According to statista there are around 312 million phone user in the US. This is almost the entire US population which is roughly 330 million (Although there are probably not that many users, maybe there is some double counting from having multiple lines.) Regardless, most people have a phone and as such a phone plan.

Given how essential this service is, you may be wondering…

how much do people pay for their plans? and

Am I getting a good deal in comparison? Keep reading find out!

Straight to the results!

In a survey of 204 people across the US we found the following. The average plan across all regions, data plans, and number of lines per plan came out to $52.56 dollars a month per line, from now on abbreviated as DMPL. Although simplistic, this gives us a broad picture of what most people pay.

However, this hides a lot of nuance we had to dig into.

Onto the nuance… if you care about those kind of things.

When looking at all the data, there are clear signs that getting the best price is influenced by many factors: location, number of lines, amount of data in your plan, and obviously who is your provider.

When we started digging into these details we found interesting things.

People love Unlimited.

72% of all respondents reported having and unlimited plan. I get it, I suppose not having to deal with data limits must be great, I wouldn’t know.

Across all providers and number of lines, the average cost of an unlimited plan came out to 55.84 dollars a month per line (DMPL), not much different than the average.

However…

if you had just 1 line in your unlimited plan the average went up to $63.65 DMPL, for unlimited plans with 2 lines the average is $60.08 DMPL, for 3 lines the average goes down by almost 10 bucks to $50.94 DMPL and for 4 lines to $38.20 DMPL about 12 dollars less per line.

As expected the total average hides the fact that if you can bundle several lines and negotiate, a much better price is out there for you.

What about my provider? does it impact what I pay?

Well… unsurprisingly, of course it does!

For simplicity, since unlimited is such a popular plan we will limit to looking at unlimited plans.

We also separate between the big three (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile) and the rest.

If you are currently a customer of the big three, the average cost comes at $62.25 DMPL…

If you are not in the big three… bring out the drums!! The average for a plan comes to …

$39.39 dollars a month per line!!!

Wow! That was way cheaper than we even guessed.

But wait there’s more

If we look again at the average for unlimited plans with the big three depending on how many lines are in your plan we saw the following.

• $74.53 DMPL for a plan with 1 line.
• $68.31 DMPL for a plan with 2 lines.
• $56.19 DMPL for a plan with 3 lines.
• $41.03 DMPL for a plan with 4 lines.

If you are not with the big three.

• $46.47 DMPL for a plan with 1 line.
• $32.88 DMPL for a plan with 2 lines.
• $34.13 DMPL for a plan with 3 lines.
  • Weird! maybe a fluke due to small sample but who knows, we are not writing a scientific paper.
• $25.83 for a plan with 4 lines.

What about depriorization though?

Well good news and bad news.

The Bad

The bad news is that it does happen and we do not have data to make deep inroads into this question. Maybe it happens, but what about the frequency? and is the frequency of this event often enough to justify the extra cost? honestly we dont know the answer to that, yet!

The Good

Good news is that we did ask all participants to rate their service providers experience from 1 to 5.

Where 1 = very poor, 2 = poor, 3 = ok, 4 = good, 5 = excellent.

here is what we got for those same groups.

For all unlimited plans across all providers the average rating was a...

3.8, somewhere between ok and good.

For unlimited plans with the big three

3.8, not bad considering the bad rep commonly accepted.

For unlimited plans with non-big three providers, wait for it..

3.9 wait what? but the cell service, and the offices and depriorization…

Well, maybe the 20 something extra dollars on average do make a difference.

If you are curious, or a price minimizer.

We left out non-unlimited plans for the entirety of this post, however there are just as many interesting data points there to be taken into account if you are into that.

Maybe you are just curious, trying to get even a lower price, dont mind to watch your data caps, or maybe you are just old and not really into the internet thing, then here is some data for you.

Less data happier user…

This one is a shocker, on average people give their provider a 4.0 rating when we include only those with plans capped between 0-10 gbs per month.

Maybe the internet is a sad place after all..

on that note, the average user in this group paid $43.30 DMPL. Although the data has a huge range, so take that with a huge grain of salt.

Breakdown

To not further extend this novel of a post, we will only look at 1, 2, 5 gb plans, here are the results across all providers and lines per plan.

• $27.75 DMPL for plans with 1GB
• $38.47 DMPL for plans with 2GBs
• $61.13 DMPL for plans with 5GBs

Again take this with a grain of salt, this area is akin to the wild west. In the 5GB plans there are people paying as low as $15 DMPL for 1 line to people paying unlimited prices of $60 DMPL with 2 or 3 lines.

If you would like us to expand on another post on the jungle of non-unlimited plans, and for us to continue posting these analysis share, comment and like this post. Only way we can know this is actually useful.

Let us know what other services you would find useful to have this breakdown for.