UK newsstand. Picture: Shutterstock
Print circulation figures for the Mirror, Express and Star newspapers will no longer be made public.
Publisher Reach has decided to keep its national newspaper ABC print sales numbers private.
This means they will be available only to ad buyers who agree to keep the data confidential.
Reach follows in the Sun and Times publisher News UK, Telegraph Media Group and The Guardian, which have all kept their print figures private for more than four years.
The changes at Reach cover the following titles: Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, Sunday People, Daily Express, Sunday Express, Daily Star, Daily Star Sunday, and Scottish titles Daily Record and Sunday Mail.
Their final published figures were as follows:
Reach’s Sunday tabloids, and the Sunday People in particular, had frequently led the biggest year-on-year circulation declines for a long time.
These figures come at the end of a downward print trend that has seen the Daily Mirror down 93% since 2000:
This means the only national newspapers that will continue to publish their print circulation figures are DMGT-owned Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, The i Paper and Metro, plus the Financial Times and DC Thomson’s Scottish weekly Sunday Post. Press Gazette’s monthly update has also historically included the free business newspaper City AM, although it is not distributed nationwide.
The average print circulation figures for these newspapers in January 2026 were as follows (Metro has not yet published its January figure but will be added when it is available):
Reach moves focus from print to digital
Reach’s decision came as it proposed to close two out of its three remaining print plants this year.
Chief executive Piers North said in a statement about those plans: “Print remains an important part of our business, and will continue to drive considerable circulation revenue, but our future is firmly rooted in digital…
“By refining our print operations, we can focus our attention on content and audiences – the core driver of our business – and accelerate our digital growth opportunities such as our digital subscriptions offering.”
On Tuesday (17 February) Reach launched a premium paywall on the Express , the first national news website on which it has done so.
Since November the publisher has launched regional digital subscriptions products, which include extra “premium” content and fewer ads, on the Manchester Evening News , Liverpool Echo, Wales Online, Daily Record and Leicestershire Live.
Reach aims to change the balance of revenue coming in as print continues to make up three-quarters (76%) overall.
Telegraph, News UK and Guardian pulled out of ABC reporting first
The Telegraph was the first national newspaper publisher to pull out of public ABC reporting in January 2020 as it decided print sales were no longer a “key metric” for its subscriber-first strategy.
Instead it published audited subscriber figures each quarter but the last time this was done was in January 2024 when it reported 117,586 print subscriptions, 688,012 digital, and 230,112 to Telegraph Wine Cellar, Telegraph Puzzles or Chelsea Magazine Company titles. Its most recently-published subscriptions figures were 1,086,000 across the group (including CMC) and 842,000 digital in December 2024.
In May 2020 Press Gazette reported News UK had pulled out of public ABC reporting to focus instead on the quarterly total brand reach figure across mobile, tablet, desktop and print provided by audience measurement company PamCo, which replaced the National Readership Survey in 2018 .
Guardian News and Media (which then also owned The Observer) followed suit in September 2021 , saying it would “focus on metrics which more accurately reflect our diversity of journalism, readership and business strategy”.
The last published ABC figures for these titles were:
- The Sun: 1,210,915 (March 2020)
- The Sun on Sunday: 1,013,777 (March 2020)
- The Sunday Times: 647,622 (March 2020)
- The Times: 365,880 (March 2020)
- Daily Telegraph: 317,817 (December 2019)
- Sunday Telegraph: 248,288 (December 2019)
- The Observer: 136,656 (July 2021)
- The Guardian: 105,134 (July 2021)
If these titles have fallen in line with rest of the industry their current circulations as of October 2025 would be roughly in line with these estimates:
- The Sun: 550,000
- The Sun on Sunday: 500,000
- The Sunday Times: 260,000
- The Times: 140,000
- Daily Telegraph: 150,000
- Sunday Telegraph: 100,000
- The Observer: 80,000
- The Guardian: 60,000
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