Almost every owner asks this question in the same shape: am I behind? They have 80 members, they see a community with 9,000, and they quietly conclude something has gone wrong. The honest answer is that the comparison they are making is not a comparison at all.
What does a typical Skool community actually look like?
Across 18,412 Skool communities mapped from the outside, the median community has about 44 members after correcting for discovery bias, and roughly 75% have fewer than 100 members.
Both of those figures need a word of explanation, because the raw counts say something different.
Small communities are genuinely hard to find from outside. They are linked from fewer places, they surface in fewer directories, and they turn up in search far less often. So a straight count of what you can see over-represents big rooms. Measured raw, the median looks like 110 members and 48.1% look like they sit under 100. Corrected for how much of each size band is actually findable, the median drops to 44 and the under-100 share rises to 75.1%.
How much correction each band needs is itself measured, not assumed:
Very large communities are essentially all visible. Small ones are mostly invisible. That single gradient is what separates "Skool is full of big communities" from "big communities are the ones you can see".
The limit worth stating: coverage is estimated with a capture-recapture model, so the corrected shares carry that model's assumptions. The median is 44 corrected against 110 observed — the direction is not in doubt, the exact figure is a best estimate.
Why is there no average Skool community?
This is not rhetoric. It is a property of the distribution.
Community size on Skool follows a power law with an exponent of about 0.92 after correction (0.81 on the raw counts). When that exponent sits below 1.0, the distribution has no stable mean: as you collect more data the "average" keeps climbing rather than settling, because each new sample can contain a community large enough to move it on its own.
So "the average Skool community" is not merely a bad summary. It is a quantity with no stable value. One 100,000-member community dropped into a sample of a thousand small rooms rewrites the average and tells you nothing about any of them.
The median does not have that problem, which is why every figure in this library is a median.
Where are all the members?
Here is the shape that surprises people most. Communities and memberships are distributed almost inversely:
Half a percent of communities hold 41% of every membership on the platform. The smallest three quarters of communities hold about 7% between them.
That is not a Skool pathology — it is what every social platform, marketplace and content library looks like once you measure it. But it has a very practical consequence, and it is the reason this page exists.
Why comparing yourself to what you see is a rigged comparison
Owners meet Skool through the communities they have joined. Which communities are those? Overwhelmingly the large ones, because large ones are what get found, recommended, advertised and talked about.
So the owner of a 90-member room is measuring themselves against a sample drawn almost entirely from the top half of one percent — and concluding they are failing. Almost nobody is looking at a fair comparison.
If you take one thing from this page: compare yourself against the band you are in, not against the communities that reached you through discovery. A 90-member community is at the 60th percentile or so of everything on the platform. It is not small. It is normal, and most of what you have read about "what good looks like" was written by and about the outliers.
Does age explain size?
Partly, and less than you would think. Skool is a young platform and most of what exists on it was created recently:
| Created | Share of communities | Median members |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 29% | 41 |
| 2025 | 47% | 101 |
| 2024 | 20% | — |
| Earlier | 4% | 444 |
Older communities are bigger, as you would expect. But note the second column: 76% of all Skool communities were created in 2025 or 2026. The platform's median community is young as well as small, and a two-year-old community with a few hundred members is comfortably ahead of the field rather than behind it.
One caveat on that table: dead communities are invisible from outside. These shares describe what survives today, not what was created. The survival rate is not something an outside measurement can see.
How should you actually read your own number?
Three rules, in order of how much they will change your thinking.
Use the median for your band, never the platform median. The right question is not "how do I compare with Skool" but "how do I compare with communities of roughly my size and door type".
Stop treating size as the headline metric. Size tells you how many people arrived. It tells you nothing about how many are still there, how many have ever contributed, or how much of what gets written comes from a handful of people. Those are separate measurements — creator rate for contribution, and the one-and-done rate for its shape — and they are far better predictors of whether a community is working.
Compare yourself to yourself a month ago. It is the only comparison you fully control and the only one that tells you whether what you are doing is working.
A 200-member community at a healthy participation rate is in better shape than a 5,000-member community where nobody writes anything. The second one is easier to screenshot. That is the only sense in which it is ahead.
These figures come from The State of Skool 2026, an independent measurement of 18,412 Skool communities. See the full report for the complete size distribution, the coverage model behind the correction, and 21 other findings.