NPS Benchmark by Industry 2026

At a glance

Executive summary

Net Promoter Score (NPS) remains one of the most-cited customer-loyalty metrics in business — and one of the most-misused. This report assembles the strongest publicly verifiable NPS benchmark evidence as of May 2026. Every score is sourced from third-party research (Qualtrics XM Institute, Bain-linked NPS Prism, ClearlyRated, Forrester, ACSI, SurveyMonkey, Survicate). No estimates. No vendor self-reports. Where a public source does not provide median or quartiles, this report shows "Data gap" rather than inferring values.

The clearest finding is methodological, not numeric. Public NPS benchmarks vary so widely by methodology, sample, country, and survey type that a single "industry NPS average" is rarely meaningful. Qualtrics' 2024 benchmark (10,000 U.S. consumers) puts retail at 33.0; ClearlyRated's 2024 legal benchmark puts professional services at 37; NPS Prism's 2025 banking benchmark shows checking-account leaders hitting 63 while laggards score 23. These are all "correct" — for their methodology.

The practical takeaway: benchmark against your specific sector, country, and survey type — never against a single global "average NPS." For most consumer sectors, a score above the public median for that category is "good." A score within 10 points of the public leader is "great." A score above 70 is "world-class" in any sector — but only 4 of the 17 NPS Prism categories had a leader at or above 70 in 2025.

15 headline statistics

Qualtrics 2024: 22 U.S. consumer industries

Qualtrics XM Institute's 2024 benchmark surveyed 10,000 U.S. consumers across 354 organizations and 22 industries during Q3-Q4 2024. The benchmark uses standard NPS methodology (the same 0-10 question across all categories), which makes cross-industry comparison cleaner than mixing methodologies.

NPS Prism 2025: leader vs laggard ranges

NPS Prism (operated by Bain) publishes benchmark data based on 800,000+ customer surveys per year using a double-blind methodology. Their 2025 cross-industry U.S. data shows the gap between top performers and bottom performers within each sector — a more useful framing than industry averages alone, because it answers "what's possible if you do this well?"

Three patterns stand out. First, automotive has the highest sector ceiling (Lexus at 78). Second, three sectors have leaders below 50 (utilities, OTT video, pay TV) — even doing well in these is hard. Third, every sector except annuities has a laggard below 20, meaning even sectors with high leaders contain failing businesses.

Survicate 2025: 11-industry medians

Survicate's 2025 benchmarks publish median NPS by industry — a more robust statistic than averages because it's not skewed by outliers. The catch: Survicate's data is from their own customer base of survey-platform users, which is biased toward B2B and SMB sectors. It's the best public source of medians, but read with caveats.

5-year trend: U.S. cross-industry NPS

The U.S. cross-industry consumer NPS dropped sharply in 2020 and has been recovering ever since. As of 2024, it remains 4.6 points below 2019. Sixteen of 20 comparable industries are still below their 2019 levels.

Country variance: 114-point spread

SurveyMonkey's 2023 9-country study is the cleanest open dataset on country-level NPS variance. The 114-point spread between Brazil (62) and Japan (-52) is largely cultural, not customer experience: Japanese respondents systematically use the lower end of 0-10 scales due to social norms around modesty and praise. SurveyMonkey explicitly warns against direct cross-country comparison.

Digital vs traditional banking: a global pattern

NPS Prism's 2024 banking benchmarks show that digital banks beat traditional banks in every measured market. The gap ranges from 4 points (Singapore) to 28 points (UK). This is the most consistent cross-geography NPS pattern in the public dataset.

Top verified company NPS scores

The table below shows only company-level NPS scores from independent third-party research firms (NPS Prism, ClearlyRated, Forrester) — no vendor self-reports, no marketing claims. Tied leaders are listed at the same rank because NPS Prism specifically notes that ties at 80% confidence cannot be ranked distinctively.

Note: This is the full set of company-level NPS scores from independent third-party research that met our publication-quality threshold. Vendor self-reported scores (often quoted by sites like CustomerGauge) are excluded because they don't disclose sample size or methodology.

Good vs great vs world-class — by sector

Bain's generic framing — "above 0 is positive, above 50 is excellent, above 80 is world-class" — is widely cited but misleading without sector context. A 30 NPS is below average in retail but above median in software. A 60 NPS is leading in OTT video but laggard-ish in automotive. The table below shows what good looks like by sector based on 2025 NPS Prism leader/laggard ranges:

Documented NPS limitations

NPS critics and even its creator Fred Reichheld have documented these limitations:

NPS vs CSAT vs CES: when to use which

FAQs

Methodology and sources

This report compiled NPS benchmarks from independent third-party research firms only. No vendor self-reports, no marketing claims. Sources used:

Cite this report

@techreport{lundberg2026nps,
  title       = {NPS Benchmark by Industry 2026},
  author      = {Lundberg, Eric},
  institution = {SpaceForms Research},
  year        = {2026},
  version     = {1.0},
  url         = {https://spaceforms.io/reports/nps-benchmark-by-industry-2026}
}

Related reports