If you're using a virtual private network for data-heavy online activities, includingstreaming, gaming, video conferencing or torrenting, your VPN speeds will be a major consideration. There’s no point paying a premium for a high-speed internet connection if your VPN provider can’t keep up, ruining your online experience. It doesn’t matter how fast your internet is, if you’re using a slow VPN you’ll end up with worse streams, laggy games, unstable calls and slow downloads. That’s why we’ve put together our list of the fastest VPNs, so you get the most out of your internet speeds while still taking advantage of the bullet-proof encryption that a top-tier VPN provides.  

Determining the fastest VPN is a time-intensive, imperfect process. Our current speed testing procedures are the result of years of benchmarking VPNs as part of our review process. We’ve developed aspeed-testing methodology that we’re pretty proud of that addresses how speed loss can change depending on where and when you test. Fortunately, CNET’s VPN experts have made sure that we’re providing the high-quality analysis of VPN speeds that’s necessary to confidently rank the VPNs we’ve reviewed. While we’ve done our best to bring you the fastest VPNs we’ve identified in 2025, you should bear in mind that your results may differ from ours. Depending on factors like the location you’re connecting from, the platform you’re using and how your ISP performs, you may end up with significantly different results. Thankfully, all of the VPNs we’ve put in the spotlight here have a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can test their speeds out for yourself before you buy.  

*Lower number is better.

NordVPN is currently the fastest VPN, based on our latest speed tests. Out of the VPNs we speed tested, NordVPN's speeds were the most consistently fast across the board. NordVPN averaged just a 3% speed loss overall; Proton came in second place with a 16% average speed loss; and Express followed with an 18% overall speed loss. Surfshark and Mullvad rounded out the list with a 21% speed loss and a 25% speed loss, respectively.

Based on our years of experience testing VPNs for privacy, usability and speed, these are the most important factors to consider when purchasing a fast VPN:

Speed

If you're looking for the fastest VPN, then speed will naturally be your top consideration. There are a lot of VPNs that struggle with speeds and can slow your internet by 50% or more. Look for a VPN that drops your speed by only about 20% or less. While all virtual private networks slow your internet speeds down somewhat, we've found that the fastest VPNs only drop your internet download speed by an average of 20% or less.

Privacy

Privacy is a major consideration for any VPN, regardless of its speed performance. The VPNs we've highlighted above all deliver top-notch privacy paired with fast speeds, so you'll get the best of both worlds with any of our recommended options. Look for basic privacy protections like a kill switch, DNS leak protection and a no-logs policy (preferably audited and/or tested in the wild). Other privacy features to look out for includeobfuscation, multi-hop connections andTor Over VPN.

Privacy vs. speed

VPN privacy features and speed often involve tradeoffs that require balancing your specific needs. Stronger encryption like AES-256 offers maximum protection but adds processing overhead compared to lighter options like AES-128, though the difference is minimal on modern devices. Multi-hop or double VPN connections route traffic through two separate servers for enhanced privacy, but typically increase your speed loss. The best VPNs optimize this balance, providing strong encryption with minimal speed reduction.

VPN protocols

Your choice ofVPN protocol can make a huge difference to your connection speed. How much your connection is slowed down depends on the VPN protocol you’re using. OpenVPN will ensure your connection is encrypted, but you usually won’t be getting the best speeds out of it because it’s less efficient and lightweight than some newer VPN protocols. If you really want to get the most out of your connection, you’ll need to use a lightweight protocol like WireGuard. Some providers also offer their own protocol, which is usually based on WireGuard.

WireGuard is a newer VPN protocol than OpenVPN, offering exceptional performance, often ranging between 3% to 25% speed loss while maintaining strong privacy. Its lightweight code (around 4,000 lines compared to OpenVPN's 100,000-plus) makes it take up potentially fewer resources on your device, decreasing power consumption. OpenVPN remains the industry standard for privacy and compatibility, but normally causes a higher speed reduction than WireGuard due to its significant encryption overhead. Proprietary protocols like NordVPN's NordLynx use WireGuard as a foundation, while ExpressVPN's Lightway is built to be an equivalent to WireGuard, providing speed optimizations without sacrificing privacy. IKEv2 offers a middle ground with good protocol performance on mobile especially, but it still lags behind WireGuard in terms of real-world speeds.

Server network

You'll want a VPN service with a large network of servers worldwide. This can help ensure that you'll have access to fast, stable VPN connections wherever you may be located. Generally, about 75 server locations and above is a decent network. Some VPNs even have servers in 100 or more countries. The main thing you'll want in your VPN's network is servers located near where you are or where you plan on traveling. If a VPN only has servers in 50 countries, but covers all of the regions you plan on using, then its server network should suffice. 

A VPN's server infrastructure also directly impacts the VPN speeds you’ll experience. Larger server networks may distribute user load more effectively, reducing congestion-related slowdowns during peak hours, which is essential if you’re concerned about streaming performance. However, server numbers alone don’t necessarily indicate that a provider has the infrastructure necessary to handle multiple high-speed connections. Looking out for providers that use a greater proportion of 10Gbps servers, which have higher bandwidth than 1Gbps servers, is a good start -- it’s a sign that a provider is heavily invested in the quality of their servers as well as the quantity. Geographic distribution also matters a lot. The more countries covered, the more hypothetical options for accessing geo-restricted content and finding servers close to your location. The best providers display current server load percentages in their apps, letting you connect to less congested options for improved performance.

Distance and latency

Physical distance between you and the VPN server typically creates unavoidable performance impacts on the responsiveness of your VPN connection. Every additional mile introduces slight delays and reduces connection stability as data travels further, with latency increasing approximately 15 to 20ms for every 1,000 miles. The impact on your download speed should be minimal when you’re connecting to far-away servers, so it won’t really get in the way of streaming video. However, for latency-sensitive activities like gaming and video calls, distance matters more than raw download speed beyond the baseline bandwidth needed to support the connection. That’s why the best VPNs try to minimize this impact through optimized routing and strategic server placement in major internet exchange points.

Split tunneling

Split tunneling allows you to select specific applications to be routed through your VPN while others use your normal internet connection. By sending only privacy-sensitive traffic (like browsing or torrenting) through the VPN, you avoid unnecessary speed penalties from encryption overheads and routing your non-sensitive traffic through an additional server. If you’re running into buffering issues while streaming video, it might be worth using split tunneling to route your video traffic outside the VPN tunnel instead, but you’ll miss out on any geo-unblocking benefits if you do so. While using agaming VPN might increase your speeds because you’re avoiding bandwidth throttling, it’s still a good idea to use split tunneling while gaming just to see if you get better real-world speeds from your normal internet connection.

Mobile device performance

VPN performance onmobile devices can vary significantly from the speeds you’d see on your desktop device. Cellular networks generally experience similar percentages in speed reduction to Wi-Fi. However, there’s greater variability due to signal fluctuations and tower congestion. You’ve probably experienced this if you’ve ever entered a particularly crowded area and found you can’t get a mobile signal anymore. The protocol you’re using also makes a significant impact on your mobile performance. OpenVPN has greater bandwidth overheads and uses up more battery power than WireGuard, so where possible it’s better to stick to WireGuard (or at least IKEv2, if available). Notably, some wireless carriers throttle certain bandwidth-intensive activities on mobile networks, like video streaming -- a practice known as traffic shaping -- so you might be able to get faster speeds andbetter video quality on your phone when streaming with a cellular signal while using a VPN.

ISP factors

Even with a VPN, yourISP is still generally the limiting factor in your internet speeds. Usually, you’re capped at whatever speed your ISP can provide, and your VPN speed will be a fraction of this speed. Connection stability varies greatly between ISPs, with some introducing high jitter or frequent disconnections that VPNs can't fully compensate for. However, if you’re experiencing ISP throttling, you may see higher speeds with a VPN on than without a VPN -- although these situations are pretty uncommon. With bandwidth throttling, ISPs identify certain types of traffic, like streaming video, and deprioritize them in favor of other types, like web traffic. Using a VPN can actually improve your effective speed in some cases by making it far more difficult to identify which types of traffic are being sent from your connection, meaning that they’ll have to treat all the data coming from your device equally. To an ISP, it’s all just encrypted traffic.

Use cases

Different online activities have distinct VPN performance requirements. Streaming demands consistent bandwidth at a certain speed. For example, 4K content needs at least 25Mbps stable throughput, whereas HD only requires 5 to 10Mbps. For standard definition content, you can get away with around 3 to 5Mbps. Gaming, on the other hand, benefits more from low latency over raw download speeds. Generally, if you can connect to a server that gives you under 50ms ping you’ll be set to game online without noticing lag.

Free vs. paid VPNs

There are several reasons we don’t recommend free VPNs, and it’s very unlikely you’ll find a free VPN that can keep up with the speeds of a paid service. Free VPNs can incur anywhere between 50 to 80% speed loss compared to 3 to 25% with premium services due to free services often using overcrowded, lower-capacity infrastructure. It’s not really possible to scale the infrastructure of a free service as more users connect, because they’re not paying for the service. Instead, free services will enforce bandwidth and speed caps to ensure they can still offer a baseline VPN connection, even if it’s unbearably slow. Premium VPNs invest in server optimization and maintain better infrastructure-to-user ratios to keep speeds high.

Cost

If you're on a budget, then the overall value of your VPN will be a major consideration. If you want the largest savings, opt for a yearly plan, which will generally afford you better value over time than going month-to-month. A budget-friendly VPN can cost about $40 to $60 per year, while a more expensive VPN can run you upward of $100 per year.  

We test VPNs over both the OpenVPN and either WireGuard (or the nearest equivalent) protocols. You’ll notice that in the case of ExpressVPN and NordVPN, we chose to test their proprietary VPN protocols, Lightway and Nordlynx, respectively, in place of WireGuard. To make sure there’s parity in terms of speeds, we check using Windows and MacOS computers. We’ve put every VPN we’ve tested through at least 252 individual speed tests, split into three rounds of tests across six locations around the globe on Windows and Mac devices.

Before each round of testing, we measured our non-VPN speeds three times to calculate the average speeds we were getting from our ISP. Then, we tested speeds three times each to VPN server locations in New York, the UK, Australia, France, Germany and Singapore. This way, we can get a good read on VPN speeds to popular locations across the globe. Once we completed the three rounds of testing at each location, we calculated our average VPN and non-VPN speeds to determine the percentage of speed lost overall through the VPN. 

Calculating the percentage of speed lost through the VPN allows us to clearly represent how you can expect these VPNs to perform for you. Your base internet speeds may be a lot faster or slower than what we got through the internet connections we used during our testing. Saying that we achieved speeds of 341.5Mbps with NordVPN doesn't paint the full picture without putting it into the proper context of how much of a speed drop that was in relation to our base speeds.

We conducted all of our tests through theOokla speed-testing platform because it's user-friendly and among the most widely used speed-testing sites. It's also the tool that most VPN users will likely use to measure their own speeds. (Ookla is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)

PIA

The speeds we measured throughPrivate Internet Access (PIA) were underwhelming, with a middling 48% average internet download speed loss. Although that's fine for casual users with fast connections -- think fiber, not satellite internet -- it falls well below a 25% average, which we expect from the fastest VPNs. ExpressVPN clocked 18%, Surfshark 21%, Mullvad 24% and NordVPN 3%, leaving PIA in the dust.

If you're unconcerned with speed loss but looking for an OG VPN provider that's cheap, delivers excellent privacy and offers unlimited simultaneous connections, then PIA is a good choice. PIA also offers some powerful customization options, especially for OpenVPN. It’s one of the rare VPN providers that allows you to choose the level of encryption you use, which can make your VPN connection faster in return for sacrificing some privacy. Furthermore, if you’re looking for low-latency connections across the US, PIA offers servers in all 50 states. Subscriptions cost $12 per month, $40 for the first year (renewing at $50) or $80 every three years, which makes PIA one of the most budget-friendly VPNs in the industry.

Read our PIA review.

IPVanish

In our 2024 speed tests, we calculated an average 44% download speed loss withIPVanish, making it one of the slowest VPNs we tested. (IPVanish is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.) We registered the fastest speeds through WireGuard on MacOS, with an average speed loss of 17%, which is decent but not competitive with other VPNs’ WireGuard speeds.

IPVanish’s abysmal OpenVPN speeds on MacOS (58% speed loss) and Windows (67% speed loss) are what ultimately dragged it down and out of the running for CNET’s Fastest VPN. Speeds that bad will have a noticeable effect, regardless of how fast your base internet speeds are. We had issues while attempting to stream content through IPVanish’s UK servers. On the plus side, IPVanish does offer connection locations in 108 countries, which places it in direct competition with the VPNs we consider to be top-tier. While the UK servers aren’t great, it’s suitable if you’re trying to stream Netflix content in the US. Ultimately, if you’re looking for a fast VPN, look elsewhere.

Read our IPVanish review.

Our speed testing confirms once again that NordVPN is the undisputed champion when it comes to performance. NordVPN scored an extraordinary 3% average speed loss that puts it far ahead of the other VPNs on our list, including our runner-up Proton VPN, which posted a 16% loss. While ExpressVPN retains our best overall recommendation with a 9/10 total score thanks to its exceptional privacy features and user-friendly interface, its 18% speed loss is slower than NordVPN, although most folks shouldn’t notice a difference. Surfshark is still an attractive budget alternative because of its cost-effective $53 two-year plan, and a decent 21% speed reduction. We’ve removed Private Internet Access from our top recommendations due to significant speed degradation and persistent CAPTCHA challenges, but it’s still a strong alternative if you’re looking for comprehensive coverage in the States.

Several providers -- including ExpressVPN and NordVPN -- have begun rolling out post-quantum protection to guard against threats from quantum computers, like hacking. Additionally, Nord and Express unveiled Linux GUI apps in 2025, which are meaningfully easier to use for beginners than CLI apps.