As of October 2026, webinar platform benchmark reports put average attendance between 33% and 60% of registrants: Goldcast reports 33%, Livestorm 47.7% and ON24 60%, and ON24’s figure counts people who watched on demand. For live attendance alone, the averages run from about a third of registrants to about half, and where you should land depends on whose customers you compare yourself with.
Say 500 people register and 204 log in. That’s a 40.8% attendance rate: above Goldcast’s average, about seven points under Livestorm’s. I’ve produced more than a thousand enterprise B2B webinars, and the panic over “only 40% showed up” is a misreading of webinar math. Below: the benchmarks and their sources, why they disagree, and the levers I’d pull to move your number.
The short answer: a third to a half of registrants
Livestorm’s 47.7% is a live show-up rate, Goldcast reports on-demand viewing separately from its 33%, and Contrast’s 2026 statistics put live attendance at roughly 44% to 50%, depending on the day and time. ON24’s 60% folds in on-demand viewers, so leave it out of any live comparison.
Here’s how I’d use that. With no history of your own, plan against the low end, about one registrant in three showing up live, and treat anything in the 40s as a good result. After a few events, your own trailing median is a better benchmark than any vendor average, because it reflects your audience, your list and your platform. If you’re consistently above 50% with a genuine outside audience, protect whatever you’re doing. If you’re under 30% with a warm house list, check your promotion and reminder mechanics first.
Attendance rate is a hygiene metric, not a vanity metric. It tells you whether your operations are sound, not whether your webinar was good.
2026 benchmarks, report by report
Each figure below comes from one vendor’s own platform data, so each describes that vendor’s customers only. Read the “How it’s measured” column before you compare your number with any of them.
| Report | Data behind it | Attendance figure | How it’s measured |
|---|---|---|---|
| Livestorm, The Pipeline Truth: 2026 Webinar Benchmarks (published September 1, 2026) | 33,786 sessions from 3,199 organizations and 7,062,572 registrations, January to December 2025 | 47.7% show-up rate in 2025 (48.9% in 2024) | Live show-up on Livestorm. Excludes test and internal events, sessions with fewer than 10 registrants and sessions shorter than 15 minutes. |
| Contrast, Webinar Statistics 2026 (updated May 26, 2026) | Behavioral data from more than 1 million registrants on Contrast | About 44% to 50% live, depending on day and time; 61% watch live or on demand | Live attendance on Contrast. Time slots are the host’s local time, and most 2 PM sessions are scheduled in CET. |
| Goldcast, 2025 B2B Webinar Benchmark Report | 19,531 webinars across 418 B2B companies, covering 2024 | 33% average attendance rate (up from 29%) | Goldcast platform, B2B companies only. On-demand viewing is reported separately. The public pages don’t say whether the rate is averaged per webinar or pooled. |
| ON24, 2026 Digital Engagement Benchmarks Report (summary published June 19, 2026) | ON24 platform data for 2025 | 60% of registrations converted to attendees | Counts on-demand viewers as attendees: 67% of attendees joined live and 43% watched on demand. |
| Zoom, Webinar Audience Behavior Report | 2025 Zoom Webinars data across more than 9 million events, plus a survey of 1,000 attendees | No overall rate on its public pages; 50% for events named “webinar”, 64% for “fireside chat” | Zoom Webinars platform data. Survey answers are self-reported. |
Three things drive the gap. Each vendor sees only its own customers, and those customer bases differ in size, industry and audience. The definitions differ: ON24 folds on-demand viewers into its attendee count, while the others report live attendance. And the math differs, even inside one report. Goldcast’s per-webinar averages, 238 registrants and 51 attendees, divide to about 21%, well below the 33% headline, which suggests its rate is averaged webinar by webinar, so small, high-turnout sessions count as much as big ones. Livestorm’s averages (175 registrants, 83 attendees) divide to about 47%, close to its headline.
Goldcast’s 2026 edition (26,190 webinars from 522 B2B organizations) keeps its headline rate behind a registration form, so the 2025 figure is the latest public one.
What the reports link to higher attendance
| Factor | What the report found | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Audience size | Webinars with 1,000+ registrants: 37% live. With 100 to 1,000: 44%. Under 100 registrants: “6% higher live attendance rates” | Contrast |
| Session length | 30 minutes: 44%. 45 minutes: 49%. 60 minutes: 47%. 90 minutes: 67% | Contrast |
| Event name | “Fireside chat”: 64%. “Webinar”: 50% | Zoom |
| Series | “Series” in the title: 38% against a 33% benchmark | Goldcast 2025 |
| Reminders | A three-step sequence (day before, 1 hour before, 5 minutes before): 27% higher live attendance | Contrast |
| Month | January is the best month in both datasets (Livestorm 50.4%, Contrast 51%); August is Livestorm’s weakest at 42.9% | Livestorm, Contrast |
These are correlations in each vendor’s platform data. A 90-minute deep dive draws a more committed audience to begin with; in my view, stretching a 30-minute session to 90 minutes won’t import that commitment.
Timing: what the data does and doesn’t show
The reports agree on less than the usual scheduling advice suggests, and they don’t use the same clock.
- Livestorm (times in ET). Its 2025 data has Tuesday at a 51.7% show-up rate, Monday at 51.5% and Wednesday at 51%, with Thursday and Friday at 50.9% to 50.3%. That’s 1.4 points between the best weekday and the worst. It recommends 11 AM or 2 PM ET and says to avoid 8 to 9 AM, lunch hours and 4 to 5 PM.
- Contrast (host’s local time). Tuesday comes in at 49.71%, while Monday (53.26%) and Friday (52.02%) post higher raw rates on fewer registrations. By hour, 2 PM leads at 55%, then 11 AM at 50% and 10 AM at 49%, but most of those 2 PM sessions are scheduled in CET, which is 8 AM on the US East Coast.
- Goldcast (time zone not stated). In the 2025 report, Monday has the highest attendance rate at 38.21%, ahead of Tuesday at 34.10%, even though most webinars run Thursday, Wednesday or Tuesday. Tech companies peaked on Fridays from 12 to 3 PM at 44%; non-tech companies on Fridays from 9 AM to noon at 54%. The 2026 edition’s landing page repeats it: “Monday has the highest attendance rate of any weekday, and Friday afternoon outperforms”.
Two of the three reports with day-of-week rates show Monday or Friday beating midweek, which cuts against the old rule that those days lose. For ET-anchored B2B audiences I still default to Tuesday to Thursday, 11 AM to 2 PM Eastern, because it catches the East Coast after the morning scramble and the West Coast before lunch, and it lines up with Livestorm’s 11 AM and 2 PM ET recommendation. But I wouldn’t move an event off a Monday or a Friday for day-of-week reasons alone. Run a slot two or three times with your own audience before you judge it.
On length, Contrast’s data favors longer sessions (see the table above), while Livestorm finds the average viewer stays 26 minutes, against an average session length of 68 minutes. My default is still 45 minutes for a standard B2B session, going longer only when the topic needs the time.
Why registrants don’t show up
The clearest first-party data point comes from Zoom. In its survey of 1,000 attendees, 68% of no-shows blamed a schedule conflict, “not a lack of interest”. Zoom’s summary of the report adds that 84% of no-shows say they plan to watch the recording, but 43% admit they have no real urgency.
You’ll also see “67% of no-shows simply forgot” quoted widely. The trail behind it ends at an unlinked citation rather than a published report, so it isn’t used here.
That reframes the fix. A schedule conflict is a calendar problem, and calendar problems have mechanical fixes. The standard I recommend is a four-email reminder sequence that includes day-of sends, down to a 15-minutes-before email. Contrast reports that hosts who send a three-step sequence see 27% higher live attendance, and Livestorm says teams with show-up rates above 60% send personalized reminders three days out, one day out and on the day. Add a calendar file (.ics) on the confirmation page and in the confirmation email, because a webinar that lives in someone’s calendar competes for the time slot, while one that lives in their inbox competes with everything else in it.
What actually moves the number
These are the levers I’d pull to shift attendance rate, roughly in order of impact. The order is my judgment; the numbers attached come from the reports above.
- Reminder mechanics. The four-email sequence plus calendar files is worth more than any other single change. Teams that send one reminder are volunteering for the bottom of the range.
- Promotion window and late registration. Most sign-ups arrive late: Livestorm logged 49.7% of registrations in the final week and 15.3% on the day itself, and Zoom found the highest-attended webinars promoted for a 13-day median. I’d still open registration three to four weeks out for the early planners, put the heaviest push into the final week, and keep registration open until the session starts. The full schedule is in our webinar promotion timeline.
- Time slot. Test it rather than assume it. The published day-of-week gaps are small and point in different directions, so treat a slot change as an experiment and measure the result.
- Topic specificity. A precise promise (“cut SaaS renewal churn in Q1”) attracts people who clear their calendar; a vague one (“the future of customer success”) attracts drive-by registrations that never convert to seats. How you pick the topic shapes the attendance rate before promotion even starts.
- Format and naming. Zoom’s fireside-chat result and Goldcast’s series result are in the table above. Goldcast also found titles containing “webinar” at 36%, above its benchmark, so the two reports disagree on that word. My rule: name the format honestly and specifically (panel, workshop, AMA), and run recurring topics as a series.
- Registration friction. Fewer form fields means more registrants but softer intent. I’ll take the bigger list, since replay and follow-up recover much of the difference, but know that a two-field form will depress your live percentage while growing your absolute numbers.
How to calculate yours honestly
The formula is simple: unique live attendees ÷ unique registrants × 100. The dishonesty creeps in around the edges.
- Count uniques, not logins. Someone who drops and rejoins three times is one attendee, not three. Check how your platform counts rejoins before you trust its dashboard.
- Remove your own people. Hosts, panelists, and the six colleagues who joined to watch inflate small events noticeably.
- Set a minimum-stay threshold. A two-minute drop-in isn’t an attendee in any meaningful sense. I’d use five minutes as the floor.
- Segment by source. For example, blending a 45% house-list rate with a 28% paid-campaign rate gives you a number that describes neither. Report them separately, and build your own bands for each source over time.
- Pick one averaging method. Total attendees divided by total registrants and the average of each webinar’s rate give different answers, as Goldcast’s own figures show. Use one consistently, and find out which one a benchmark uses before you compare against it.
And keep attendance in context: it’s the middle of the funnel, not the end. A 48% attendance rate that produces zero pipeline loses to a 38% rate that filled the sales calendar. Pair this metric with the rest of the funnel; our webinar conversion rate benchmarks cover the stages before and after this one.
On-demand changes the math
Replay viewers are a real second audience, but the reports disagree on its size. Goldcast’s 2025 data averaged 21 on-demand views against 51 attendees per webinar, with 9.5% of all registrants watching on demand. Livestorm averages 3.97 on-demand views for replays limited to registrants and 14.60 for public ones. At the other end, Contrast says 42% of webinar views are on demand, and ON24 says 43% of attendees watched on demand. Zoom adds a deadline: 72% of replay views happen within the first week, and the median time to view is 3.7 days.
So don’t assume the replay audience will match the live one; in the Goldcast and Livestorm data it’s a fraction of it. Opening the recording helps: Livestorm’s public replays averaged about 3.7 times the views of registrant-only ones. Build the replay funnel deliberately, and treat live attendance as one channel among several. Attendance was never the finish line; the follow-up playbook is where registrants, attendees and replay viewers get converted into actual outcomes.
Evergreen “just-in-time” sessions, where a visitor registers and the session starts minutes later, remove the gap between sign-up and start time, so their show-up rates aren’t comparable with scheduled events. None of the reports above publishes a benchmark for them, so report them separately from your live program.
Frequently asked questions
What is the average attendance rate for a webinar?
It depends on the platform. Goldcast’s 2025 report puts the average at 33%, Livestorm measured 47.7% for 2025, and Contrast puts live attendance at roughly 44% to 50%. ON24 reports 60%, but that figure counts on-demand viewers as attendees.
Is a 50% webinar attendance rate good?
Yes. For live attendance, 50% is above the Goldcast and Livestorm averages and at the top of Contrast’s 44% to 50% range. Livestorm says teams above 60% pre-qualify interest, send personalized reminders, promote on more than one channel and keep registration open until start time, so that’s the next level to aim for.
How do you calculate webinar attendance rate?
Divide unique live attendees by unique registrants and multiply by 100. Exclude hosts and internal staff, count each person once regardless of rejoins, and apply a minimum-stay threshold (five minutes is a reasonable floor) so drive-by joins don’t inflate the number. Use the same method every time so your results stay comparable.
Why do people register for webinars but not attend?
In Zoom’s survey of 1,000 attendees, 68% of no-shows blamed a schedule conflict rather than a lack of interest, and 84% said they planned to watch the recording. That points to calendar fixes: a calendar invite at registration, a reminder sequence with day-of sends, and a fast replay for the people who still miss it.
What is a typical webinar no-show rate?
It’s the mirror of attendance. Livestorm’s 47.7% show-up rate means 52% of registrants missed the live session, and Goldcast’s 33% average implies about two-thirds did. That’s why the replay and the follow-up matter: no-shows are still people who raised their hand.
Attendance benchmarks are lesson-one material from our courses. See what’s coming, or get the free lessons by email as they ship.
Last checked: October 2026. Vendors update these reports every year; check each report’s page for its latest edition before you quote a number.