The world's most popular passwords are pretty unsurprising - surely we can do better?

• NordPass finds “admin” and “password” are the top US passwords in 2025
• Weak password habits persist across all generations, despite myths about older users
• Special character use is rising, but most passwords remain easily guessable

2025 is almost over, but it seems many of us still haven’t learned how to create a proper password.

Top password manager company NordPass has released its seventh edition of its annual Top 200 Most Common Passwords research, and the results are embarrassing, to say the least.

Shockingly, or not, the number one password in the United States is - “admin”. The second-placed one is “password”. This means that in many cases, cybercriminals running automated brute-force or credential stuffing attacks will succeed at breaking in and accessing people’s sensitive information.

123456...

It has always been the general opinion that older generations, who are also less tech-savvy, are the ones with poor password hygiene and whose accounts are the easiest to compromise.

NordPass has debunked this myth, saying that password quality is “equally poor” across all generational groups. The only difference is that groups have different common passwords.

For every age bracket, “12345” and “123456” are always on top, but older generations are more likely to use names in their passwords. On the other hand, Generations Y and Z most often combine “12345678” and “skibidi”.

In the US, the top 20 infamous list is dominated by simple numeric sequences and weak passwords like “qwerty123” or simple “1234567890”.

But things are looking up, NordPass claims, as compared to 2024, there has been a “significant increase” in the use of special characters.

In fact, 32 passwords on the main list now include special characters, which is a “notable rise” from last year’s six. However, we still have plenty of work to do, since most of the passwords are still not complex enough, and include the likes of “P@ssw0rd”, “Admin@123”, or “Abcd@1234”, all of which are relatively easy to guess.

Using a strong password is one of the key pillars of proper cyber-hygiene. The best passwords are a long string of random letters (lowercase and uppercase), numbers, and special characters. To remember all of them, it is best to use a password manager that securely stores them and requires users only remember one password.

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