Just under five years.

Why Britain

Two countries with similar incomes, the same rules until 2020 and the same statistics. The EU survey on internet use has asked both the same questions for twenty years. On access to a bank account, a phone and the internet they're almost level. If they're still years apart at the checkout, regulation, wealth and coverage don't explain it. Behaviour does.

What the numbers show

Shopping online. 8 indicators: buying online at all, travel, accommodation, groceries, tickets, clothing, insurance and financial products. Median 66 months, range 56 to 88.

Paying without cash. 7 indicators: debit and credit cards, card acceptance in shops, cashless payments overall, credit transfers, the decline in cash withdrawals. Median 57 months, range 31 to 127.

Software from the cloud. 3 indicators: firms buying cloud services, for office software, for accounting. Median 51 months, range 46 to 51.

Germany is behind in all 18. Not one is level, and not one has Germany ahead.

Where Germany is ahead

Germans buy computers, electronics and games online earlier than the British, computers by 66 months. On direct debits Germany is at least 144 months ahead. German firms took up ERP and CRM software 108 and 67 months earlier. On selling online, German companies are slightly ahead, median 11 months. Solar power and electric cars, as you'd expect.

Germans buy technology early. Paying for things is another matter.

Every measurement

96 indicators against Britain, all on this page. Germany is behind on 53, ahead on 38, level on 5. Median across all: 14 months. The middle half runs from 19 months ahead to 51 months behind.

The 18 behind the headline are everything that measures everyday shopping, card payment and cloud software. Technology purchases and online selling are in the same table, pointing the other way.

Each row: what was measured, when Britain reached the level, when Germany did, the gap in months, the source with a link. Where Britain was already past the level when its data begins, the gap is a minimum and marked as such.

¹ Single figures from a report, not a time series. The gap is taken from the report figures.

How we measure

For each indicator we take one publisher's series for both countries. We compare at the lower of the two latest levels and read off when each country first reached it, interpolated to the month. The gap is the difference. Data from the EU survey on internet use is measured to 2020, because Eurostat changed the questionnaire in 2021. The same indicator from two publishers is one row with both sources. Only things people or firms choose to take up are included: services, devices, software, ways to pay. Population, taxes and hospital beds stay out.

What we're not claiming

That Germany is slow in general. That the gap is shrinking or growing; we haven't measured that. Any gap against the United States.