Territorial Survey on ICT in Households. 2023

In 2023, El Baix Llobregat and El Barcelonès were the counties with the highest proportion of people aged 16 to 74 who had used the internet in the previous three months (both 97.3%) while El Tarragonès (87.6%) had the lowest percentage.

Compared to 2021, the proportion of people aged 16 to 74 who had used the internet in the previous three months increased in 34 of the 43 Catalan counties, led by L’Alta Ribagorça, El Pallars Jussà, El Pallars Sobirà and L’Alt Urgell.

In terms of people who shopped via the internet at some point, all counties except Osona increased their percentage between 2021 and 2023, especially El Montsià and La Terra Alta with increases of 10.2 and 9.8 points respectively. Meanwhile, the counties with the highest percentage of the population who said they had shopped online at some point were El Maresme and El Baix Llobregat at 83.2% and 82.4% respectively.

By contrast, 83.5% of people aged 16 to 74 had used a computer in the previous three months, 1.1 points below 2021. The biggest decreases were in El Vallès Oriental and El Segrià by 7.9 and 7.0 points respectively.

Email use was up in all counties except for El Vallès Oriental. The county of Osona had the highest email use figure at 90.4%, two points above the Catalan average (88.3%).

As for information and communication technologies equipment in households, all counties had percentages of households with internet access above the European average (93.1%) led by El Baix Llobregat, El Barcelonès and El Vallès Occidental (at 97.9% each). At the other end of the scale was L’Alta Ribagorça where 93.3% of households had internet access. La Noguera saw the greatest increase in the percentage of households with internet access, rising from 90.7% in 2021 to 94.5% in 2023.

The proportion of Catalan households which had had an incident with their internet service provider in the previous 12 months fell in Catalonia as a whole (from 27.8% in 2021 to 26.7% in 2023) and in 21 counties. El Priorat and El Solsonès had the highest percentages of households reporting these incidents in 2023 (38.6% and 35.2% respectively).

These statistics also provide results for Catalonia as a whole for ICT indicators which are considered relevant in each edition of the Survey.

52.1% of people always or almost always used Catalan in mobile messaging compared with 25.3% who did so sometimes and 21.0% who never or almost never used it. In the case of social media, interaction in Catalan always or almost always stood at 28.5% while using Catalan only was lower in chats and forums (24.5%) and on websites or blogs it came to 22.3%.

69.8% of all internet users in the previous three months had looked for information related to travel planning online, 61.2% made bookings and 55.4% made payments.