More than you think
Count the accounts you've made. Not the ones you use — the ones that exist: the streaming service you tried once, the store that made you register to check out, the app that emailed a receipt in 2019. Each one asked for a password. The honest number is: you have no idea, and it's a lot more than you think.
Researchers have put a figure on it — and the shape of the story surprises. The pile of personal passwords roughly doubled in four years, then, for the first time, began to fall.
By the numbers
The password pile, by the year
Average personal passwords per person, per NordPass research.
Before the accounts-for-everything years — already more than anyone can memorize.
More than double in four years — a new login for every app, store, and service.
The first drop, as single sign-on and passkeys fold logins together.
That last number matters more than it looks. The count is finally falling because people are consolidating — signing in with one account instead of making another, letting passkeys and single sign-on collapse many logins into few. The direction of travel is toward fewer secrets, not more. But 120 is still impossible to hold in your head — so nobody does.
What people do
Faced with too many, people reuse one
Google, with the Harris Poll, surveyed 3,000 Americans. The coping strategy, laid bare:
reuse the same password across multiple accounts.
use the same password for every account they have.
use a unique password everywhere — the safe minority.
The real risk
Reuse is the quiet danger
When one service is breached — and services are breached constantly — attackers replay the leaked email-and-password pairs against banks, email, and shops. It's called credential stuffing, and it only works because the same password opens more than one door. One leak becomes ten. (It's also why storing passwords in your browser isn't the finish line.)
Convenient until the day it isn't. Reuse turns a single breach into a skeleton key for your whole life online.
"Use a unique password everywhere" is right and useless — no one memorizes 120 of anything. The system, not the person, has to change.
The bigger load
It was never only about passwords
Each of those accounts also made you re-type your identity — name, address, date of birth, phone, card — over and over. The real load isn't 120 passwords. It's 120 copies of the same handful of facts, each guarded by a secret you were meant to invent and remember. No wonder people reuse.
Just 11 facts describe 94% of everything you're ever asked to enter, across 30 common signup forms.
The average checkout — and a too-long form drives 17% of abandoned carts.
The fix
The fix is fewer, not better
You'll never win by memorizing 120 stronger passwords. The count is already falling because people are consolidating — the whole idea, taken to its end: one encrypted identity, not a hundred scattered secrets.
A passkey replaces the password for one account — nothing to reuse, nothing to phish. Good, and only half the picture.
One place for the facts every account keeps asking for — encrypted so only you can read it, and filled into forms so you stop re-typing.
The number is finally shrinking, and you can help it along — by keeping the part that matters in one place that fills the rest for you, instead of a hundred you can't remember.
One identity, not a hundred secrets
The password explosion was really an accounts explosion — and the accounts were really your identity, copied into a hundred places you can't see. Simply Once keeps it in one place, encrypted, and fills the rest for you.
Part of the guide to protecting your personal data online →
Sources
- NordPass, How many passwords does the average person have? — ~80 passwords (Feb 2020) → 100 (Oct 2020) → nearly 170 (2024 peak) → ~120 (2026), with the recent decline attributed to single sign-on and passkeys.
- Google / Harris Poll, Online Security Survey (2019) — of 3,000 US adults, 65% reuse passwords across accounts and 13% use the same password everywhere.
- Baymard Institute, Cart & checkout abandonment research — an average of 14.88 checkout form fields; ~70% cart abandonment; a too-long or complicated checkout cited in 17% of abandonments.
- Simply Once, 94% of signup-form data you already gave away — 11 facts describe 94% of the fields across 30 common signup forms.