of the 4,711,475. 314,204 published in the last 30 days. All three windows end on 16 August 2026, the date of the dump.
356,901 podcasts have their first episode in 2025, against 287,283 in 2024. 191,093 started between 1 January and 16 August 2026. The largest year is 2020, with 1,015,023.
The feeds report at least 147,100,070 episodes between them. That sum is a floor, because the dump caps a feed's episode count at 1,000 and half the Buzzsprout rows report none.
3,506,878 podcasts have two episodes or more, 74.4% of the 4,711,475. 1,470,918 have three episodes or fewer and nothing in the last 12 months.
Definitions
- Podcast
- One RSS feed in the Podcast Index. The index treats one feed as one show. A hosting platform creates the feed when someone signs up, sometimes before any episode exists, and the index keeps the feed after the show stops.
- Active
- The newest episode in the feed is dated inside the 30, 90 or 365 days before 16 August 2026. 256,537 feeds carry no newest-episode date; they never count as active and stay in every denominator.
- Start year
- The year of the oldest episode still in the feed. A show that deletes its early episodes moves to a later year.
- Episodes
- The sum of the episodeCount field across all feeds, a floor for the reasons above.
- Source
- The Podcast Index feed dump dated 16 August 2026, table podcasts, 4,711,475 rows. Every row is counted; nothing is sampled or dropped.
Source: Podcastquery, August 2026
Source: Podcastquery, August 2026
Source: Podcastquery, August 2026
Podcasts by window
| Definition | Podcasts | Share of all podcasts |
|---|---|---|
| All feeds in the dump | 4,711,475 | 100.0% |
| At least one episode | 4,484,531 | 95.2% |
| Two episodes or more | 3,506,878 | 74.4% |
| Active, 365 days | 754,899 | 16.0% |
| Active, 90 days | 437,693 | 9.3% |
| Active, 30 days | 314,204 | 6.7% |
| Three episodes or fewer | 1,831,341 | 38.9% |
Source: Podcastquery, August 2026
Podcasts by year of first episode
| Start year | Podcasts | Active, 90 days | Active share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 191,093 | 130,079 | 68.1% |
| 2025 | 356,901 | 88,794 | 24.9% |
| 2024 | 287,283 | 51,118 | 17.8% |
| 2023 | 298,296 | 36,621 | 12.3% |
| 2022 | 347,399 | 29,043 | 8.4% |
| 2021 | 748,538 | 26,445 | 3.5% |
| 2020 | 1,015,023 | 26,708 | 2.6% |
| 2019 | 368,033 | 15,047 | 4.1% |
| 2018 | 222,615 | 9,707 | 4.4% |
| 2017 | 147,914 | 6,661 | 4.5% |
| 2016 | 115,953 | 4,914 | 4.2% |
| 2015 | 90,202 | 3,554 | 3.9% |
| 2014 | 60,481 | 2,230 | 3.7% |
| 2013 | 52,797 | 1,659 | 3.1% |
| 2012 | 42,712 | 1,185 | 2.8% |
| 2011 | 33,230 | 845 | 2.5% |
| 2010 | 22,236 | 676 | 3.0% |
| 2009 | 17,225 | 508 | 2.9% |
| 2008 | 11,991 | 397 | 3.3% |
| 2007 | 8,863 | 310 | 3.5% |
| 2006 | 7,819 | 238 | 3.0% |
| 2005 | 2,945 | 141 | 4.8% |
| Before 2005 | 5,162 | n/a | n/a |
| No first-episode date | 256,764 | n/a | n/a |
Source: Podcastquery, August 2026
The 2026 row covers 1 January to 16 August 2026. Its feeds are at most seven and a half months old, which is why its active share is high. The rows add to 4,711,475.
Podcasts by language
| Language | Podcasts | Share of all podcasts | Active, 90 days | Active share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| English | 2,609,134 | 55.4% | 284,149 | 10.9% |
| Spanish | 696,557 | 14.8% | 28,590 | 4.1% |
| Portuguese | 265,109 | 5.6% | 7,918 | 3.0% |
| French | 123,298 | 2.6% | 18,797 | 15.2% |
| German | 120,301 | 2.6% | 25,287 | 21.0% |
| Chinese | 89,223 | 1.9% | 12,704 | 14.2% |
| Italian | 82,117 | 1.7% | 7,741 | 9.4% |
| Japanese | 49,600 | 1.1% | 11,085 | 22.3% |
| Russian | 47,574 | 1.0% | 3,384 | 7.1% |
| Dutch | 34,907 | 0.74% | 4,426 | 12.7% |
| Indonesian | 32,412 | 0.69% | 119 | 0.37% |
| Arabic | 30,811 | 0.65% | 1,316 | 4.3% |
Source: Podcastquery, August 2026
Language is the tag the publisher declares in the feed, folded to its base code (en-US and en-GB count as English). It is not checked against the audio. 114,971 feeds declare no language and 101,575 carry the tag "in", which no current language code uses; neither group is in the table.
Podcasts by category
| Category | Podcasts | Share of all podcasts | Active, 90 days | Active share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Society & Culture | 782,849 | 16.6% | 55,766 | 7.1% |
| Education | 506,062 | 10.7% | 37,583 | 7.4% |
| Business | 417,201 | 8.9% | 56,812 | 13.6% |
| Arts | 411,638 | 8.7% | 27,291 | 6.6% |
| Religion & Spirituality | 396,148 | 8.4% | 59,697 | 15.1% |
| Music | 255,273 | 5.4% | 17,978 | 7.0% |
| Health & Fitness | 253,050 | 5.4% | 29,815 | 11.8% |
| Comedy | 242,348 | 5.1% | 14,204 | 5.9% |
| News | 239,206 | 5.1% | 28,742 | 12.0% |
| Sports | 190,777 | 4.0% | 25,313 | 13.3% |
| Leisure | 184,016 | 3.9% | 16,654 | 9.1% |
| TV & Film | 108,615 | 2.3% | 12,740 | 11.7% |
Source: Podcastquery, August 2026
Category is the first Apple category the feed declares.
Against the public figures
| Metric | Podcastquery | Public figure | Source | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| total feeds | 4,711,475 | 4,727,620 | Podcast Index live stats 2026-09-06 | -0.34% |
| total feeds | 4,711,475 | 3,806,954 | Listen Notes 2026-09-06 | 23.8% |
| shows published in last 30 days | 314,204 | 328,141 | Podcast Index stats 2026-09-06 (their window ends 2026-09-06, ours 2026-08-16) | -4.2% |
| shows published in last 90 days | 437,693 | 476,312 | Podcast Index stats 2026-09-06 | -8.1% |
| episodes (sum of episodeCount) | 147,100,070 | 193,644,042 | Listen Notes 2026-09-06 | -24.0% |
Source: Podcastquery, August 2026
The Podcast Index live total counts every feed it holds. It was read three weeks after the dump and is 16,145 higher. Listen Notes leaves out feeds with no episodes, so its total is lower.
Cuts of the same count
Method
We read every row of the Podcast Index feed dump dated 16 August 2026 and counted it with tools/count.py. The windows use the newestItemPubdate field and the start year uses oldestItemPubdate, both against 16 August 2026. No row has a newest episode dated more than a day after it.
The Podcast Index keeps feeds that stopped publishing long ago and misses feeds nobody submitted to it. Language and category are what the publisher declared.
A breakdown of the same dump into stubs, one-episode feeds, dormant feeds and active feeds, with the CSVs, is in 91% of the world's 4.7M podcasts haven't published an episode in 90 days.