How does your newsletter’s open rate compare to others?
Usually that’s a hard question to answer. But because GlueLetter newsletter analytics provides advanced newsletter data analysis for dozens of leading news publishers, we have exclusive access to email engagement trends across the newsletter industry.
This analysis includes:
- more than 20,000 email campaigns
- nearly 600 different newsletter products
- 600 million opens
- 83 million clicks
- Data from a variety of ESPs including Mailchimp, Sailthru, ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, Beehiiv, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact, Iterable, Cordial, Pardot, Sendgrid, and others
…that we tracked between January 1 to April 30 of 2026.
Open rate averages
The median open rate across all newsletter campaigns in so far in 2026 (January through April) was 47.3%.
That’s a slight decrease from 2025, when the median open rate was 49.3% in Q1 and 48.8% in Q2.
The middle half of campaigns recorded an open rate somewhere between 39.5% and 58%. Which means if your open rate was above 58% you are in the top 25% of newsletters, and if you are below 39% you are in the bottom 25%.
| Your open rate… | GlueLetter’s evaluation… |
| 32% | Poor (bottom 10% of newsletters) |
| 39% | Lagging (bottom 25% of newsletters) |
| 47% | Normal (better than 50% of newsletters) |
| 58% | Great (better than 75% of newsletters) |
| 66% | Super (better than 90% of newsletters) |
Methodology
Open Rate: GlueLetter calculates this as the email’s unique opens as a percentage of sends. It is the percentage of all recipients who opened the email at least one time.
Privacy related opens: These figures do NOT exclude any opens from Apple’s MPP, Google image caching, or other similar programs. Scroll further down to see separate benchmarking metrics for publishers who do filter out non-human opens.
Detailed percentiles breakdown for open rates
If you want to get more specific, here are the open rates GlueLetter recorded at percentiles from 5% up to 95%. For example, if your score is near the “40th percentile” that means your open rate is higher than 40% of other newsletters (and lower than the other 60%).
| Open rate | Percentile |
| 28.10% | 5th percentile |
| 31.74% | 10th percentile |
| 35.38% | 15th percentile |
| 37.52% | 20th percentile |
| 39.50% | 25th percentile |
| 41.17% | 30th percentile |
| 42.69% | 35th percentile |
| 44.19% | 40th percentile |
| 45.70% | 45th percentile |
| 47.32% | 50th percentile |
| 49.27% | 55th percentile |
| 51.36% | 60th percentile |
| 53.37% | 65th percentile |
| 55.66% | 70th percentile |
| 58.10% | 75th percentile |
| 60.82% | 80th percentile |
| 63.73% | 85th percentile |
| 66.72% | 90th percentile |
| 71.21% | 95th percentile |
Open rates filtered for non-human opens
Some ESPs, such as Sailthru, attempt to exclude non-human open events from their engagement metrics.
Filtering out non-human opens produces a very different result, with a median open rate of 15.7% and an average (mean) open rate of 25.5%.
If you use an ESP that has suppressed non-human open events, expect to fall closer to that range.
More data
Other metrics: Browse our previously released benchmarking data.
Future updates
We update these datasets with new releases once in a while. Sign up for email updates below, and follow GlueLetter and our founder Jeff Sonderman on LinkedIn for regular updates.
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