The Most Commonly Used Passwords of 2025 Uncovered on World Password Day

Ash Brown
May 4
2 min read

Cybernews researchers analyzed 19B passwords and discovered how people create them: their favorite animals, pop culture terms, celebrities, cities, food, names, swearwords, and more.

Researchers analyzed 19,030,305,929 passwords, of which only 1,143,815,266 (6%) were identified as unique.

“The ‘default password’ problem remains one of the most persistent and dangerous patterns in leaked credential datasets. Entries ‘password’ (56M) and ‘admin’ (53M) reveal that users overwhelmingly rely on simple, predictable defaults,” said Neringa Macijauskaitė, information security researcher at Cybernews.

Researchers developed custom wordlists covering diverse themes to better understand password composition. To read the full research and see those wordlists, please click here.

Key findings:

Most people use 8–10 character passwords (42%), with eight being the most popular.
Almost a third (27%) of the passwords analyzed consist of only lowercase letters and digits.
Almost 20% of unique passwords mixed case letters and numbers, but had no special characters.
Passwords composed of profane or offensive words might seem rare, but they're very common in practice.
Despite years of being called out, default and “lazy” passwords like “password”, “admin”, and “123456” are still a common pattern.
Researchers found “1234” in almost 4% of all passwords – over 727 million passwords use this sequence.
338 million passwords use the “123456” combination.
Only 6% of passwords are unique, leaving other users highly vulnerable to dictionary attacks.
Ana is the most popular name, used in almost 1%, or 178.8M passwords.
The positive wordlist is dominated by words like love (87M), sun (34M), dream (6.1M), joy (6.9M), and freedom (2M).
Some of the most frequently used pop culture terms in passwords include Mario (9.6M), Joker (3.1M), Batman (3.9M), Thor (6.2M), and, surprisingly, Elsa (2.9M) from Disney’s “Frozen”.
Swear words are also very common in passwords. The top entry, ass (165M).
Users often craft their passwords using fuck (16M), shit (6.5M), dick (3.2M), and bitch (3.2M).
The most popular city for passwords is Rome (13M), while 9.8M passwords include lion, and 7.8M – fox.
Summer (3.8M) is the most popular season, and users prefer Monday (0.8M) the most to protect their accounts.
May (28M) appears in lots of passwords but also in many other words used to create passwords.
The second most popular month was April (5.2M).
Over 36M passwords included tea, 10.7M – apple, 4.9M – rice, 3.6M – orange.
Google holds the door for 25.9M accounts, followed by Facebook (18.7M), and Kia (12.7M).
Many believe that hackers will be repelled by boss (10M), hunter (6.6M), cook (4.2M) and other professions.
Soccer (4M) is a more popular account safeguard than football (3.4M).
Carolina (1.9M), Dakota (1.2M), and Texas (1.1M) are the three most popular US states that will not keep hackers away.
Almost 24M users believe “god” will make their password secure, and 20M rely on “hell”.