Smartphone Usage Statistics for 2026: Who Owns a Phone, Who Has Nothing Else, and What They Do With It

Fifteen mobile figures and the agency or company behind each

Federal agencies, a research center, a trade association and two analytics companies produced the numbers below. We opened every source in mid-October 2026 and kept the unit each one counted, because people, households, connections, page views and transactions all get reported as mobile. The hub of our marketing statistics section explains the general method; this page applies it to the phone.

Pew's 91% and StatCounter's page view share also appear on our hub. Google's 94.13% share of US mobile search referrals is broken out by device on our Google search statistics page.

Nearly everyone has a phone; the gaps hide in age and income

Pew Research Center's 2025 survey, run by SSRS by mail, web and phone from an address-based sample, found 98% of American adults own a cellphone of some kind and 91% a smartphone. Pew's first measure, in 2011, was 35%. In fifteen years the smartphone went from a third of adults to nine in ten.

The national figure flattens the edges. Pew's breakdowns show where a phone-only plan still misses people.

For a business whose customers skew older, such as a home care agency, a hearing clinic or a Medicare insurance broker, roughly one customer in five over 65 still carries a basic phone or none. That customer calls rather than taps a booking widget. Pew's smartphone-only figure points the other way: 16% of adults use a phone as their only connection, including 27% of adults under 30 and 34% of those in households earning under $30,000. For them, a page that fails on a phone is a page that does not exist.

Eighty percent of adults live where no landline rings

The most careful count of telephone habits in the country comes from an unlikely place. The National Health Interview Survey, run by the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, interviews thousands of adults about their health and, along the way, about the phones in their homes. Its September 2026 release found 80.0% of adults in July to December 2025 lived in wireless-only households, up from 76.0% two years earlier. Only 1.0% lived in landline-only homes.

The same release reports each adult's own phone status, a slightly different measure, at 79.2% wireless-only. That table is where the useful splits are.

• By age: 89.6% of adults 30 to 34 and 89.1% of those 25 to 29 are wireless-only, against 63.4% of adults 65 and older.
• By region: 83.6% in the South and 81.4% in the Midwest, against 67.7% in the Northeast.
• By place: 79.9% in metropolitan areas and 75.4% outside them.
• A caveat NCHS states itself: the federal shutdown of October 1 to November 12, 2025 paused interviews, December cases were not fielded, and weights were adjusted for the missing month. The late 2025 sample is smaller than usual.

Households, as the Census Bureau counts them, and why the newest report covers 2021

The Census Bureau asks about computers and internet access in the American Community Survey every year, and publishes a written report every few years. The most recent, Computer and Internet Use in the United States: 2021 (report ACS-56), came out on June 18, 2024. It is older than we would like, and it is still the Bureau's latest written analysis; the yearly detail tables (table S2801) live in its data tools.

In 2021, 90% of households owned at least one smartphone, 81% a desktop or laptop and 64% a tablet. The Bureau notes smartphones have been the most common computing device in households since 2017. Ownership again tracked age: roughly 75% of households headed by someone 65 or older had a smartphone, against roughly 98% of households headed by someone under 35.

Note the unit. Census counts households and Pew counts adults, so Census's 11% and Pew's 16% are not a trend from one to the other. They are two measures of a similar idea, taken four years apart, from different samples.

Half of page views and more than half of holiday sales happen on a phone

Traffic measures tell a different story from ownership, because a person with a phone and a laptop chooses one for each task. StatCounter's US data for September 2026 put mobile at 49.1% of page views, desktop at 48.47% and tablet at 2.42%. Worldwide, mobile was 58.99%. Among US phones, iOS ran on 53.59% and Android on 46.39%, so the iPhone is the slightly more common screen your pages land on, and the Android visitor is nearly as likely.

Shopping has tipped further. Adobe, which sells the analytics software it measured with, reported that 56.4% of US online holiday sales between November 1 and December 31, 2025 were made on a smartphone, up from 54.5% the year before. Christmas Day reached 66.5%. The sample is large, over 1 trillion visits to US retail sites, and also particular: Adobe says its software is used by most of the top 100 US internet retailers, so the figure describes big stores more than small ones.

The Census Bureau does not split e-commerce by device, so no federal mobile commerce figure sits beside Adobe's. Nor could we find a recent Google figure for the mobile share of its searches, so that common claim stays out. Local behavior is better measured: BrightLocal's 2026 study, covered on our local SEO statistics page, found that most consumers ran their latest local business search on a phone.

159 trillion megabytes, and the connections that are not phones

CTIA, the trade association of the wireless carriers, publishes an annual survey of its industry. The 2026 highlights, released in September 2026, report that Americans used 159.3 trillion megabytes of wireless data in 2025, 20% more than in 2024, when the figure was 132 trillion. In 2015 it was 9.6 trillion.

A quarter of adults say the phone almost never leaves their hand

Ownership says who could see your page. Attention says how they will. Pew's survey of 9,750 adults from May 26 to June 1, 2026 found 26% say they use their smartphone almost constantly and 60% several times a day. By age, almost constant use runs from 42% of adults 18 to 29 to 9% of those 65 and older.

The same people are ambivalent about it. 53% say they spend too much time on their phone, including 70% of adults under 30. 45% tried to cut back in the past year, and among those who tried, 23% say they were not too or not at all successful. Your reader may be one of them.

Your page is competing with the eleven other things on the same screen, and the visitor is already feeling guilty about the screen.

The practical reading: the first screen on a phone has to say what you do, where, and how to reach you, before the thumb moves on. Our guide to mobile website design best practices covers the layout, and how to get more calls and estimate requests covers the buttons.

Six checks before a mobile statistic goes in a slide

1. 1

   Name the unit

   Pew counts adults, Census counts households, NCHS counts adults by household and by person, CTIA counts connections, StatCounter counts page views, Adobe counts dollars. A sentence that moves a figure from one unit to another is a new claim nobody measured.

2. 2

   Separate owning from using

   91% own a smartphone. That says nothing about whether they use it to find a plumber. Usage figures come from traffic and transaction data, and those come from narrower panels.

3. 3

   Check who paid

   Pew and the federal agencies sell nothing. CTIA speaks for carriers. Adobe sells the analytics it measured with, and StatCounter's panel is the sites that install its free tracker. Both company datasets are large and useful, and neither is a random sample.

4. 4

   Look for the shutdown footnote

   Federal surveys fielded in late 2025 lost weeks of interviews to the government shutdown. NCHS says so and adjusted its weights. Read any late 2025 federal figure with a slightly wider margin.

5. 5

   Date the report, not the release

   Census released its computer use report in 2024; the data describe 2021. Pew's fact sheet is dated November 2025; its fieldwork ran February to June 2025.

6. 6

   Distrust the round, undated mobile claim

   Figures such as a large share of searches happening on mobile circulate without a publisher, a year or a method. If the trail ends at a roundup, leave it out, as we did.

Your own device split is two clicks away

National figures say the phone is the default screen. Your analytics say whether that is true for your customers. In Google Analytics, add the Device category dimension to the traffic acquisition report and compare mobile and desktop by conversions, not just sessions. In Google Search Console, filter the Performance report by device. If phones bring most of the visits and few of the conversions, the phone version of the site is where the money leaks. If calls and forms are not counted yet, conversion tracking setup comes first.

Then look at the site the way most visitors do, on a phone, on cellular data, logged out. Google ranks the phone version of a page, which our mobile SEO guide explains. The free website audit checks mobile, speed, SEO, security and content and emails a report with fixes, and the website health check runs quick checks in seconds. If the fixes are layout problems, our mobile responsive fixes work handles them; if the site needs replacing, a rebuild starts at $1,500 on our web design pricing page, and the free mockup shows you the new home page before you commit.