Passwords Are Losing, and the Numbers Finally Prove It

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What the report found

The FIDO Alliance — the industry group behind the passwordless authentication standard — released its State of Passkeys 2026 report in May, based on research across 11,000 consumers and 1,400 enterprise decision-makers in ten countries. A few numbers stand out: passkeys now see a 93% sign-in success rate compared to 63% for passwords, and average sign-in time drops to roughly 8.5 seconds versus over 30 seconds for password-based logins. Awareness has also jumped to 90% of consumers, with about 5 billion passkeys now active worldwide.

The security case is the more important one. Passkeys are built to be phishing-resistant by design — unlike a password, there’s no shared secret that can be typed into a fake login page, because the credential is cryptographically tied to the real site and your device. That’s a structural fix, not a behavioral one — it doesn’t depend on you spotting a scam email, which is precisely where most password-based breaches start.

Why adoption still lags

Here’s the more interesting number: even among organizations that have rolled out passkeys, the majority still keep passwords running in parallel as a fallback, and a large share of individual users still don’t use passkeys everywhere they’re offered. The barrier at this point isn’t awareness — it’s habit. People default to what’s familiar, even when the safer option is one tap away.

The practical takeaway

Most major platforms — Google, Apple, Microsoft, and a growing list of banks and retailers — now offer passkeys as a login option, usually sitting quietly in account security settings labeled “passkey” or “sign in without a password.” The action worth taking today: pick your two or three most important accounts (email first, since it’s the recovery path to everything else) and set up a passkey where it’s offered, instead of waiting for a breach to force the decision.

Passkeys aren’t foolproof — device loss and account-recovery flows are still an active area of security research — but they close off phishing, which remains the largest single cause of account compromise today.