Surprising Duolingo English Test (DET) Numbers

I've written about numbers of test takers of popular exams before, but I never bothered to cover DET. I've seen so many mixed reviews of DET on Reddit, so I always assumed it was struggling to gain traction, but it actually has a shot at cracking the top 5 in the English test-taking market as measured by # of test takers.

TOEFL/IELTS/Cambridge are the global behemoths of the industry, with ~2/4/5MM+ test takers each year, respectively. The STEP EIKEN in Japan and the PTE from Pearson in India are strong local players in massive markets. The EIKEN in particular comes in at ~4MM. PTE doesn't break out numbers as far as I can tell, but it's also likely in the millions.

Duolingo has between 700K - 800K test takers, which is waaaaay higher than I thought. At 65-70$ per test it's about 30% of the cost of the bigger players, and it's accepted by pretty much every major University.

My Math

Duolingo breaks out DET as a separate line item on its disaggregated revenue section of its 10K filing. 2024 revenue was ~ 45.6MM.

The average price of a test in the US is ~70$, with some regional variation, so it's about ~650K test takers. However, Duolingo applies fee waivers, and regional variation might lower the cost of each test to ~55$ for example. In the higher case we might see ~800K test takers.

Headwinds

Between 2023 and 2024 there was a modest increase to DET revenue of 4MM which the Duo team noted was primarily due to an increase an average revenue per test. AKA they raised prices. They also noted some institutions were rescinding validity due to concerns around quality, as well as immigration policy in the US (majority of their revenue) as a headwind against the # of international students apply. These are all slightly concerning, but I'm going to add DET to my tracker nonetheless.