Q2 2026 · Investor update

Users first. Growth followed.

58.7 million people learned on Duolingo every day last quarter — DAUs up 23% and accelerating — after we chose product and user growth over near-term monetization. FY2025 was our first $1 billion revenue year.

Luis von AhnCo-founder & CEO

August 5, 2026Q2 2026 results

Pittsburgh, PANasdaq: DUOL

A DeckSpace template built from Duolingo, Inc.'s public shareholder letters, press releases and SEC filings (all figures cited on the slide). Not an official Duolingo communication; the trademark belongs to Duolingo, Inc.

Downtown Pittsburgh at sunrise seen from the Duquesne Incline, with an incline car in the foreground

Pittsburgh, home of Duolingo's headquarters · photo: Dllu, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The quarter in six numbers

Q2 2026: the user base accelerated, and the P&L held.

Three months ended June 30, 2026. Year-over-year change in each box.

Daily active users

0M

+23% YoY — an acceleration from +21% in Q1

Revenue

$0M

+18% YoY · subscription revenue $258.0M, +22%

Paid subscribers

0M

+17% YoY · MAUs 140.6M, +10%

Total bookings

$0M

+8% YoY (+6% constant currency) · subscription bookings $250.3M, +10%

Adjusted EBITDA

$0M

25.9% margin · net income $33.2M · gross margin 72.6%

Cash & short-term investments

$0M

Free cash flow $78.6M in the quarter (26.3% margin)

Source: Duolingo Q2 2026 Shareholder Letter and press release, August 5, 2026 (Form 8-K, sec.gov). Adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow are non-GAAP measures as defined in the letter.

The strategy, in order

We manage the business for DAUs — and we told you so a year ago.

1

Make the product better every week

~350

changes tested in every weekly app release — the "Green Machine" of small, compounding improvements to retention. AI-assisted content creation lets us rebuild whole courses in a quarter.

2

Grow the people who learn daily

+23%

DAU growth in Q2, up from +21% in Q1. Current-user retention hit an all-time high of 84%. Target: 100M DAUs in 2028.

3

Monetize without hurting growth

+8%

bookings growth — deliberately slower. Longer free trials, Video Call moved into Super, no paywall that costs us learners.

Step 1 — Product. Every week the app ships hundreds of A/B-tested changes; almost none is a "feature", most are tiny. The point is retention: a learner who comes back tomorrow is worth more than one we monetize today.

Sources: Q2 2026 earnings call, August 5, 2026 (transcript, fool.com) — "~350 changes", CURR, trials, Video Call; Q2 2026 Shareholder Letter (DAU +23%, CURR 84%); Q1 2026 Shareholder Letter, May 4, 2026 (100M DAU target for 2028).

Daily active users

From 31 million to 59 million daily learners in ten quarters.

DAUs, millions (quarterly average)

+23%

YoY DAU growth in Q2 2026 — after lapping +40% in Q2 2025 and +51% in Q4 2024.

140.6M

monthly active users, +10% YoY. DAU/MAU is now about 42% — more of the people who try Duolingo make it a daily habit.

100M

DAU target for 2028 target. For 2026 we guided to roughly 20% DAU growth; H1 ran ahead of that.

Sources: DAUs by quarter from Duolingo shareholder letters and press releases (Q1 2024 – Q2 2026), sec.gov and investors.duolingo.com; MAUs and DAU growth, Q2 2026 Shareholder Letter, Aug 5, 2026; 2026 DAU-growth expectation, Q4 2025 Shareholder Letter, Feb 2026; 100M DAU target, Q1 2026 Shareholder Letter, May 4, 2026.

Revenue by quarter

Revenue keeps compounding; bookings are the number to watch.

20242025 – 2026Q3 2026 guidance (projection)

$298.5M

Q2 2026 revenue, +18% YoY. Subscription revenue $258.0M (+22%) is 86% of the total.

$289.1M

Q2 bookings, +8% YoY. Revenue is recognised over the life of a subscription, so today's revenue growth reflects bookings from the past year — and bookings growth is where our users-first choices show up first.

$302M

Q3 2026 revenue guidance (+11% YoY) projection; Q3 bookings guidance $307M (+9%).

Sources: quarterly revenue, Duolingo shareholder letters / press releases Q1 2024 – Q2 2026 (sec.gov, investors.duolingo.com); Q2 2026 subscription revenue, bookings and Q3 2026 guidance, Q2 2026 Shareholder Letter, Aug 5, 2026. Guidance is a company projection, not a result.

Fiscal 2025 in review

Our first billion-dollar year — at a 29.5% adjusted EBITDA margin.

Annual revenue, $MFY2026 guidance (projection)

FY2025 revenue

$1,037.6M

+39% vs. $748.0M in 2024

FY2025 bookings

$1,158.4M

+33% · subscription bookings $996.3M

Adjusted EBITDA

$305.9M

29.5% margin, up from 25.7% in 2024

Free cash flow

$360.4M

34.7% margin · year-end cash $1,036.4M

Sources: Q4 / FY2025 Shareholder Letter, Feb 2026 (Form 8-K) and FY2025 Form 10-K, sec.gov; FY2024 figures from the Q4 / FY2024 Shareholder Letter; FY2021–2023 revenue from Forms 10-K. GAAP net income for FY2025 was $414.1M and included a $256.7M tax benefit from releasing a valuation allowance.

Q2 2026 versus Q2 2025

The scorecard, line by line.

Metric	Q2 2026	Q2 2025	YoY
Users
Daily active users	58.7M	47.7M	+23%
Monthly active users	140.6M	128.3M	+10%
Paid subscribers (end of period)	12.7M	10.9M	+17%
Top line
Revenue	$298.5M	$252.3M	+18%
Subscription revenue	$258.0M	$210.7M	+22%
Total bookings	$289.1M	$268.0M	+8%
Subscription bookings	$250.3M	$227.3M	+10%
Profitability
Gross margin	72.6%	72.4%	+20 bps
Net income (GAAP)	$33.2M11.1%	$44.8M17.8%	−26%
Adjusted EBITDA (non-GAAP)	$77.3M25.9%	$78.7M31.2%	−2%
Free cash flow (non-GAAP)	$78.6M26.3%	$86.3M34.2%	−9%

Sources: Q2 2026 Shareholder Letter, Aug 5, 2026; Q2 2025 Shareholder Letter, Aug 2025 (both Form 8-K exhibits, sec.gov). Percentages in small type are margins on revenue. The lower margin is the plan: we are spending on user growth, AI features in the free and Super tiers, and marketing.

Engagement and retention

The habit is the moat. Retention has never been higher.

Current-user retention

84%

An all-time high for CURR, up about one point year over year. Small weekly improvements, compounded.

Q2 2026 Shareholder Letter · call, Aug 5, 2026

Streak revival, June 2026

15.4M

learners revived a long-term streak in a one-time campaign; about 8M of them had been inactive. Bringing lapsed learners back is cheaper than finding new ones.

Q2 2026 Shareholder Letter

Streaks of 7+ days

43MDAUs

at year-end 2025 — and about 15M learners held a streak of 365 days or more.

FY2025 Form 10-K

Organic reach

1B+

social-media impressions per quarter. Duo the owl is a marketing channel most companies would pay for; we own it.

Q2 2026 earnings call

Retention drives everything downstream: a learner who stays a second year costs nothing to re-acquire, and converts to paid at their own pace rather than ours.

AI, Video Call and Max

AI got 30× cheaper for us this year. We are passing it down to more learners.

Cost of one Video Call with Lily

Before

$0.30

Now

<$0.01

Driven by moving most inference to open-weight models, with no loss in quality we can measure. AI and hosting are tens of millions of dollars of cost of revenue; internal AI operations run about $10M.

Source: Q2 2026 earnings call, Aug 5, 2026 (transcript, fool.com). The bar for "now" is drawn at $0.01 for visibility; the actual figure is below one cent.

Video Call is moving into Super. Most new Super Duolingo subscribers now get it; the goal is every Super subscriber. Over the past year the average words spoken per user in Video Call more than doubled.
Speaking practice is everywhere: spoken answers, audio flashcards and free AI-powered Speaking Adventures across free and paid tiers.
Max's future is an open question. If premium features can live in Super without losing revenue, one possibility is to sunset Max. No decision has been made — treat this as a scenario, not a plan.
Margins reflect the choice: gross margin was 72.6% in Q2; we guide to about 71% in Q3 and 71.6% for the year as AI features reach more learners.
Content at AI speed: 20,500 course units published in Q1 2026 alone; Duolingo Score coverage extended to 129 (CEFR B2).

Sources: Q2 2026 Shareholder Letter and earnings call, Aug 5, 2026; Q1 2026 Shareholder Letter, May 4, 2026 (Video Call words, Speaking Adventures, course units, Score); Q4 2025 Shareholder Letter, Feb 2026 (Video Call to Super tier). Gross-margin guidance is a projection.

Beyond languages

Chess found seven million daily players in under a year.

Chess

7M+DAUs

in less than a year from launch — over a million by the end of its first quarter (iOS, English only) and past seven million by year-end 2025.

Q2 2025 and Q4 2025 Shareholder Letters

Math and Music

1–9MDAUs each

"single-digit millions" of daily users each. Math is refocused on K-12 students — the people who actually need to learn it; Music is being rebuilt with the NextBeat studio we acquired.

Q2 2026 earnings call; Q4 2025 Shareholder Letter

Duolingo English Test

6,100+institutions

accept DET results, including 5,300+ higher-education programs and 24 of the top 25 U.S. undergraduate programs by international enrollment.

FY2025 Form 10-K

Courses

250+

language courses, for more than 130M monthly active users at year-end 2025. Chinese, Japanese and Korean courses were substantially rebuilt in 2026.

FY2025 Form 10-K; Q1 2026 Shareholder Letter

Team

900+employees

including 430+ engineers, at December 31, 2025. Stock-based compensation is expected to be about 15% of revenue in 2026.

FY2025 Form 10-K; Q4 2025 Shareholder Letter

China

#2

market by DAUs, monetizing at levels comparable to France. We run local models there by law and flag the regulatory risk plainly.

Q2 2026 earnings call

Outlook and capital allocation

Guidance: bookings +11%, revenue +16%, margin raised to 26.5%. projections

Guidance (Aug 5, 2026)	Q3 2026	FY 2026
Total bookings	$307M+8.9%	$1,285M+10.9%
Revenue	$302M+11.1%	$1,207M+16.3%
Adjusted EBITDA	$76M25.2%	$320M26.5%
Gross margin	≈71.0%	≈71.6%
Free cash flow	—	>$375M

$400M

share repurchase authorization (Feb 2026). $44.4M bought in Q2 (~432K shares); $72M and ~700K shares cumulatively. Diluted share growth expected at 3.5–4% for 2026.

$1.31B

cash and short-term investments at June 30, 2026 — enough to keep investing through a deliberate margin trough.

100M

DAUs in 2028 is the goal we are managing to; the FY2026 margin raise came from gross-margin flow-through, not from slowing investment.

Sources: Q2 2026 Shareholder Letter and earnings call, Aug 5, 2026 (guidance, buyback, cash, FCF expectation); Q4 2025 Shareholder Letter, Feb 2026 (buyback authorization, dilution). All guidance figures are forward-looking company projections and may not be achieved.

Pittsburgh skyline from Mount Washington

Pittsburgh from Mount Washington · photo: Cbaile19, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Why we do this

Teach a billion people. Then keep going.

"Any monetization that we're doing that is counter to DAU growth, don't do it."Luis von Ahn, Q2 2026 earnings call, August 5, 2026

Luis von Ahn, co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, at Wikimania 2015

Luis von AhnCo-founder & CEO, Duolingo, Inc.
photo: EneasMx, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (2015)

Sources (all public, retrieved Sept 2026)

Q2 2026 Shareholder Letter, press release and earnings call · Aug 5, 2026 · Form 8-K, sec.gov; transcript, fool.com
Q1 2026 Shareholder Letter · May 4, 2026 · Form 8-K
Q4 / FY2025 Shareholder Letter · Feb 2026 · Form 8-K; FY2025 Form 10-K
Q3 2025 (Nov 5, 2025), Q2 2025 (Aug 2025) Shareholder Letters; Q1 2025 Form 10-Q
Q4 / FY2024 Shareholder Letter (Feb 2025); 2024 quarterly press releases, investors.duolingo.com
FY2021–2023 revenue: Forms 10-K, sec.gov

Images and marks

Duolingo wordmark (2019) — Wikimedia Commons, public domain (simple text/shapes); a registered trademark of Duolingo, Inc., used here only to identify the company
Pittsburgh from the Duquesne Incline — Dllu, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Pittsburgh from Mount Washington — Cbaile19, CC0 · Luis von Ahn — EneasMx, CC BY-SA 4.0 (all via Wikimedia Commons)

A DeckSpace template built from public filings. Not issued by, affiliated with or endorsed by Duolingo, Inc. Non-GAAP measures as defined in the company's letters.