Netflix Net Subscriber Additions per Quarter, 2009 to 2024: Records, Losses and Missed Forecasts

How fast Netflix grew, measured by additions

A net addition is the change in paid memberships from the end of one quarter to the end of the next: new sign-ups and returning members, minus cancellations. It is the number investors watched most closely for more than a decade, because it showed at a glance whether the service was still finding new households. This page is about that change. The size of the base each quarter, from 34.24 million in early 2013 to 301.63 million at the end of 2024, is covered in our companion report on Netflix paid memberships worldwide by quarter.

52 quarters of paid net additions in one chart

The quarterly series on a paid basis starts in 2012, the first year Netflix split its streaming business into domestic and international segments with paid counts for each. Until 2016 the additions are calculated from those reported paid counts; from 2017 they come straight from the paid net additions tables in the letters and the 2019 regional exhibit.

Growth came in waves: a steady climb to 2019, a lockdown spike in 2020, a two quarter loss in 2022 and the strongest run in company history after paid sharing in 2023.

Three things stand out. First, the series is seasonal: a strong first or fourth quarter, a soft second quarter. Second, the size of the swings grew with the base. Before 2018 no quarter added more than 7 million paid memberships; in 2018 and 2019 six of eight quarters brought between 5 and 9 million. Third, the pattern breaks twice, in 2020 and in 2022, and both breaks are explained further down. Netflix did not publish counts by country, so the quarterly figure is the most detailed public measure of its growth, alongside the regional subscription numbers.

Annual paid net additions: from 8.76 million in 2012 to 41.35 million in 2024

Adding up the quarters gives a clear annual rhythm. Paid net additions rose every year from 2012 to 2018, dipped slightly in 2019, jumped to 36.57 million in the pandemic year 2020, halved in 2021 and fell to 8.91 million in 2022. Then they rebounded to 29.53 million in 2023 and 41.35 million in 2024, a record that Netflix described in its January 2025 letter as record net additions of 41 million.

The 2022 trough: 8.91 million was the lowest annual gain since 2012, and less than a quarter of the 2024 total.

Year end counts are Netflix figures; additions, year over year changes and the fourth quarter share are BusinessStats calculations. Summing the four quarterly figures gives 8.90 million for 2022, 29.52 million for 2023 and 41.36 million for 2024, because each quarter is rounded separately.

The last column shows how much the year end came to matter. From 2012 to 2019 the fourth quarter delivered roughly 29 to 33 percent of the annual total. In 2021, 2023 and 2024 it delivered 44 to 46 percent, and in 2022 it delivered 86 percent, because the first half of that year was negative. A record year that leans so heavily on one quarter shows how much a single holiday slate can move the annual figure. The revenue side of the same years is in our Netflix revenue and profit statistics.

Before paid streaming counts: subscriber additions from 2009 to 2011

In 2009 Netflix was still mainly a DVD-by-mail company in the United States, and its earnings releases reported one subscriber total that included members on a free trial. On that basis the company added 2.88 million subscribers in 2009, reaching 12.27 million, and 7.74 million in 2010, passing 20 million in the closing hours of 31 December 2010. International members, starting with Canada, first appear in the counts in Q3 2010, with 0.13 million net additions.

The first loss: the consolidated count fell by about 0.30 million in Q3 2011, after Netflix introduced separate prices for DVD and streaming plans.

2011 brought the first quarterly decline in the company history. After Netflix announced separate prices for DVD and streaming plans, unique US subscribers fell by 805,000 in the third quarter of 2011, to 23.79 million. International growth of 0.51 million softened the consolidated drop to about 0.30 million. The 2011 Form 10-K says the reaction to the price change and branding announcement was very negative and led to significant customer cancellations. The US base recovered by 606,000 in the fourth quarter, and the full year still ended with 6.24 million consolidated additions.

Why many published Netflix records do not match

Lists of Netflix subscriber growth often disagree because Netflix changed its headline measure. Until 2018 its letters led with total net additions, which counted members in a free trial month. Paid net additions only counted accounts that had been billed. The gap was often more than a million in a single quarter, and records set on one basis are not records on the other.

By the fourth quarter of 2018 Netflix was setting its forecast in paid net additions, and every record from then on, including the 18.91 million of Q4 2024, is a paid figure. This page uses paid net additions for every quarter from 2012, so the numbers can be compared across the whole period. The previous version of this page mixed the two definitions, which inflated several years before 2018.

Where the additions came from before 2020: the US share fell from 61 to 9 percent

Until 2019 Netflix reported two streaming segments: the United States and everything else. In 2012 the US produced 5.32 million of the 8.76 million paid net additions, or 61 percent. The US kept adding between 4.5 and 6.2 million paid memberships a year until 2018, but international additions grew more than sevenfold, from 3.44 million to 25.28 million, as Netflix expanded country by country and, on 6 January 2016, launched in more than 130 new countries at once.

A flat home market: US additions stayed in a narrow band while international additions climbed every year; in 2019 the US added only 2.55 million.

2019 marked the turn in the home market. US paid memberships fell by 0.13 million in Q2 2019, the first US paid loss since the segment data begin in 2012, and the year ended with only 2.55 million US additions, 9 percent of the global total. In the Q2 2019 letter Netflix said its miss was across all regions but slightly larger in markets with price increases, and that the quarter content slate drove less growth than expected. The longer history of the home market is in our report on Netflix subscribers in the US and Canada.

EMEA led additions in six of seven years; APAC led in 2022

In December 2019 Netflix restated its membership figures into four regions back to 2017, and from 2020 it reported those regions every quarter. Over the seven years from 2018 to 2024, Europe, the Middle East and Africa added 75.15 million paid memberships, Asia-Pacific 51.06 million, Latin America 33.60 million and the United States and Canada 31.21 million, based on the sum of the reported quarters.

UCAN went negative for a year: the United States and Canada lost 0.93 million paid memberships across 2022, then added 9.49 million in 2024, its best year in the series.

The regional figures show that Netflix growth relied on different engines in different years. APAC was the steadiest: it never reported a negative quarter, and in 2022 it delivered 5.40 million of the 8.91 million global additions. EMEA produced the largest gains in every year except 2022, and in 2024 APAC came within 0.12 million of it, with 12.21 million against 12.33 million. Members in these regions pay less on average than in UCAN, which is why revenue and membership trends diverge; the per member side is analysed in our data on Netflix ARPU by region and the money side in Netflix revenue by region.

All 28 regional quarters of paid net additions

Four lines, one spike: in Q4 2024 all four regions added more than 4 million paid memberships in the same quarter for the only time in the series.

Netflix figures. 2018 and Q1 to Q3 2019 are converted from thousands in the December 2019 exhibit. Regional values may not add to the global value because each is rounded.

The ten largest quarters of Netflix paid net additions

Ranked by paid net additions, the top of the list is dominated by two periods: the 2020 lockdowns and the paid sharing years 2023 and 2024. Five of the ten biggest quarters are fourth quarters, and three are first quarters. Q2 2020 is the only second quarter on the list.

Record ladder: on the paid basis the quarterly record moved from 8.26 million in Q1 2018 to 8.84 million in Q4 2018, 9.60 million in Q1 2019, 15.77 million in Q1 2020 and 18.91 million in Q4 2024.

The 15.77 million of Q1 2020 stood as the record for almost five years, until Q4 2024 beat it by 3.14 million. The difference between the two is the cause. The 2020 spike was a shock that pulled growth forward and was followed by the weakest year in a decade. The 2024 record came at the end of seven consecutive quarters of strong additions, with every region contributing.

26 million in six months, then 5.5 million in the next six

Netflix entered 2020 with a modest forecast. Its Q4 2019 letter forecast 7.0 million paid net additions for the first quarter, below the 9.60 million of Q1 2019. The Q1 2020 letter said membership growth in January and February was similar to the prior two years, and that once lockdown orders began in March many more households joined. The quarter closed at 15.77 million, more than double the forecast, with EMEA alone adding 6.96 million. Q2 2020 added another 10.09 million against a forecast of 7.5 million.

Netflix warned early that the gain was partly borrowed. In April 2020 it wrote that some of the lockdown growth would turn out to be pull-forward from the multi-year trend, resulting in slower growth after lockdowns lifted, and in July 2020 it said the strong first half likely pulled forward demand from the second half. That is what happened. Q3 2020 added 2.20 million, Q1 2021 3.98 million against a 6.0 million forecast, and Q2 2021 1.54 million. The Q1 2021 letter blamed the big Covid-19 pull-forward and a lighter content slate caused by production delays. Growth recovered in the second half of 2021, when Q3 brought 4.38 million and the Korean drama Squid Game was chosen by 142 million member households in its first four weeks, one of the titles in our ranking of the most viewed non-English Netflix shows.

The only two global losses, and nine regional ones

On the paid streaming basis, Netflix reported a global loss in two quarters out of 52: -0.20 million in Q1 2022 and -0.97 million in Q2 2022. The first came against a forecast of +2.5 million. Netflix said the suspension of its service in Russia had a -0.7 million impact, and that excluding it paid net additions would have been +0.5 million. For Q2 2022 it then forecast a loss of 2.0 million; the actual loss was half that, in a quarter when Stranger Things returned to what the letter called tremendous fan reception. The same Q1 2022 letter gave the first estimate of account sharing: more than 100 million additional households, including more than 30 million in UCAN.

UCAN had four negative quarters between 2017 and 2024, LATAM three, EMEA two and APAC none. The regional record also shows how quickly the losses reversed: in Q4 2022 every region was positive again, and the global total of 7.66 million beat the 4.5 million Netflix had forecast. The effect of 2022 on profits and spending is covered in our data on Netflix net income and Netflix marketing spend.

Before and after paid sharing, region by region

Paid sharing started in February 2023 in Canada, New Zealand, Portugal and Spain, where members could add an extra member for up to two people outside their household or let a borrower transfer a profile to a new paid account. In May 2023 Netflix extended it to more than 100 countries representing more than 80 percent of its revenue. Its Q2 2023 letter said the cancel reaction was low, that sign-ups already exceeded cancellations, and that every region added more than 1 million paid memberships in the quarter. The ad-supported plan was the second new entry point: by Q4 2023 it accounted for 40 percent of all sign-ups in the countries where it was offered. Its audience is now reported separately in our series on Netflix monthly ad-supported users.

The biggest change was in the market where sharing was most common. UCAN added just 0.43 million paid memberships in the seven quarters before the launch and 15.22 million in the seven quarters after, a 35-fold increase. LATAM went from 2.58 million to 12.08 million. APAC, which was already growing strongly before the launch, rose the least in relative terms. Globally, additions tripled from 23.31 million to 69.13 million. Netflix did not publish how many of these accounts came from paid sharing, so the comparison shows the scale of the shift rather than an exact attribution; content, the ads plan and price changes also played a role.

17 quarters of Netflix forecasting its own growth

For years Netflix gave a forecast for the next quarter of paid net additions in every letter, and the market judged each quarter against it. The paid forecast series used here runs from Q4 2018 to Q4 2022. In its Q3 2022 letter the company said it would keep reporting memberships but stop guiding on them, calling revenue its primary top line metric.

One giant miss in the good direction: Q1 2020 beat the forecast by 8.77 million; the worst shortfall was Q1 2022, 2.70 million below.

Across the 17 quarters Netflix forecast 84.1 million paid net additions and delivered 100.32 million. Most of the surplus came in 2020, when it forecast 23.0 million and reported 36.57 million. Outside 2020 the record was mixed: the 2019 forecasts added up to 28.5 million against 27.83 million delivered, and 2021 to 19.0 million against 18.18 million. The average gap between forecast and result was 1.87 million per quarter, a reminder of how hard it was to predict the net of tens of millions of sign-ups and cancellations.

Q4 2024: four regions, each above 4 million

The letter of 21 January 2025 called Q4 2024 the biggest quarter of net adds in the company history and said growth was driven by broad strength across the content slate, improved product and market fit in all regions and typical fourth quarter seasonality. The quarter included the Jake Paul and Mike Tyson fight, which Netflix said became the most-streamed sporting event ever. Revenue for the quarter came in slightly above forecast because membership growth and ad sales outpaced it.

The most balanced quarter on record: the four regional totals were within 0.85 million of each other, from 4.15 million in LATAM to 5.00 million in EMEA.

For UCAN, 4.82 million was its best quarter in the regional series, well above the 2.94 million of Q2 2020. LATAM turned from a loss of 0.07 million in Q3 2024 to a gain of 4.15 million. The programming budget behind that slate is tracked in our report on Netflix content spending.

From quarterly net adds to milestones

Netflix announced the change in its Q1 2024 letter in April 2024: starting with its Q1 2025 earnings it would stop reporting quarterly membership numbers and average revenue per membership. The reasons it gave were that revenue and operating margin had become its primary financial metrics, that memberships are just one component of growth now that advertising and extra member fees exist, and that each additional paid membership has a very different business impact depending on the country and plan. The same letter noted it had already stopped giving quarterly paid membership guidance in 2023, and promised to announce major subscriber milestones as they were crossed.

Moving from 301.63 million to more than 325 million means Netflix added at least 23.4 million paid memberships in 2025. That is a lower bound calculated by BusinessStats, not a company figure, and the true number cannot be derived from the milestone. For 2026 Netflix guides revenue of $51.1 billion, up 13 percent, and Q3 2026 revenue grew 12 percent to $12.9 billion. Readers who want to compare Netflix with services that still publish subscriber totals can use our SVOD subscriber comparison by platform, keeping in mind that each company defines a subscriber differently. Viewing per account, another figure Netflix still publishes, is in our report on time spent streaming Netflix per account.

How the figures were compiled

Every figure was checked against Netflix filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Where Netflix published paid net additions directly, from 2017, the reported value is used. Where it did not, the value is the difference between reported paid membership counts. The notes below explain the breaks in the series.

Questions about Netflix subscriber growth