Insurers estimate of the population of gamers

In my quest to find data points on how many D&D players there are out there I stumbled upon this "The tabletop gamers’ survey" by Compare The Market - the general gist of which is "there are a lot of gamers out there, have you got insurance for all those out of print RPG books and precious, precious miniatures?" - which fair play, they are transparent in their angle in all of this, respect the hustle and so on.

They do give us some interesting insight with a 3000 person survey equally split across the US, Canada and Australia - finding that ~ 30% of US and Canadians (about half that for Australia) play or played tabletop games and the most popular of those games in every case was Dungeons and Dragons.

Their focus was a little unusual because it was about the physical stuff - with questions like 'I play, but I always borrowed minis' - more than whether people were current or lapsed players. If we bucket it all together as 'how many folk ever played D&D - now or in the past' we can compared to other sources and build some confidence in our understanding of what is going on.

Taking all the answers on whether folk ever played and collected a tabletop-roleplaying game or wargame we get
US - 29%
Canada - 32%
Australia - 16%

The found D&D was the most popular tabletop RPG or Wargame in each country and that combining all the survey results gave 32% of respondants selecting it. I do not think we can assume a flat ratio across the three countries and say therefore we have a thid of each survey response group saying they play or have played D&D - ~10% of all surveyed folk for US/Canada, ~5% for Australia.

There is a bit of a range in there - I spitballed back in 2022 that there might be ~33-43 million USA "fans" based on assumptions M.T. Black made on trends from WotCs 2020 claim of "over 40 million fans around the world." Recognising there was a daisy-chain of assumptions in there, it translates to 9-13% of USA folk being fans. Coming in the same ballpark but still a pretty wide range.

Recognising there is fuzz in there, I think "about one-in-eight folk in the US play or have played D&D" feels more plausible than the high-ball "about one-in-three have".

There are other bits and pieces like Cyberpunk and Call of Cthulu also being mentioned in there but given that we have no other sources for even as rough an analysis as this for those games, there is nothing I can do with those.

Sources

2026 Survey by Researchscape (N = 1253)

2025 The tabletop gamers’ survey (N = 3035)

2022 Survey by Researchscape (N = 1074)

2019 Survey by Researchscape (N = 942)

2000 Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0 (N = "about a thousand")