ExpressVPN Expands to 214 Server Locations, Its Largest Network Ever

ExpressVPN announced on July 7, 2026 the expansion of its global server network to 214 distinct, app-selectable locations across 113 countries, the largest network the company has operated in its history. New additions span Europe, Africa, the Middle East and North America, with cities including Nuuk, Lagos, Doha, Valencia and Manchester joining the roster of connection points, per ExpressVPN’s own announcement.

Why server count actually matters

A bigger number of locations isn’t just a marketing figure. More app-selectable cities means more options to find a low-latency server close to your actual location, more fallback choices if a specific server gets congested or temporarily blocked by a streaming platform, and better odds of finding a server in a specific city when local IP addressing matters, for banking, local pricing, or region-specific content.

The addition of smaller or less common locations, Nuuk in Greenland and Doha in Qatar among them, also matters for a narrower but real use case: travelers and expats who need a server genuinely local to a country most VPN providers don’t bother covering.

How this compares to the rest of the market

Server location count varies significantly across the providers we track. NordVPN and Surfshark both operate large global networks with thousands of individual servers, though NordVPN groups its network around a somewhat smaller set of distinct countries than ExpressVPN’s new 113-country footprint. ExpressVPN has historically differentiated itself less on outright server volume and more on distinct location count and consistency, and this expansion pushes that advantage further.

In our own testing, ExpressVPN scores 5/5 on both speed and streaming access, tying NordVPN for the top marks in both categories, with an overall score of 3.70/5 pulled down mainly by weaker transparency and jurisdiction scores relative to Panama-based NordVPN. The server expansion doesn’t change those underlying scores, but it does reinforce the specific strength, breadth of location choice, that already differentiated ExpressVPN’s product.

Want to compare all VPNs side by side? Check our full VPN comparison table with scores across 18 criteria.

What this means for streaming and travel use cases

More granular city-level server choice generally helps with two things readers search for most. First, streaming: a wider spread of US, UK and EU city servers gives you more options to route around a specific IP range that a platform like Netflix or BBC iPlayer has flagged, without needing to switch providers entirely. Our guide on fixing VPN issues with Netflix covers the server-switching logic this expansion makes easier to execute.

Second, travel: readers researching the best VPN for Europe travel or looking for reliable connections while working from unusual locations benefit directly from a wider spread of nearby servers, since latency and reliability both improve when you’re not routing halfway across a continent to reach the nearest available city.

The pricing side hasn’t changed

ExpressVPN’s pricing in our database remains at $12.99/mo month-to-month, $59.88 total on the one-year plan ($4.99/mo effective), and $83.76 on the two-year plan. The server expansion is a network investment rather than a plan restructuring, and current subscribers get access to the new locations automatically through a standard app update, no separate purchase or plan change required.

Should this change your VPN choice?

If you were already choosing between ExpressVPN and a close competitor and city-level server variety was the tiebreaker, this expansion tilts things further in ExpressVPN’s favor. It doesn’t change the broader trade-offs: NordVPN still leads on overall score, audit history and jurisdiction in our comparison, while ExpressVPN’s British Virgin Islands base and this network breadth remain its clearest differentiators. Our full ExpressVPN vs NordVPN comparison breaks down how the two stack up beyond server count alone.

See ExpressVPN’s current plans, or if jurisdiction and audit cadence matter more to you than raw location count, check NordVPN instead.

What “app-selectable location” actually means

It’s worth clarifying the terminology, since VPN providers use server counts inconsistently in marketing. A “location” is a distinct city or region you can choose from inside the app, while the total number of physical or virtual servers behind that location is usually much higher and largely invisible to the user. ExpressVPN’s 214 figure refers to distinct selectable locations, not raw server count, n connect from, not how much duplicate infrastructure sits behind a single city. A provider claiming 6,000+ servers across 100 countries might still only offer one selectable city in a given country, while a smaller total server count spread across more distinct cities gives you finer control over exactly where your traffic appears to originate. For most everyday use, city-level choice matters more than raw server totals, since it directly determines whether you can find a low-latency option close to home or a specific city needed for local pricing or content.

Why Nuuk, Doha and Lagos are the interesting additions

The headline cities in this expansion aren’t the ones most users will connect to daily, but they signal something about where ExpressVPN sees demand growing. Doha gives travelers and expats in the Gulf region a genuinely local option rather than routing through a more distant Middle East hub. Lagos extends coverage into West Africa, a region most major VPN providers still cover thinly if at all, useful for both local users and anyone needing a Nigerian IP for banking or content access. Nuuk, in Greenland, is the most unusual addition, a market so small that its inclusion says more about ExpressVPN’s stated ambition to cover the full spread of populated regions than about any obvious commercial demand.

Coverage like this typically pays off less in day-to-day usage for most subscribers and more in edge cases: a journalist working from an underserved region, a remote worker whose company requires a local IP for compliance reasons, or a traveler who specifically needs their traffic to appear to originate from a country most competitors skip entirely.

How server expansions affect speed and congestion

More locations doesn’t automatically mean faster speeds on servers you already use, but it does reduce the odds of hitting a congested server during peak hours. When ExpressVPN’s most popular US or UK locations get heavy simultaneous traffic, having additional nearby cities to switch to spreads that load across more infrastructure rather than concentrating it on a handful of flagship servers. This is one of the less visible benefits of network expansion: it’s not about the new locations themselves so much as the breathing room they create for the popular ones everyone already uses.

The broader industry trend

ExpressVPN isn’t alone in treating network breadth as a competitive differentiator. NordVPN, Surfshark and others have all expanded their footprints over the past two years, and server count has become one of the more visible marketing metrics providers compete on, alongside speed and audit history. The risk for consumers is that raw numbers can obscure quality: a provider adding dozens of virtual server locations that all route through the same handful of physical data centers isn’t offering the same value as one adding genuinely distinct physical infrastructure in new cities. ExpressVPN’s announcement specifies distinct app-selectable locations rather than a vague total server count, which is the more transparent way to report this kind of expansion, and worth watching for when comparing similar announcements from competitors going forward.