Pakistan has spent years talking about “digital inclusion” in the same slightly haunted tone it uses for “tax reform” and “police reform”: everyone agrees it’s necessary, nobody is fully sure it’s happening, and the evidence arrives in fragments. The new Household Integrated Economic Survey (HIES) 2024–25 lands like a rare clean data point in that fog. According to the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS), the share of households with internet access has jumped to 70%, up from 34%, while the proportion of individuals using the internet has risen to 57%, up from 17%. If those figures feel almost too dramatic to be believed, that’s because they’re not merely telling you “more Pakistanis are online.” They’re telling you something more structural: connectivity is moving from being an individual privilege (one person with a phone and a data package) into becoming a household condition—something that sits in the background of daily life like electricity, even if unevenly and imperfectly. “Household internet access” isn’t the same thing as “every person is online,” but it’s a big shift in what becomes possible: shared access, shared devices, shared expectations. It changes what commerce, schooling, health information, and government services can plausibly assume about the average home.
The survey itself matters almost as much as the headline numbers. PBS and the Planning Ministry are leaning hard on the fact that this was the first fully digital HIES, run after the Digital Population and Housing Census 2023—and conducted using tablet-based enumeration, quarterly fieldwork, and an integrated system for monitoring and task management. PBS’s own documentation describes HIES 2024–25 as the first-ever digital round in the provincial HIES series and the 16th round in the broader HIES/PSLM series, with fieldwork running September 2024 to June 2025, covering 32,814 households, including AJK and GB. The PID release puts it similarly: field operations completed in June 2025, covering roughly 32,000 households, using an ERP-style system for real-time monitoring.
That “digital survey” angle isn’t just a vanity badge. It has two implications. First, digital tooling can reduce certain kinds of error—built-in checks, geotagging, validation rules—while also introducing new risks (training quality, device issues, enumerator compliance, respondents interpreting questions differently). PBS notes it updated modules—especially around ICT—in line with international measurement guidance, explicitly referencing the ITU’s household ICT measurement manual. Second, a digital-first national data stack signals that the state is trying to become legible to itself in real time, not years later in an Excel file that nobody trusts. Whether it succeeds is a separate question, but the intent is visible in the machinery.
So what do the numbers actually say?
At the top line: 70% of homes report internet access, and 57% of individuals report using the internet. PBS also reports 96% of households have mobile or smartphone facility—another reminder that Pakistan’s internet story is mostly a phone story, with all the benefits and distortions that creates (cheap reach, fragile quality, platform dependence, and a tendency to confuse “being connected” with “being empowered”).
HIES doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and it helps to triangulate. DataReportal’s “Digital 2026: Pakistan” estimates 117 million internet users and 45.6% online penetration by the end of 2025. That’s not a contradiction; it’s a reminder that these are different measures built on different methodologies. HIES is household-survey-based and speaks in the language of homes and people sampled; DataReportal aggregates from multiple sources and estimates national penetration. One can show rapid growth in “access at home” and “self-reported use,” while the other gives a population-wide penetration snapshot with its own assumptions. The useful move is not to force them to match, but to read them together: Pakistan’s connectivity is expanding, yet the country still has a lot of people who remain offline or only intermittently online—and the difference between “sometimes online” and “reliably online” is where the real development drama lives. There’s also a telecom-side plausibility check. A recent report referencing PTA’s annual reporting claims broadband connections have crossed 150 million and broadband penetration is above 60%, alongside telecom coverage above 92%. You can quibble with definitions—SIM-based subscriptions are not unique humans, broadband “connections” can be multiple per person, and household access can be shared—but the direction of travel supports the idea that connectivity has widened fast enough to produce the HIES jump.
The more interesting part is what this does to Pakistan’s economic and social architecture. When household access moves from 34% to 70%, you’re not just adding users; you’re changing the baseline for markets. A consumer internet economy doesn’t require that everyone be online; it requires that enough households be connected that digital behaviour becomes normal: ordering, comparing, paying, learning, searching, applying, complaining, reviewing, and checking. In Pakistan, where so much commerce still runs on cash, trust, and habit, expanded internet access acts like a solvent. It dissolves certain frictions (information asymmetry, distance, gatekeeping) and creates new ones (scams, manipulation, platform monopolies, predatory lending, and the subtle tyranny of “app-only” services). None of this is automatically good or bad—it’s simply what happens when connectivity spreads faster than institutions.
It also reframes the policy conversation. The Planning Minister’s comments in the PID release are trying to claim the moral high ground of “evidence-based policymaking” and “data-driven governance,” arguing that updated datasets strengthen research and business decision-making. Fine. But the real test is whether the state uses this visibility to improve service delivery, or to expand surveillance and bureaucratic reach without improving outcomes. A digitised society gives governments sharper instruments. It does not guarantee that they’ll play the right song. HIES’s wider highlights are a reminder that “digital” is tangled with everything else. The same release that celebrates internet growth also points to shifts in education and health indicators—literacy at 63% (up from 60%), out-of-school children down to 28% (from 30%), record-based full immunization up to 73% (from 68%). Dawn’s report also notes declines in neonatal and infant mortality, and a slight decline in total fertility rate. These aren’t “internet outcomes,” but connectivity changes how these outcomes can be influenced: health information travels differently, school support and tutoring markets mutate, public awareness campaigns become cheaper, and misinformation becomes a parallel public health system.
Still, there’s a trap here: headline connectivity can disguise inequality. “70% of homes” can mean “urban homes are saturated while rural homes catch up,” or “one province leaps while another crawls,” or “men’s usage rises while women remain disproportionately offline.” HIES does talk about being representative at national and provincial levels, but until PBS releases more disaggregated tables and cross-tabs (gender, age, rural/urban, income quintiles), the clean national number is best treated as an entrance to questions, not an ending. The survey methodology hints that PBS is at least thinking in the right measurement language. PBS notes its ICT module was amended in light of ITU guidance on measuring ICT access and use by households and individuals. That matters because the global problem in “internet stats” is not a lack of numbers; it’s a lack of shared definitions. What counts as “internet access”? What counts as “use”? Is it “used once in the last 3 months,” “used in the last week,” “can access from home,” “has a data plan,” “has a smartphone,” “has functional literacy”? Measurement choices shape the story you tell yourself about progress.
And that story is now impossible to ignore: Pakistan’s internet is no longer a niche layer sitting on top of society. It’s becoming part of the substrate. That creates opportunity—digital services, remote work platforms, online retail, distance learning, telemedicine, farmer price discovery, logistics optimisation, consumer protection channels. It also creates a new kind of vulnerability: when connectivity becomes normal, being left out stops being a personal inconvenience and starts looking like structural exclusion. The offline person isn’t merely disconnected; they’re locked out of the default path.
So yes: the HIES numbers are big. They’re also the start of a more serious argument. If 57% of individuals are internet users and 70% of households have access, Pakistan is entering a phase where the question shifts from “Are people online?” to “What does being online do to power?” Who captures the value—platforms, telcos, banks, government, or households themselves? Who absorbs the harm—women, low-income users, rural communities, minors, the elderly, the easily scammed? A connected country doesn’t automatically become a more capable one. It becomes a more amplified one, for better and for worse. The sanest response is to treat this as infrastructure, not celebration: build the boring stuff that makes connectivity productive. Better digital literacy (not just app familiarity), consumer protection that works at internet speed, identity systems that don’t turn into bureaucratic choke points, payments that are interoperable and cheap, and a telecom environment where “coverage” doesn’t mean “two bars of hope and a spinning wheel.” HIES has given Pakistan a stronger mirror. What the country does with its reflection is where the story actually begins.
Reference Corpus: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
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