The State of Skool 2026: what we measured

By Christopher Ward, Co-founder, SkoolgradesPublished

Short answer

It measured 18,412 Skool communities, 322,331 posts and 2.8 million member records from outside. The headline findings: the median community has about 44 members, a median 2.15% of members write three quarters of all posts, members are online roughly 47 minutes a week, the median priced community charges $19 a month, and 86.8% of members who leave a community stay on Skool. Every figure carries the scope it was measured at.

See the State of Skool report18,412 communities measured. Benchmark your own against every chart.

Nobody publishes what a Skool community actually looks like. Skool does not, and the figures circulating in the ecosystem are mostly extrapolations from single communities. So it was measured from the outside: 18,412 communities mapped, 322,331 posts read one by one, 2.8 million member records observed. Here is what came back.

The platform is small, young and lopsided

The median Skool community has about 44 members after correcting for how hard small rooms are to find, and roughly 75% have fewer than 100. Meanwhile 0.5% of communities hold 41% of all memberships. Community size follows a power law with an exponent near 0.92, and below 1.0 a distribution has no stable mean — so "the average Skool community" is not a bad summary, it is a quantity with no stable value.

Three quarters of the platform was created in 2025 or 2026, and 73.4% of communities have exactly one admin.

Against the outside world, Skool does well — and the gradient matters

A median Skool post reaches 5.1% of members against 0.3% of followers for a median Instagram brand post in Quid's 2026 benchmark, using the same formula. That is roughly seventeen times. The rate inflates in small rooms, so the honest version is the gradient: 13.5% under 100 members down to 0.61% above 1,000 — and every band still clears Instagram.

The comparison owners actually want does not exist. Meta publishes no figure for what share of a Facebook Group's members ever post, and the academic range spans 0% to 99%. We report that as an absence rather than inventing a number.

Participation is a ladder, not a yes or no

A median 7.3% of members have ever posted. Counting comments, participation rises to about 27.8% — meaning roughly 21.3% of members comment without ever starting a thread. For every visible poster there are about three more people taking part invisibly.

And they are barely yours: 71.5% of a typical roster's Skool activity happens somewhere other than the community measuring it, and only about 1 in 370 members gives one community more than half their platform activity.

A very small group does almost everything

A median 2.15% of members write three quarters of all posts — about four people in a 200-member room. That share holds across a 62-fold range of community sizes, and it survives the obvious confound: holding post volume constant, it moves by four tenths of a point rather than by a factor of five.

In 77.4% of communities the biggest poster is the owner, writing a median 25.8% of everything — 52.2% below 200 members. Platform-wide, the most active 10.6% of members generate 68.4% of all activity.

Share of members needed to cover each share of all posts
Half of all posts
0.59%
Three quarters
2.15%
Nine tenths
5.16%

Attention is scarcer than anyone plans for

Members are online a median of about 47 minutes a week per community, and roughly 37 minutes member-weighted across the platform. The spread is enormous — under 10 minutes at the 10th percentile, over 11 hours at the 99th — and it falls hard with size, from 129 minutes per member in small rooms to 31 in the largest.

Communities barely sleep. A median 7.2% of posts land in a community's quietest six hours, and of 101 communities over 5,000 members, not one has a six-hour stretch carrying under 1% of its posts.

People leave early, and they do not leave Skool

The median member who left had been there 35 days, and a quarter of all departures happened in the first week. But 86.8% of members who leave a community are still on Skool, and 70.2% were active somewhere on the platform within the following month.

Members who engaged in their first fourteen days churned at 3.9% against 7.5% for those who stayed silent.

The money is flatter than expected

About 31.9% of communities list a membership price, median $19 a month, with a quarter at or below $9 and the top tenth above $111. Six price points account for 42% of every priced community. Whether a community charges is essentially flat across size and age.

The most common structure is neither free nor paid: about 44% of classified communities run a free door with paid rooms behind it, and that model leads show-up rates in all four size bands.

What this measurement cannot see

Stated plainly, because a benchmark without its limits is worse than none.

Private communities. Roughly 14,600 were identified and none of them can be read. Every public figure here describes public communities.

Dead communities. They are invisible from outside, so age cohorts describe survivors rather than launches.

Two instruments, never blended. Structural figures come from a public panel of 688 communities with complete crawls. Attention, per-post engagement and comment participation come from communities that granted direct access — owners who bought analytics, and who skew more engaged than a random sample. No figure mixes the two.

Several corrections carry model assumptions. The median of 44 members, the 22% ownership figure and the untapped bounds are corrected or modelled, and they are labelled as such wherever they appear.


The full report — every chart, the complete method, and your own community benchmarked against each figure — is at The State of Skool 2026.

See the State of Skool report18,412 communities measured. Benchmark your own against every chart.

Frequently asked

What is the State of Skool 2026 report?
An independent measurement of Skool from the outside: 18,412 communities mapped, 322,331 posts read individually, and 2.8 million member records observed. It exists because neither Skool nor any third party publishes what a typical community looks like, so owners have had nothing credible to compare themselves against.
What are the headline findings?
The median community has about 44 members; a median 2.15% of members write three quarters of all posts; members are online roughly 47 minutes a week; the median priced community charges $19 a month; and 86.8% of members who leave a community remain active on Skool. Every figure is a median, because the distributions have no usable means.
How was the data collected?
Two instruments, deliberately kept separate. A public panel of 761 communities was crawled in full, with 688 returning complete post histories, giving the structural figures. A smaller set of communities granted direct access, giving attention, per-post engagement and comment participation. No published figure blends the two.
What can the research not measure?
Private communities — roughly 14,600 were identified and none is readable — and dead communities, which are invisible from outside and therefore make age cohorts a survival curve. Several figures, including the corrected median community size and the 22% ownership rate, are modelled and labelled as such.
Why are all the figures medians rather than averages?
Because the distributions are extremely skewed. Community size follows a power law with an exponent below 1.0, which means no stable mean exists at all. Member activity is similar: the median member is active 26 days a year against a mean of 81. A mean in this data describes the small hyperactive tail, not the population.
What owners say

Better than sliced bread.

As someone building my own Skool community, this has completely changed how I engage on Skool. It's simple, easy on the eyes, and helps me quickly find conversations where I can genuinely connect and add value. Instead of wasting time searching for posts, I spend more time building real relationships. It's one of the first tools I open each day.

Lorri Lynn Roche — Founder, The Inner Shift Collective

See this in your own community

Skoolgrades reads your Skool community through your own browser and turns it into a report you can act on: participation measured on real interactions, who is drifting, where your members go when they leave your room, and a ranked list of what to do next — with the draft already written.

Start with Flow — free

Keep reading

Last updated 2026-09-18. Skoolgrades is an independent tool and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Skool.