By Michael Chen · Published June 27, 2025 · Updated June 8, 2026 · 10 min read
Quick answer: Yes — faxing is absolutely still a thing in 2026. About 17 billion faxes are sent globally every year, and the worldwide fax market is growing, not shrinking. The only thing that's dying is the plastic box on the shelf — fax itself has moved to your phone.
You've heard the predictions. "Fax is dead." "Nobody faxes anymore." "It's only a matter of time."
Every decade since the 1990s has brought a new technology that was supposed to kill fax: email, then PDFs, then DocuSign, then Slack, then encrypted messaging. And yet — fax keeps going.
Here's what nobody tells you: the fax market is actually growing. The global online fax market was valued at $4.18 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $12.52 billion by 2031. The US healthcare industry alone exchanges over 9 billion fax pages per year. Japan has more fax machines per capita than video game consoles. Germany, a country with ubiquitous internet access, still has 77% of its companies sending faxes.
So — is faxing still a thing? It's very much a thing. Here's the data-backed truth.
The Numbers: Fax Is Bigger Than You Think
The most common assumption about fax is that it's in freefall. The actual data says something different.
The distinction matters: traditional fax machine hardware is declining (down about 5% per year). But fax as a communication standard — the infrastructure, the protocols, the legal framework — is growing because cloud and mobile fax services have made it accessible to anyone without a dedicated machine.
The fax services market grew from approximately $2.9 billion in 2021 to $3.31 billion in 2024. Analysts project it could reach $6.5 billion by 2029. That's not a death curve — it's a growth curve.
What's driving fax market growth?
Two forces: the migration from hardware to cloud fax (which brings in new users who couldn't afford a dedicated machine), and tightening compliance requirements in healthcare and finance that make fax the path-of-least-resistance for regulated document transmission.
Who Still Uses Fax in 2026?
Fax is not universally used — but in specific industries, it's deeply embedded. Here's where the volume comes from.
Healthcare: The Largest Fax User on Earth
US healthcare is, by a wide margin, the world's biggest consumer of fax. The numbers are staggering.
- Healthcare organizations conduct roughly 70% of all clinical communication via fax — rising to 90% when EHR-integrated faxing is included
- 89% of healthcare organizations still maintain active fax machines
- 56% of patient referrals travel by fax
- 90% of medical record requests are still transmitted by fax
- The US healthcare industry exchanges over 9 billion fax pages annually
- Only 12% of the 182 million annual prior authorization transactions use the mandated electronic HIPAA format — the rest default to fax or manual processes
Why hasn't healthcare moved on? Three reasons:
HIPAA compliance. Fax over a dedicated phone line is inherently HIPAA-compliant. Getting email to the same compliance standard requires end-to-end encryption, Business Associate Agreements with email providers, access controls, and staff training. Fax is the path of least resistance.
Interoperability. Hospitals, clinics, labs, and specialist offices often run incompatible EHR systems. Fax is the lowest common denominator that works across all of them — no shared platform, no API integration, no credentials.
Infrastructure inertia. The US healthcare system has invested billions in existing fax infrastructure. Replacing it would cost more than maintaining it.
Legal: When the Timestamp Matters
Law firms, courts, and legal departments still fax because fax provides something email can't easily replicate: a timestamped, legally defensible proof of delivery. Fax transmission reports include the date, time, sender number, and recipient number — and courts have decades of legal precedent for accepting them.
A 2019 Association of Corporate Counsel survey found that 63% of legal departments still use fax for sensitive documents. Courts have fax numbers. Clerks accept faxed filings. Many jurisdictions allow emergency motions and time-sensitive pleadings to be submitted by fax precisely because the timestamp is irrefutable.
Government and Tax Agencies
The IRS maintains specific fax numbers for dozens of forms and purposes. You can fax Form 2848 (Power of Attorney), Form SS-4, and Form 4506-T directly to the appropriate IRS division. Try sending those by email — you can't. The IRS doesn't accept them.
State agencies, courts, and licensing boards follow the same pattern. Fax is written into the operating procedures of government, and those procedures change slowly.
Financial Services
Banks, insurance companies, and lenders process millions of faxed documents annually. Loan applications, signed disclosures, insurance claims, and compliance filings frequently travel by fax because the delivery confirmation creates an audit trail that regulators require under SOX and other financial compliance frameworks.
Real Estate
Agents fax purchase offers, counteroffers, disclosures, and signed contracts — especially in multi-state transactions where e-signature laws vary, or when working with sellers or agents who prefer traditional methods. Real estate is document-heavy and deadline-driven, which is exactly where fax's timestamped delivery receipt is most valuable.
Countries Where Fax Is Still Booming
The "fax is dead" narrative is almost entirely an American tech-media perspective. Zoom out globally, and the picture is completely different.
Japan
of public schools use fax machines daily, per Japan's Ministry of Education. Japan has more fax machines per capita than nearly any country — the hanko stamp system requires physical documents, keeping fax essential.
Germany
of companies with 20+ employees still use fax, per a June 2024 Bitkom survey. Down from 95% in 2018, but the decline is far slower than expected — even with fast internet access nationwide.
United Kingdom
fax machines were still operating across NHS hospital trusts in 2019, when the Royal College of Surgeons filed an FOI request. A government ban on buying new NHS fax machines was issued — and missed.
United States
of global fax market share belongs to North America. 11 million businesses subscribe to eFax alone. Healthcare, legal, and government are the dominant drivers.
Japan: A Nation Built on Paper
Japan's relationship with fax goes beyond habit — it's structural. Japan produced 90% of the world's fax devices during its economic expansion in the 1980s. More importantly, Japanese legal and administrative culture is built around the hanko seal — a physical stamp that serves as legal identity verification. Because hanko stamps require physical documents, digital workflows have struggled to displace paper-based communication.
Japan's government attempted to eliminate floppy disks in July 2024 — what Digital Minister Taro Kono called a "war" on outdated technology. The floppy disk war was won. The fax war was not: 400 ministry objections blocked fax elimination. Even with those objections overruled at the government level, private sector and school use continues essentially unchanged.
Germany: Slow but Steady
Germany is an interesting case because it's a technologically sophisticated nation with excellent internet infrastructure — and yet 77% of its companies still fax. Experts attribute this to German cultural preference for verifiable paper trails and the strong legal recognition of fax as a binding communication method under German law.
The German parliament (Bundestag) made international news in 2024 for finally phasing out its own fax machines. But that headline obscures the reality: the private sector continues as before. The 18-percentage-point decline from 95% (2018) to 77% (2024) over six years is slower than almost anyone predicted.
7 Facts About Fax That Will Surprise You
Fax is older than the telephone
Alexander Bain patented the first "Electric Printing Telegraph" — effectively a fax machine — on May 27, 1843. Alexander Graham Bell's telephone patent came 33 years later, in 1876. Fax predates the phone.
200 billion pages consumed by fax machines annually in the US alone
As of the most recent IDC estimates, US fax machines consumed 200 billion pages per year. If just 5% of those pages switched to online fax, it would save roughly 1 million trees and 360 million gallons of water annually.
88% of prior authorizations in healthcare still use fax or manual processes
Only 12% of the 182 million annual prior authorization transactions in US healthcare use the mandated electronic HIPAA format. The remaining 88% use fax, phone, or paper. This is not a fringe use case — it's the majority.
Fax cannot be phished, spam-filtered, or spoofed
A fax sent to a business fax number goes directly to the machine or digital inbox. It cannot be diverted to a spam folder, spoofed with a fake sender domain, or blocked by corporate email gateways. For security-conscious organizations, that's a meaningful advantage.
Courts accept faxed documents with far less scrutiny than email
Faxed documents carry an inherent timestamp and delivery record that courts have accepted as legal proof for decades. Authenticating an email in court requires substantially more effort, and email evidence is challenged more frequently.
Japan eliminated floppy disks but couldn't eliminate fax
In 2024, Japan's government finally banned floppy disk usage — but 400 ministry objections blocked fax elimination. The floppy disk war was won; the fax war was not even close.
The online fax market is growing faster than most SaaS categories
The global online fax market is expanding at a 13% compound annual growth rate — faster than many established software categories. This is not a market in hospice care. It's a market that found a second wind.
Why Fax Refuses to Die
The persistence of fax has nothing to do with nostalgia and everything to do with practical advantages that competing technologies haven't replicated.
Legally Binding Delivery Records
A fax transmission produces a report with the exact date, time, sending fax number, and receiving fax number. Courts, the IRS, and regulatory bodies have accepted these records as proof of communication for decades. That legal precedent is baked into legislation, judicial rulings, and agency procedure. No equivalent digital mechanism has the same across-the-board acceptance.
No Shared Internet Infrastructure
Traditional fax travels over the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) — a dedicated circuit between two endpoints that exists only for the duration of the call. The data never sits on an internet server. There's no inbox to breach, no server to hack, no man-in-the-middle exposure. For healthcare and legal documents, that architecture matters.
Important caveat
Modern cloud fax services route faxes over the internet to reach the PSTN — meaning the document is briefly in transit over internet infrastructure. Reputable providers use TLS encryption and 256-bit AES encryption for storage. The original PSTN-only security model applies primarily to traditional analog fax machines.
Universal Reach Without Account Setup
A fax number works like a phone number. The recipient needs no software, no account, no shared platform. You can send a document to a rural medical practice, a government office, or a law firm with a 30-year-old fax machine — and it arrives cleanly. Email requires both parties to agree on a platform; fax does not.
Regulatory Requirements Written in Stone
Fax is listed as an accepted or required submission method in a significant body of healthcare, legal, and financial regulation. Changing those regulations requires rulemaking, public comment periods, and often legislative action. The HIPAA fax provisions, IRS submission procedures, and court filing rules that reference fax were not written last year — and they're not being rewritten quickly.
The Modern Answer to an Old Technology
The fax machine of 2026 is not the beige plastic box with its thermal paper and 9-second-per-page transmission rate. That hardware is declining — down about 5% per year globally.
What replaced it is better in every measurable way.
| Then | Now |
|---|---|
| Dedicated fax machine + phone line | Mobile app or web browser |
| Thermal paper, ink ribbons | PDF delivery, digital storage |
| 9 seconds per page transmission | Near-instant delivery |
| $50–200/month for hardware and line | $0 per-use or low monthly plan |
| Junk faxes filling your paper tray | Spam filtering in digital inbox |
| Manual filing of paper originals | Automatic cloud archiving |
Online fax services — including apps like mFax — send faxes over the same underlying infrastructure that courts and the IRS recognize, while the user experience is purely digital. Upload a PDF, enter a fax number, tap Send. You get a delivery receipt. The recipient gets a clean document. No machine required on either end (if they're using a digital inbox too).
This is why the fax market is growing even as fax machine hardware declines. Online fax brings in millions of occasional users — people who need to fax something to the IRS once a year, or send a signed contract to a real estate agent — who would never have bought a dedicated machine.
Fax vs. Email: When Does Fax Still Win?
For everyday communication, email is obviously better. But there are specific scenarios where fax remains the right tool.
| Use Case | Fax | |
|---|---|---|
| IRS form submissions | ✅ Accepted, timestamped | ❌ Not accepted |
| HIPAA-covered medical records | ✅ Compliant over dedicated line | ⚠️ Requires additional safeguards |
| Court filings | ✅ Accepted in most jurisdictions | ⚠️ Varies by court |
| Legal proof of delivery | ✅ Timestamped transmission report | ⚠️ Easier to challenge |
| Recipient has no email/portal | ✅ Works with fax number only | ❌ Not possible |
| Large file attachments | ⚠️ Slower for many pages | ✅ Faster |
| Everyday business comms | ⚠️ Overkill | ✅ Standard |
| Phishing resistance | ✅ Cannot be phished | ❌ Primary attack vector |
For more on the security differences, see our guide on fax encryption and security.
So — Is Faxing Still a Thing?
Yes. Emphatically.
The answer depends on who you are and what you do. If you're texting a friend or emailing a coworker, fax has nothing to offer you. But if you're:
- Submitting documents to the IRS
- Working in healthcare, legal, insurance, or government
- Signing real estate contracts
- Sending documents where delivery time must be legally provable
- Communicating with organizations that don't share your digital ecosystem
— then faxing is not just "still a thing." It may be the most appropriate tool for the job.
The good news is that in 2026, faxing doesn't mean finding a fax machine. mFax.to lets anyone send a fax from their phone in under two minutes. Upload your document, enter the fax number, and send — with a delivery confirmation. No hardware, no monthly commitment, no trip to a copy shop.
Over 5 million users have already made that switch. The fax is alive. It's just moved to your pocket.
Send a Fax Right Now
Skip the UPS, skip the copy shop. mFax.to — upload your PDF, enter the fax number, done.
For individuals: Try mFax → — send from your phone in under 2 minutes.
For healthcare, legal, or business teams: mFax Business starts at about $9/mo (billed annually) and includes HIPAA compliance, virtual fax numbers, and team accounts. You build your own plan — pick exactly the seats and pages you need and pay only for what you use, with no rigid fixed tiers.
Already know your way around fax? Check out our guides on how to fax from iPhone, how to fax from email, and the best HIPAA-compliant fax services.