By the end of December 2025, Kenya had 51,356,425 mobile money subscriptions. That represents a 5.6% increase from the 48,630,797 recorded at the end of September.
This means that roughly 2.7 million Kenyans activated or reactivated mobile money accounts in a single quarter. The penetration rate now stands at 98% of Kenya’s population.
The sector statistics report from Communications Authority says that this growth is “mainly attributed to the busy festive season that coincides with the reference period.”
The October-to-December quarter contains some of the country’s highest-spending weeks of the year, where school fees, Christmas, and end-of-year celebrations all converge, and the mobile money data reflects this.
More people activated accounts as the number of registered mobile money agents grew by 4.4% to 501,399. This indicates that more access points were available to facilitate cash-in, cash-out, and transfers. The system scaled in both directions simultaneously.
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Who Controls the Market
Safaricom’s M-Pesa holds 89% of mobile money subscriptions in Kenya. Airtel Money is second at 11%. T-Kash, operated by Telkom Kenya, registers 0% percent, which is a rounding artifact but indicative of negligible market share.
The concentration here is more extreme than in any other segment of Kenya’s mobile market. Safaricom holds 66.8% of overall SIM subscriptions and 64.3% of mobile broadband subscriptions, making it dominant in both, but with meaningful competition.
In mobile money, M-Pesa is in a category of its own.
Mobile money in Kenya is more than a payment tool, as it serves as the on-ramp to savings products, credit facilities, insurance, and merchant payments.
A service with 89% market share in that ecosystem has structural influence over a large portion of the country’s financial activity.
The Central Bank of Kenya and the Communications Authority have both examined this concentration over the years, and the data here confirms it has not meaningfully changed.
The 98% Figure Deserves Scrutiny
A 98% mobile money penetration rate is certainly a striking headline. It means that for every 100 Kenyans (including children and the elderly), there are 98 mobile money subscriptions. However, it’s worth understanding what this figure actually counts.
These are subscriptions, not unique individuals. A person can hold more than one mobile money account, such as an M-Pesa account, an Airtel Money account, or accounts registered under different phone numbers.
The 98% figure is a ratio of subscriptions to population, not a survey of individual uptake. CA itself notes that this report measures supply-side data; actual demand-side figures, including how many unique individuals actively use mobile money, are collected separately through national surveys in partnership with the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics.
With that caveat in place, the trend is still clear-cut. Kenya had 42,302,833 mobile money subscriptions in December 2024. One year later it has 51,356,425, a year-on-year increase of over 9 million subscriptions, representing a 21.4% annual growth rate.
Agents as Physical Infrastructure
The 501,399 registered mobile money agents deserve more attention than they typically receive. These agents, which are typically small shops, kiosks, and retail outlets, are the physical layer of Kenya’s mobile financial system.
They handle the conversion between digital money and physical cash, which remains essential in a country where a large portion of commerce, especially in rural areas, still operates in cash.
READ: The Mobile Money Paradox of Kenyan Finance: Why the Phone Ate the Bank But the Branch Refuses to Die
The 4.4% growth in agents in a single quarter means roughly 21,000 new agent locations were registered between October and December 2025. That expansion is important because access to an agent determines whether mobile money is useful for a given person.
An account registered in a town with three agents nearby has very different practical utility from one registered in a rural area where the nearest agent is an hour’s journey.
Kenya’s mobile money story is often told as a technology story, but the agent network is the reminder that it is equally a logistics story and one that depends on 501,399 human intermediaries operating across the country to make the digital system function in the physical world.
