A good newsletter open rate is not a single number. The most honest answer is a range, bracketed by who's on your list, how big the list has grown, and what share of your readers use Apple Mail. Most of what shows up in the SERP for this query skips that nuance and prints one benchmark, usually somewhere between 20% and 40%, with no caveat. Both of those numbers can be right at the same time.
The reason is Apple Mail Privacy Protection, which has been quietly warping the metric since September 2021 and is now the single largest source of noise in your dashboard. Below is the honest version: what the benchmarks really say, why they disagree, where your number should sit, and what to measure when the open rate stops being a useful signal.
What the benchmarks actually say
Three reputable sources, three different averages, all published in the last twelve months.
- Brevo: an average open rate of 20.73% across marketing emails, and 33.87% when Apple MPP opens are included, per their 2026 benchmarks report. The 13-point gap between those two figures is the MPP effect, in one company's data, isolated.
- MailerLite: an average open rate of around 41% across newsletter sends, with click-to-open ratios near 7%, per their industry benchmarks. This number does not strip out MPP, so it sits at the high end of the range.
- Beehiiv: open rates across the platform average above 41%, per their internal benchmarks. Their data skews creator-led, with smaller, fresher lists.
Three publishers. Two roughly agree at 41%. One reports 20.73% on the same metric. None of them is wrong. They are reporting different slices of the same noisy measurement.
The Apple Mail Privacy Protection problem
Apple Mail Privacy Protection launched with iOS 15 in September 2021. It does one thing that broke the open rate as a metric: it preloads every email on Apple's servers, including the 1x1 tracking pixel that every email tool uses to detect opens. The pixel fires whether or not the reader ever looked at the message.
According to Litmus's email client market share data, Apple Mail accounted for roughly 49% of all tracked opens in early 2025. Close to half of every reported open in your dashboard is a server, not a person. That share is bigger if your list skews to founders, designers, and consultants. It is smaller if your list is heavy on Outlook or Gmail web.
The practical effect: a list that read at a healthy 28% in August 2021 looked like it was reading at 45% in October 2021, with no change in human behaviour. Newsletter operators who started measuring after MPP rolled out have never known a different number. They are comparing a phantom-inflated benchmark to a phantom-inflated send, and the math works out, but the meaning has drifted.
List size matters more than industry
Most "average open rate" tables are sorted by industry. The more useful split is by list size. Smaller, fresher lists open dramatically better than older, larger ones, almost regardless of what the newsletter is about.
- A list under 1,000 subscribers, mostly added in the last six months, will typically open at 40–55% post-MPP, or roughly 25–35% if you strip Apple opens.
- A list in the 5,000–25,000 range tends to settle at 25–40%, depending on how aggressively inactive subscribers are pruned.
- A list past 100,000 with no list hygiene will land around 15–25%. The same publisher, sending the same edition, would have opened at twice that rate when the list was a tenth the size.
Two reasons this happens. New subscribers are warm; they signed up recently and remember why. Old subscribers forget, drift, or change addresses. And the inbox-provider algorithms (Gmail's in particular) treat unopened mail as a deliverability signal. The bigger and older the list, the more dead weight it carries, and the lower the open rate trends as a result.
What to measure instead
Opens are still a useful directional signal. They are no longer a precise one. The metrics worth watching alongside, in rough order of usefulness for a publisher:
Click-to-open rate (CTOR). Of the people who opened, what share clicked something. This metric is MPP-resistant because clicks require a human. MailerLite puts a healthy CTOR at around 7%; Campaign Monitor puts the healthy range higher, at 10–15%. Either way, watching CTOR over time tells you whether the people who actually opened found anything worth doing.
Replies per send. A reply is the highest-trust signal a reader can give you, and almost impossible to fake. A consulting or coaching newsletter that books a single discovery call per send is, on the math, doing better than a 50,000-list newsletter with no replies at all. The number is small (one reply per thousand is a strong figure), but its correlation with revenue is high.
The two-week engaged-subscriber count. How many people on the list have opened or clicked in the last 14 days. This is the number you can actually reach this month. It is closer in meaning to the "email reaches 21% of subscribers" figure we cite elsewhere on this blog, and it is the number worth comparing to your follower count when thinking about subscribers vs followers.
Conversion to a paid action within 30 days. Bookings, signups, purchases, replies that turn into work. If the newsletter exists to serve a business, this is the only number that ultimately decides whether the open rate matters.
What "good" actually means
A good newsletter open rate, defined honestly, has three properties. It is stable over time, it pairs with a healthy CTOR, and it tracks with a roughly stable count of two-week-active subscribers. The absolute number matters less than the shape of the trend.
If your open rate is 45% but half your audience is on Apple Mail and your CTOR is 1%, you have a phantom-inflated metric and a disengagement problem. If your open rate is 22% but the people who open click at 12% and reply often enough to fill a calendar, you have a list that is doing what a list is for.
The benchmark you are looking for is yours. Last month's open rate, last quarter's, last year's. If those numbers are flat or rising, and the click and reply numbers are rising with them, the open rate is fine. If they are slowly falling, the answer is usually list hygiene, not a copywriting fix.
What this means for tooling
Most newsletter dashboards still lead with the open rate, in the biggest font, on the front page of the analytics tab. It is the number that sells the product. It is also the number most distorted by the change Apple shipped almost five years ago. Treat the headline figure as a directional read, and design the rest of your view around CTOR, replies, and the engaged-subscriber count.
The other half of the problem is structural. Most creators & solopreneurs end up with the newsletter analytics in one tool, the blog stats in a second, the lead-magnet form data in a third, and no connecting tissue between them. The same subscriber shows up four times, untagged, and the question "which page brought this reader, and have they engaged in the last two weeks?" takes a spreadsheet to answer.
Nashra is the publishing OS we built for the other model. Your newsletter, your Magic Links, and your subscriber list all sit on the same spine, tagged at source, wired to automations, from the moment they go live. One source of truth, one view of engagement, one place to ask the questions opens stopped answering.
Closing
A good newsletter open rate, in 2026, is the one you can defend after you account for Apple Mail, your list age, and the CTOR underneath it. A 45% number on a phantom-inflated dashboard is not better than a 25% number paired with clicks and replies. Pick the metrics that require a human to register, and let the open rate be what it now is: a directional read.
And the wider frame still holds. Opens, however noisy, are still dramatically more reliable than reach on any social platform. A subscriber converts roughly 10× better than a follower, even on a list whose open rate is half what your dashboard claims. The right answer is rarely to chase the open rate. It is to grow the thing the open rate is a proxy for: a list of people who chose to hear from you.
