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MTN Nigeria and Airtel Nigeria recorded sharp increases in Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) in 2025, according to their financial results.

The rise was driven by the combined impact of tariff adjustments and rising data consumption, which boosted customer spending across Nigeria’s telecom sector.

ARPU, a key telecom industry metric, measures the average amount each subscriber spends monthly on telecom services such as voice, data and digital products.

According to the full-year financial results released by the company, MTN Nigeria’s monthly ARPU rose to $3.60 in 2025 from $2.17 in 2024.

In addition, MTN expanded its 4G population coverage by 2.1 percentage points to 84.6%, driven by accelerated investments in network infrastructure and service quality improvements.

For Airtel Nigeria, monthly ARPU climbed to $2.4 in 2025 (full financial year ended March 31, 2026) from $1.7 in 2024.

In naira terms, the figure increased to N3,326.4 from N2,599.3. Despite the increase, an average customer on Airtel spends less monthly compared with MTN.

Airtel reported that its revenue grew by 47.4% in constant currency, largely driven by continued strength in the demand for data services and supported by tariff adjustments.

The company’s data revenue increased by 63.6%, supported by growth in both data customers and data ARPU.

Airtel said data customer growth stood at 8.1%, while data ARPU expanded by 49.2% during the year.

The telecom operator also recorded a significant rise in internet consumption, with average data usage per customer increasing by 30.8% to 11GB monthly from 8.4GB recorded in the previous year.

The increase in customer spending followed the implementation of the 50% telecom tariff adjustment approved by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) early last year, which raised the prices of voice calls, SMS and data bundles across the industry.

Last week, the Executive Vice Chairman of the NCC, Dr. Aminu Maida, disclosed that Nigerians are now consuming about 45,800 terabytes of data every day, reflecting the country’s rapidly growing dependence on internet services and digital platforms.

He said the daily consumption brought total consumed data in March 2026 to 1.42 million, compared with 995,000 terabytes recorded within the corresponding period of 2025.

The increase in data usage by Nigerians is also putting a strain on the telecom networks, a development that has led to the poor service quality experienced by subscribers in recent times.

However, the NCC said the operators are responding to this challenge by increasing their investments in network capacity expansion.

According to the telecom regulator, the network operators have committed to upgrading 12,000 sites this year to improve service quality across the country.

Meanwhile, the Commission has also recently directed the telcos to compensate subscribers in areas where network quality fell below prescribed standards.