Less than a week has passed since the premiere of Stranger Things Season 5 on Netflix in the 2025 TV schedule, and the streamer has wasted no time in sharing viewership numbers that reveal just how much of a hit Volume 1 has already been among fans with a Netflix subscription. Not only has the new season already smashed records for the platform, but the increase in viewers over the last season is absolutely wild. Suffice it to say that the show’s final season got off to a strong start!
The first volume of Season 5 has achieved 59.6 million views over the first five days of streaming after its pre-Thanksgiving holiday release on November 26, according to Variety. That total is enough to conclude that Stranger Things Season 5 had the best premiere-week viewership for an English-language Netflix series ever in the history of the streamer. It also holds a spot in the Top 3 overall, ranking behind only Squid Game‘s second and third seasons.
To compare to its own most recent numbers, Stranger Things Season 4 premiered in 2022 with about 22 million views. Now, I say “about 22 million” due to the fact that Netflix at the time ranked viewership by the amount of time streamed rather than view counts, and the approximately 22 million views for Season 4 is calculated from 287 million hours watched.
If, like Steve Harrington in the latest batch of episodes, arithmetic isn’t your favorite subject, the 59.6 million views for Season 5 is a jump of more than 170% from the 22 million for Season 4. That said, it is worth noting that the numbers from 2022 were tallied from the first three days after release, whereas the latest numbers are from the first five days.
Still, if we do a little bit of math (sorry, Steve), Season 4 earning 22 million views over three days means about 7.33 million views per day. Assuming that the trend would more or less remain the same for another two days to get to five, then the total for Season 4 would be around 36.66 million views, still well below the 59.6 million viewers for the first five days of Season5. Volume 1 of Season 4 was made up of seven episodes, while Volume 1 of Season 5 runs for four.
It’s not particularly surprising that Stranger Things Season 5 is already crushing, and I expect that it will still be topping Netflix’s Top 10 well into the 2026 TV schedule after Volume 2 releases on Christmas Day and the finale debuts on New Year’s Eve. Anticipation for Season 5 was so high that all of the first four seasons were back in the Top 10 at the same time, suggesting that there were plenty of people rewatching to prepare for the return to Hawkins. (For CinemaBlend’s Corey Chichizola, the big Will Byers twist was more powerful after a Season 2 rewatch.)
Unfortunately, the wait is now on for the next set of episodes for tens of millions of fans to watch, with weeks to go before Episodes 5 – 7 arrive on December 25. Like Volume 1, they’ll become available at 8 p.m. ET rather than 12 a.m. PT, as is the norm for Netflix releases. The finale will also premiere at 8 p.m. ET on December 31, with a run time of just over two hours.