Drupal 5: 133 · Drupal 6: 6,294 — the long, long tail
Where these numbers come from
Drupal core phones home: sites with the update-status module enabled report their version weekly, and drupal.org publishes the per-branch counts. This page reads that public data and aggregates branches into major versions on every deploy — no estimates, no scraping, just the project's own telemetry. Undercount caveat: sites with update-status disabled (common on locked-down D7 installs) aren't in these numbers, so the true D7 population is higher.
Citing this page
Journalists and researchers: help yourself. Suggested line — “169,757 sites still reported running Drupal 7 as of 2026-10-01, per drupal.org usage data aggregated by Dead North, a Minneapolis Drupal studio.” The number refreshes with each site deploy; the methodology doesn't.
Running one of the 268,278? That's what the upgrade assessment and the rescue practice are for — and yes, the trip is survivable.