Is Substack Still Growing in 2026?

Published: September 2026

The honest answer depends entirely on which number you're looking at. Some of Substack's growth metrics are still climbing sharply; the one that arguably matters most for the company's own valuation - paid subscription growth - has genuinely stalled compared to its earlier trajectory. Both things are true at once, and conflating them gives a misleadingly rosy or misleadingly bleak picture depending on which side you pick.

The bull case: several numbers are still climbing fast

By several measures, Substack looks like a platform still in an active growth phase. The number of publications actually earning money on the platform nearly doubled in a single year - from roughly 50,000 in May 2025 to close to 100,000 by April 2026. Total active subscriptions across the platform sit around 50 million, with 5 million-plus paid. Gross writer revenue across the platform reached $450 million in 2025, with total payout volume exceeding $600 million annually across all creators, and the company itself was valued at $1.1 billion following a $100 million Series C round. None of these are the numbers of a platform that's plateaued.

The bear case: paid subscriber growth has genuinely slowed

Here's where the more skeptical read comes in, and it's worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as pessimism. Substack announced crossing 4 million paid subscriptions in late 2024, then 5 million by March 2025 - a jump that looked like acceleration at the time. But as of roughly a year later, the platform still hadn't announced crossing 6 million. One detailed analysis frames the significance plainly: "Now it's a year later, and it still hasn't hit 6 million paid subscriptions, which suggests to me that growth is decelerating" (Simon Owens). Before the 2024-2025 jump, Substack had been adding roughly 1 million paid subscribers a year - so if the platform has reverted to something closer to that baseline pace after one unusually strong year, that's a meaningfully different growth story than the one implied by a $1.1 billion valuation, which the same analysis notes assumes eventual scale "to the tune of like 50 million paid subscribers." At roughly 1 million a year, reaching that number "is going to be a real slog."

A real caveat on how confidently to read the slowdown

It's worth being precise about what's actually known here versus inferred. Substack has only ever announced round, approximate figures - "5 million-plus" rather than an exact count - which means the platform could have technically crossed 6 million without a specific announcement, and the "stalled at 5 million" read is itself somewhat speculative rather than a confirmed fact. The deceleration story is a reasonable inference from the available public data, not a certainty Substack has confirmed directly. Treat it as the more cautious, evidence-consistent read, not gospel.

Two different growth stories, not a contradiction

The doubling of monetizing publications (50,000 to nearly 100,000) and the stall in total paid subscriptions aren't actually inconsistent with each other - they're describing different parts of the ecosystem. More publications successfully turning on paid subscriptions at all is a sign the platform is getting easier to monetize on, or that more writers are trying; it doesn't require the overall subscriber pie to be growing at the same rate, since many of those newly-monetizing publications may be pulling from an existing subscriber base or converting existing free readers rather than the platform adding entirely new paying users overall.

What's unambiguously still accelerating: the Notes ecosystem specifically

Separate from the platform-wide subscription numbers, the parts of Substack most directly tied to Notes look like they're still in an active growth phase. Substack Notes reportedly drove over 32 million free subscriptions and nearly 500,000 paid subscriptions in a three-month window, and it's currently described as the top source of subscriber growth for publishers using the platform. Whatever is happening with the platform's overall paid-subscriber trajectory, the specific mechanism this blog focuses on - Notes-driven discovery, restacks, and recommendations - is not the part of the story showing signs of slowing down.

What this actually means if you're deciding whether to invest time here

For an individual writer, the platform-level growth-rate debate matters less than it might seem. Even in a "decelerating" scenario, Substack is still adding real paid subscribers, still processing hundreds of millions in creator payouts annually, and still has the recommendation network and Notes ecosystem functioning as genuine growth engines for individual writers regardless of the platform's aggregate trajectory. A platform-level slowdown in aggregate paid-subscriber growth doesn't mean an individual publication's growth ceiling has dropped - the realistic growth benchmarks for an individual writer covered elsewhere on this blog are still achievable regardless of which side of this debate turns out to be right at the platform level.

The bottom line

Substack isn't shrinking, and by several real measures - monetizing publications, total revenue, Notes-driven subscriptions - it's still growing quickly. But the specific number most tied to the platform's long-term valuation story, total paid subscriptions, has genuinely slowed from its 2024-2025 pace, and that's worth knowing if you're evaluating the platform's trajectory rather than just your own. For a writer actually using Notes to grow a specific publication, the more relevant fact is that the mechanisms this blog covers - restacks, recommendations, and Notes-driven discovery - remain active and effective regardless of how the platform-wide subscriber-growth debate eventually resolves.

Whatever the platform-level trajectory, NotesIQ helps you see and improve your own growth - the numbers that actually matter for your publication.