Everyone wants a single number for average email open rate, something to compare themselves against, but the honest answer is that the number moves depending on your industry, your list size, and, increasingly, how many of your subscribers use an iPhone.
Open rate is measured with a tiny, mostly invisible tracking pixel that loads when someone opens your email, and the platform counts that load as an open. That's always been an imperfect measure, since it depends on images loading at all, but it used to be roughly consistent across a list. It isn't anymore, which is the biggest reason benchmark numbers you find online vary so much depending on when they were published.
Your own average also depends heavily on list age and hygiene. A freshly built list of people who just signed up will open at a much higher rate than a list you've been mailing for three years without ever pruning it, so comparing your number to an industry benchmark only tells you so much until you've cleaned house.
Apple's Mail Privacy Protection pre-loads images, including tracking pixels, for a large share of Apple Mail users automatically, whether or not that person ever actually opened the email. This means a chunk of your reported opens aren't real opens, they're Apple's servers fetching the pixel in the background, and depending on how much of your list uses Apple Mail, that can inflate your reported open rate meaningfully.
This isn't a reason to ignore open rate entirely, but it is a reason to stop treating it as a precise number and start treating it as directional, especially if you're comparing your rate today to a rate from before Apple rolled MPP out broadly. I go into the mechanism and what to do about it in more detail in how Apple Mail Privacy Protection affects your open rate.
With the caveat above in mind, here's roughly where average email open rate tends to land by industry as of 2026, based on the ranges I see most often across client accounts and published benchmark reports:
Treat these as a rough compass, not a scoreboard. A list well below its category range usually points to a deliverability or list-quality issue worth investigating, while a list within range still has room to improve through better subject lines and segmentation.
Click rate and click-to-open rate tell you more about whether your content is working than open rate does, since they require an actual decision from the reader rather than a pixel loading automatically. Reply rate matters even more if you're doing anything relationship-driven, like B2B outreach or a paid community.
Underneath all of it sits deliverability rate, the share of your sends that actually reach an inbox instead of bouncing or getting filtered before anyone had the chance to open or ignore it. A great open rate on a list that's shrinking because of bounces isn't actually a great sign, it's a sign your healthy subscribers are carrying a shrinking, increasingly filtered list.
Start with list hygiene. Removing cold, unengaged, or invalid addresses raises every rate that matters almost immediately, because you stop diluting your engaged base with people who were never going to open anything. My guide on how to clean an email list walks through the process.
From there, sharpen subject lines, see writing better subject lines, and check that your emails are actually landing in Primary rather than Promotions, since a subject line can't fix a placement problem. If you're not sure where your emails are landing, Unbury's Inbox Scorecard is a free way to check before you spend time optimizing copy nobody's seeing.
Apple's Mail Privacy Protection automatically pre-fetches images, including tracking pixels, for a large portion of Apple Mail users, which counts as an open even when nobody actually opened the email. The jump usually reflects that shift rather than a real change in engagement.
It depends heavily on your industry and list quality, but roughly 20-30% is a reasonable middle ground for most engaged, well-maintained lists, with media and nonprofit lists often running higher and ecommerce promotional lists often running a bit lower.
Yes, as a directional signal and especially as a way to catch sudden drops that might indicate a deliverability problem, but it shouldn't be your primary success metric anymore given how unreliable it's become on Apple Mail.
Click rate, click-to-open rate, and deliverability rate together give a much more honest picture. Reply rate matters too if your emails are meant to start a conversation rather than just get read.
If your open rate looks fine but replies and clicks have gone quiet, the issue might be placement, not the pixel. Check where your emails are actually landing with a free <a href="/scorecard">Inbox Scorecard</a>.