---
title: "For most wireless-only households, look south and west"
description: "The states with the most wireless-only households tend to be largely rural and in the West or South; households in the Northeast are most likely to hang onto their landlines. "
date: "2013-12-23"
authors:
  - name: "Drew DeSilver"
    job_title: "Senior Writer/Editor"
    link: "https://www.pewresearch.org/staff/drew-desilver/"
url: "https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/12/23/for-most-wireless-only-households-look-south-and-west/"
categories:
  - "Platforms & Services"
  - "Rural Residents & Tech"
  - "Rural, Urban and Suburban Communities"
---

# For most wireless-only households, look south and west

![](https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2014/01/FT_13.12.19_WirelessHouseholds_640px_new.png)

The state where people most rely on their cellphones isn't, as you might think, a busy metropolis (like New York) or a city crowded with texting college students (like Boston). It's scenic, sparsely populated Idaho, where as of last year more than half (52.3%) of adults lived in households that had cut the landline-phone cord completely.

That's according to a recent report from the CDC's [National Center for Health Statistics](http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr070.pdf), which has tracked the rise of wireless-only households since 2003. Close behind Idaho were Mississippi, where 49.4% of adults lived in wireless-only households, and Arkansas (49% of adults). Washington, D.C. came in fifth at 46%, just behind Utah, but New York was clustered near the bottom with several other Northeastern states, with 23.5% of adults in wireless-only households. Where you're most likely to find a landline: New Jersey, where 78.9% of households have one (regardless of how much they use it).

The patterns are similar when the analysis is expanded to include households that have a landline phone but receive most calls on cellphones. Largely rural states in the West and South have the highest shares of such "wireless-primary" households, while the lowest wireless-primary shares are clustered in the Northeast.

[![WirelessOnly_Households2](https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2013/12/WirelessOnly_Households2.png)](https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2013/12/WirelessOnly_Households2.png)

Overall, according to [a separate CDC report](http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/wireless201312.pdf), two in every five American homes (39.4%) had *only* wireless phones as of the first half of 2013. About 38% of U.S. adults (or 90 million) and 45.4% of U.S. children (33 million) lived in wireless-only households. The wireless-only share has been rising steadily ever since the CDC began asking people about their phone status: Just three years ago only 26.6% of U.S. households were wireless-only.

The wireless-only lifestyle is especially predominant among the poor and the young. According to the CDC, nearly two-thirds (65.6%) of adults ages 25-29 lived in households with only wireless phones, as did three-in-five (59.9%) 30- to 34-year-olds and a majority (54.3%) of adults ages 18-24. A majority of adults living in poverty (54.7%) lived in a wireless-only household, versus 47.5% of what the CDC calls the "near-poor" and 35.3% of non-poor adults; wireless-only households also predominate among Hispanics, renters and adults living with roommates. (Some of those categories overlap, of course.)

Young adults who grew up with cellphones may never have had a landline to give up, [industry analysts say](http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2011-04-20-cellphone-study.htm), while poor people may cut the cord on a seldom-used landline phone to [save money](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/20/landline-phones-poor-households_n_851802.html). (As Bloomberg News [notes](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-18/poor-americans-lead-shift-to-wireless-homes-abandoning-landlines.html), federal subsidies encourage low-cost and no-contract providers to give phones to low-income people.) As fewer people use traditional landlines, phone companies have become [more reluctant to maintain their traditional switched networks](http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/11/18/246001725/have-we-reached-the-end-of-the-landline); the resulting degradation of call quality, in turn, can lead even more people to switch.

[![](http://pewresearch.org/pewresearch-org/internet/Reports/2013/Cell-Internet/Main-Findings/~/media/7B670129C7CB47F8A2169430202FB8A4.jpg?w=452&h=792&as=1)](http://pewresearch.org/pewresearch-org/internet/Reports/2013/Cell-Internet/Main-Findings/Cell-Internet.aspx)

The CDC data are paralleled by Pew Research Center findings on [people who use their phones to go online](http://pewresearch.org/pewresearch-org/internet/Reports/2013/Cell-Internet/Main-Findings/Cell-Internet.aspx). A 2013 survey found, for example, that overall 34% of those "cell internet users" go online mostly using their phones, but the "cell-mostly" share rises to 45% among the lowest-income people, 50% among people ages 18 to 29, and 60% among Hispanics.

The demographic and geographic differences between wireless-only and landline households pose a particular statistical challenge for survey researchers, who have to make sure that their samples of both groups are adequately represented and properly weighted in their analyses.