How Many American Households Have No Home Internet? A County-Level Look at All 3,144 Counties

How Many American Households Have No Home Internet? A County-Level Look at All 3,144 Counties

26,296,558 US households, 20.3% of the country, have no home internet connection. That figure combines two groups the headline statistics usually keep apart: the 11,477,855 households with no internet subscription of any kind, and the 14,818,703 households whose only connection is a cellular data plan.

The second group is the larger of the two. 56.4% of households without a home connection are getting by on a phone plan, and because a cellular data plan counts as an internet subscription, they appear as connected in the standard subscription figures.

What we measured, and why we combined those two groups

A cellular data plan is a real internet connection, and for many households it is the only affordable one. But it is not equivalent to a fixed home connection. Data caps, throttling after a threshold, and a single small screen shared across a household are the practical realities. A student cannot reasonably submit coursework on it, and a remote worker cannot reasonably hold a video call on it.

So this analysis counts a household as having no home internet if it has no subscription at all, or if a cellular plan is its only subscription. Where that distinction matters we have published both components separately in the data files, so anyone can split them back apart.

The states where it is most common

The counties where it is most concentrated

285 counties have at least 40% of households without a home internet connection. The table below shows the highest, restricted to counties with at least 1,000 households, because below that threshold the margins of error are too wide to rank meaningfully.

Method

All figures come from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey 2024 five-year estimates, table S2801, retrieved through the Census API. This is the most recent vintage the Census publishes at county level; the 2025 five-year file is not released until December 2026. County coverage requires the five-year series, because the one-year series only covers areas with populations above 65,000.

Three variables were used. Total households (S2801_C01_001), households whose only internet subscription is a cellular data plan (S2801_C01_016), and households without an internet subscription (S2801_C01_019). The headline measure is the sum of the second and third.

Coverage is the 50 states and the District of Columbia, 3,144 counties and county equivalents. Puerto Rico municipios are excluded so that the county and state tables describe the same territory.

Margins of error are published alongside every figure in the accompanying files. The national margin of error on the headline number is plus or minus 72,698 households. County estimates in small counties carry wide margins, and 74 of the 3,144 counties have a margin of error exceeding 10 percentage points. Those counties appear in the data files but are excluded from any ranking here.

Every number in this analysis is a count published by the Census Bureau. Nothing is modelled, projected, or weighted by us.