Patreon Transparency Report 2026

March 30, 2026

At Patreon, we believe that meaningful creative freedom depends on clear rules and consistent enforcement. Without clear guardrails, bad actors can undermine trust, disrupt communities, and harm both creators and fans. We enforce our Community Guidelines to reduce harmful behavior so creators can mutually invest in creative culture.

This report is part of that commitment. Each year, we publish a detailed look at how we enforce our policies, respond to legal requests, and uphold platform integrity. This third annual Transparency Report covers activity from January 1 through December 31, 2025.

You can read last year’s report (covering 2024) here.

Policy enforcement

Keeping Patreon safe while remaining creator-first requires a thoughtful, balanced approach to content moderation. The Trust & Safety team upholds Patreon’s Community Guidelines by reviewing reports, proactively identifying potential violations, and applying enforcement measures that are proportionate to the conduct at issue.

This section outlines how potential violations are identified, the types of enforcement actions we apply, and how we report on our moderation activity. Our commitment to transparent enforcement reflects our continued effort to safeguard platform integrity while earning and maintaining creator trust.

How we identify potential violations

Potential violations of Patreon’s Community Guidelines are identified in three primary ways:

Proactive moderation: Trust & Safety specialists review content and accounts, particularly in higher-risk areas.
User reports: Creators, fans, and external stakeholders flag material or behavior that they believe violates our policies.
Automated detection systems: Technology helps surface potentially violative content for human review, especially in areas like teen safety and sexually explicit material.

Once flagged, reports are primarily reviewed by trained human moderators, with automated enforcement systems used in certain high-volume or high-risk areas.

Types of enforcement actions

In 2025, we continued refining our enforcement model to reflect the evolving ways creators and fans interact on Patreon. We apply enforcement at three levels:

1. Object-level enforcement actions: These actions apply to specific pieces of content or account elements (”objects”) that violate our guidelines but do not warrant full account suspension or removal. This includes the moderation of chat messages, comments, collections, live videos, posts, product listings, profile photos, and usernames. In many cases, violative objects are hidden or removed, and the account holder is notified and may edit, remove, or appeal the enforcement action. Repeated or severe violations at the object level may result in account-level enforcement.

2. Account suspensions: These actions apply to accounts with repeated violations or more serious policy violations. In some cases, suspensions temporarily restrict access to certain platform features or functionality.

3. Account removals: These actions apply to accounts responsible for severe or egregious violations of our policies. Removals result in permanent termination from the platform.

Enforcement totals & reporting methodology

In 2025, Patreon’s Trust & Safety team reviewed 103,041 creators, representing 883,045 individual reports, for potential violations of our Community Guidelines. This reflects a significant increase from 71,022 creators reviewed in 2024, driven in part by expanded detection coverage and moderation across new product surfaces. Following continued investments in our data infrastructure and reporting systems, Patreon has improved its ability to measure and attribute enforcement actions across the platform. As a result, enforcement volumes in this year’s report more comprehensively reflect the work our Trust & Safety team performs across a broader set of surfaces and content types.

Several factors contributed to this growth:

Expanded moderation of member chats and comments, which was introduced in the second half of 2024 and scaled more broadly in 2025.
Continued investment in proactive detection systems in higher-risk policy areas (e.g., StopNCII.org to combat Non-Consensual Intimate Image (NCII) abuse).
Moderation expanded across community surfaces, including new feature types such as live video.

As a result of these reviews, the following enforcement actions were taken in 2025:

66,434 unique object-level enforcement actions
1,989 unique account suspensions
3,165 unique account removals

Reporting methodology

Enforcement metrics reflect actions taken in 2025 on reports that were both submitted and resolved within the 2025 calendar year. The totals above reflect distinct enforcement actions and are not a direct sum of the columns in the policy table below. The policy-vertical table reflects enforcement actions categorized under specific Community Guidelines areas. If a single object or account is reported under multiple policy categories (for example, both “Harassment” and “Hate Speech”), any resulting enforcement action may be logged under each relevant policy vertical. However, each enforcement action is counted only once in the overall totals provided above.

We continue to refine our internal transparency reporting systems to improve accuracy, consistency, and visibility into trends over time.

Enforcement actions by policy area

The table below shows enforcement activity by policy vertical from January 1 through December 31, 2025. These figures reflect both user-reported content and proactive detection. Automated systems play a particularly important role in proactively surfacing potential violations for review in higher-risk areas such as Sexually Gratifying Works. Notwithstanding the reality that the Patreon community inherently skews toward adult audiences and it is not likely to appeal to children, we take Teen Safety extremely seriously and so we also invest in proactive detection in that area.

Note: On March 16, 2026, Patreon updated its Community Guidelines to rename the “Sexually Gratifying Works” section “Adult/18+ Works.” For consistency with the reporting period covered in this report (January 1–December 31, 2025), the previous terminology is used here.

Context

Overall reviews increased year-over-year, reflecting expanded moderation across new community surfaces, including live video and member chats.
Throughout 2025, Patreon also expanded automated detection and review capabilities across several content types, helping identify potential violations earlier and across more areas of the platform.
2025 marked the first full year of moderating member chats and comments, contributing to growth in object-level enforcement activity.
Enforcement activity remains concentrated in higher-risk areas such as Teen Safety and Sexually Gratifying Works, where proactive detection systems play a significant role in surfacing potential violations.

Copyright, privacy & government requests

In addition to enforcing our Community Guidelines, Patreon responds to intellectual property claims, privacy-related requests, and lawful government inquiries. Each request is evaluated carefully to ensure it satisfies applicable legal requirements before action is taken.

Copyright infringement notifications

In 2025, Patreon processed 1,161 valid notifications of claimed copyright infringement (DMCA notices) under applicable copyright law, an increase from 1,047 in 2024.

Data & privacy requests

Patreon remains committed to providing users with meaningful control over their personal data. In 2025, the team processed 24,950 data subject access requests (DSARs), up from 22,133 requests in 2024.

For more information about how Patreon collects, uses, and protects personal data, please review our Privacy Policy or contact [email protected].

Government & law enforcement requests

Patreon reviews government and law enforcement requests in accordance with applicable law and requires valid legal process before disclosing user information. Requests that do not meet legal requirements are rejected. In 2025:

Patreon received 13 properly served requests for information from U.S.-based law enforcement agencies & responded to 100% of those requests after determining they met the legal threshold for disclosure. One such request was received in 2025 and fulfilled in early 2026. By comparison, in 2024 Patreon received 17 requests and responded to 100%.
Patreon received no requests from non-U.S.-based law enforcement agencies in 2025.