The average US wireless connection cost $33.14 a month in service revenue in 2025, a third less than the $49.26 it commanded in 2007 — and after adjusting for 55% consumer-price inflation, the real price dropped 57%, according to CTIA's 2025 Wireless Industry Survey released September 10, 2026.

That makes wireless the rare household bill to fall in price across an 18-year stretch that included the 2008 financial crisis, a pandemic and the highest annual inflation reading since 1981.

How much did carriers actually cut?

The 599 million connections CTIA counted at year-end 2025 include 46% that are not phones — smartwatches, tablets, fixed-wireless home Internet lines — and that mix shift pulls the headline average down. But the carriers' own phone numbers tell the same story.

AT&T reported postpaid phone ARPU of $56.57 in the fourth quarter of 2025, up 1.9% from $55.52 six years earlier. T-Mobile's postpaid phone ARPU climbed 10.7% to $50.71. Consumer prices rose 26% over those six years, so the postpaid phone line got 19% cheaper in real terms at AT&T and 12% cheaper at T-Mobile — with no watches or tablets in the denominator.

What happened to the price per gigabyte?

Service revenue divided by traffic on the network fell from $412 per gigabyte in 2010 to $4.50 in 2020 and $1.48 in 2025. Smartphones alone carried the bulk of that slide:

• AT&T postpaid phone ARPU divided by average smartphone traffic: about $6.03 per GB in 2019, $2.56 in 2025
• T-Mobile equivalent: $4.98 per GB in 2019, $2.29 in 2025
• Average smartphone usage: 22.1 GB a month in 2025, up from 9.2 GB in 2019 and roughly 176 MB in 2010

If carriers still charged 2015's industry rate of $19.89 per gigabyte, the 22.1 GB monthly smartphone bill would come to $440. AT&T billed $56.57.

Does the government's price index agree?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics wireless telephone services index, which prices service at constant quality, fell 28% between 2007 and 2025 while the all-items index rose 55%. Between 2020 and 2025 — a stretch that included 8% inflation in 2022 — the wireless index slipped 1.7% and the all-items index climbed 24%.

The BLS index adjusts for quality, so more data for the same dollar counts as a price cut; it measures the value of service, not the size of the monthly bill.

What does the household budget look like?

In 2007, at average private-sector hourly earnings of $20.91, the average connection's monthly service bill cost 141 minutes of work. In 2025, at $36.44 an hour, it cost 55 minutes. For production and nonsupervisory workers, the bill fell from 170 minutes of work to 63 — an hour and 47 minutes handed back every month.

From the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey:

• Cellular service took 1.73% of average household spending in 2024, down from 2.06% in 2020
• All telephone service took 1.86% in 2024, the two lowest readings since BLS began the series in 1984
• The annual cellular outlay still rose to $1,359 as households put more lines on the account

Where did the growth come from?

The industry sold 151% more connections in 2025 than in 2007, lifting service revenue 69% to $235 billion. Network traffic reached 159.3 trillion megabytes in 2025, 410 times the 2010 volume. Smartphones carried roughly 83 trillion MB of that total; the rest came largely from 5G fixed-wireless home Internet, which CTIA puts at nearly 16 million subscribers.

Traffic outside smartphones grew from about 4 trillion MB in 2020 to about 77 trillion MB in 2025 — roughly 60% of all network-traffic growth across those five years.

The prepaid segment complicates the picture less than critics suggest: its share of connections fell from 24% in 2012 to 14% in 2025, yet prepaid revenue per connection still rose 26% over the period to $33.68 — well below the 40% rise in consumer prices.

As carriers work through their 5G capex cycles and the fixed-wireless market matures, the BLS index, CTIA's annual survey and the carriers' own ARPU filings will continue to offer the cleanest read on whether nominal price stability translates into sustained affordability for US households.