Every time we publish a study of Dominican business websites, somebody asks a fair question: why are you counting this by hand? Surely the government publishes this.

So we went to find out. We spent a day going through what the Oficina Nacional de Estadística, INDOTEL, the Banco Central and the Ministerio de Turismo actually publish about digital adoption in the Dominican Republic — not what gets quoted in press releases, but the primary documents.

The short version: there is a surprising amount of good data about whether Dominican people are online, and almost nothing current about whether Dominican businesses are. That asymmetry is the whole story, and it explains why private studies like ours exist at all.

What ONE publishes about households, and it is good

The best source in the country is ENHOGAR-MICS 2025, run by the Oficina Nacional de Estadística with UNICEF and SISALRIL. Fieldwork ran from August to October 2025, so by the standards of national statistics it is genuinely recent.

From the published report:

• 56.2% of Dominican households have internet access at home

• Urban 60.2%, rural 45.5%

• 92.7% of households have a mobile phone, and 89.4% have a smartphone

• 32.3% have a computer — and note that this figure combines desktops, laptops and tablets into one category, so the share with an actual computer is lower still

The regional breakdown is where it gets interesting for anyone reading this from the east:

• Cibao Norte: 67.7%

• Ozama / Metropolitana: 62.0%

• Cibao Noroeste: 59.6%

• Cibao Sur: 59.1%

• Cibao Nordeste: 57.3%

• Higuamo: 46.7%

• Yuma, which includes La Altagracia and therefore Punta Cana and Bávaro: 44.2%

• El Valle: 41.7%

• Valdesia: 40.6%

• Enriquillo: 39.4%

The tourism capital of the Dominican Republic has the fourth-lowest household internet access in the country. Twelve points below the national average. Twenty-three points behind Cibao Norte.

One honest note on using this report: its summary text and its table disagree. The text names Cibao Sur as the region with the highest household internet access at 67.7%, while the table assigns 67.7% to Cibao Norte and 59.1% to Cibao Sur. We have quoted the table. If you cite this figure somewhere that matters, read both and decide for yourself.

The gap that explains Dominican web design

Put two official numbers next to each other and the whole market makes sense.

The World Bank, using ITU data, puts individuals using the internet in the Dominican Republic at 91.0% of the population in 2024, up from 86.1% in 2023.

ONE puts households with internet at home at 56.2%, and households with any computer, laptop or tablet at 32.3%.

Both can be true. Nine out of ten Dominicans use the internet. Barely a third of Dominican households own anything with a keyboard. The country is online through a phone on a mobile data plan, and that is it.

This is not an abstraction. It is the reason an 8 MB homepage is a business problem here in a way it is not in Madrid or Miami. When we measured 36 Punta Cana hotel websites and found a median load time of 17 seconds on a simulated mid-range phone, we were not testing an edge case. We were testing the only device most of the market has.

What the Banco Central publishes, and it is better than you think

The Banco Central maintains a set of payment-system statistics that almost nobody in the Dominican web industry seems to use. Among the series available:

• Internet payments, monthly, 2018 to 2026

• Internet banking users, 2014 to 2026

• Electronic payment account transactions, 2022 to 2026

• Point-of-sale terminals by geographic zone, 2018 to 2026

If you want to argue that Dominicans will or will not pay online, this is where the evidence is. It is a set of spreadsheets rather than a report, which is probably why it gets quoted so rarely — but it is official, current and specific.

What INDOTEL publishes, and the hole in it

INDOTEL is the telecommunications regulator, so it is the obvious place to look for internet subscription and coverage figures. In practice, its public data presence is thinner than its mandate suggests.

On datos.gob.do, the national open data portal, INDOTEL publishes three datasets: user-assistance complaint statistics, employee payroll, and freedom-of-information request counts. None of them is about subscriptions, penetration or coverage. The regulator of Dominican internet access publishes no internet access data on the national open data portal.

There is also a change coming that anyone tracking these numbers should know about. In Resolution 083-2024, dated 1 August 2024, INDOTEL put out for public consultation a revised set of indicators that operators must report. Three indicators are marked for elimination: total broadband subscriptions, fixed broadband subscriptions and mobile broadband subscriptions. They would be replaced by total internet subscriptions across all speeds, plus mobile connections broken down by 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G, with new 5G population and territorial coverage indicators added.

Whether that is an improvement depends on what you need. More granularity on technology and coverage is useful. But "broadband penetration in the Dominican Republic" may stop being a reported national indicator, which will make comparisons across time harder for everyone.

What nobody publishes: whether businesses are online

Here is the gap.

ONE does publish one report on this. Tecnologías de la Información y Comunicación (TIC) en la actividad empresarial formal, ENAE 2022, published in 2023 from the 2022 Encuesta Nacional de Actividad Económica. If you want official Dominican data on business ICT adoption, that is the document, and it is worth opening.

But look at what it can and cannot tell a business owner in 2026.

Its reference year is 2022. That is before ChatGPT was a consumer product, before AI Overviews existed, before AI Mode. Any question about how Dominican businesses are positioned for how people search now is a question that survey could not have asked.

It covers formal enterprises. A very large share of Dominican economic activity — including a lot of the restaurants, guesthouses, tour operators and workshops that most need a working website — does not appear in a formal-enterprise survey frame.

And a survey can only ask whether a business reports having a website. It cannot check whether that website loads, whether the link in its Google listing resolves, or whether the menu on it is a photograph. Those are the things that turned out to matter when we checked 64 restaurants by hand and found 22% had a dead website or menu link. A business with an expired domain still answers "yes" on a survey.

The statistic that does not exist

While researching this we kept meeting a figure: that around 70% of Dominican MIPYMEs are not digitalised. It appears in vendor blog posts, conference slides and the occasional news article.

We tried to trace it to a primary source and could not. No study, no institution, no published methodology, no reference year that we could find. It is attributed loosely, passed along, and repeated until it sounds official.

We are not saying it is wrong. We are saying nobody who repeats it appears to know where it came from, and neither do we. If you have seen the underlying study, we would genuinely like the link.

This is the practical cost of the data gap. When there is no current official statistic on business digital adoption, an unsourced number fills the vacuum, and then gets cited in strategy documents.

What a business owner should take from this

Three things.

First, the official data about your customers is good, free and better than most people realise. ENHOGAR-MICS tells you your customers are on phones, not computers, and that if you operate in the east your local audience has below-average home internet. Build for that.

Second, the official data about your competitors does not exist in a usable form. There is no current figure telling you what share of Dominican hotels have a working website or what share of restaurants publish a readable menu. If you want to know how you compare, somebody has to count. That is the honest reason we publish our own research rather than citing a national statistic.

Third, be suspicious of digital-adoption percentages quoted at you without a source. Ask which survey, which year, which population. In our experience the question usually ends the conversation.

If you want help working out where your own business actually sits against what we have measured, DR Web Studio works with businesses across the Dominican Republic — contact us for a free consultation.