About 110. Half of the roughly 135,000 extensions on the Visual Studio Code Marketplace have fewer than 110 installs, and 13 percent have never been installed at all. Only 550 extensions, 0.4 percent, have passed a million installs. Measured across the full catalogue in September 2026.
Microsoft publishes an install count on every extension page and no summary of the catalogue. Because the marketplace lets you sort the whole catalogue by install count and page into it, the extension sitting at any rank can be read directly, which makes exact percentiles possible rather than estimated.
| Position in catalogue | Rank | Installs |
|---|---|---|
| Top 1% | 1,348 | 244,881 |
| Top 5% | 6,740 | 18,961 |
| Top 10% | 13,479 | 5,368 |
| Top 25% | 33,698 | 815 |
| Median | 67,396 | 110 |
| Bottom 25% | 101,095 | 15 |
| Bottom 10% | 121,314 | 0 |
The median VS Code extension has about 110 installs. The gap between the median and the top one percent is a factor of more than two thousand.
| Installs | Extensions | Share of catalogue |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000,000 or more | 550 | 0.4% |
| 100,000 or more | 2,430 | 1.8% |
| 10,000 or more | 9,680 | 7.1% |
| 1,000 or more | 30,899 | 22.8% |
| 100 or more | 69,207 | 51.1% |
| 10 or more | 105,797 | 78.1% |
| 1 or more | 117,704 | 86.9% |
Roughly 17,000 extensions, 13 percent of the catalogue, have never been installed once. Half the catalogue has fewer than 100 installs.
Below about rank 120,000 the install counts are zero and the listings stop resembling developer tools. Sampling that region returns titles offering pirated software, game save editors and account hacks. A listing on this marketplace is not a review of any kind, and the size of the catalogue is not evidence of the size of its useful part.
On 2026-09-08 we queried the Visual Studio Marketplace extension query API for extensions targeting Visual Studio Code, sorted by install count descending. The API reports a total count and allows paging to any rank, so for each percentile we fetched the ten extensions at that rank and took their median install count. The counts at each threshold were then found by binary search on rank, which gives an exact answer rather than an interpolation.
Install counts are Microsoft's own published figure for each extension.
The figures on this page are free to quote and republish with attribution (CC BY 4.0). The same numbers in machine readable form: vscode-extension-installs.json.
sellerkit, “VS Code Marketplace install distribution, 2026”, 2026-09-08. https://legal.sellerkit.workers.dev/data/vscode-extension-installs