One in five households have cut their landlines

June 18, 2009

FACT: 20% of Households are Mobile-Only.

A survey conducted by the NCHS found that on- fifth of U.S. households have cut out their land line phones and rely solely on their cell phones. In fact, the rate of households going wireless may be increasing as families cut costs during the economic downturn.

Preliminary results from the July-December 2008 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) indicate that the number of American homes with only wireless telephones continues to grow. More than one of every five American homes (20.2%) had only wireless telephones (also known as cellular telephones, cell phones, or mobile phones) during the second half of 2008, an increase of 2.7 percentage points since the first half of 2008.

The number of households without a land line phone jumped to 20 percent from 17 percent in the second half of 2008. This is the largest jump in mobile-only health since the National Center for Health Statistics began this survey in 2003.

The NCHS collects statistics on land line and mobile phone use as part of its annual National Health Interview Survey. The survey showed that over 12 thousand US households became mobile-only from July to December last year.

Now there are more households in the US relying solely on mobile phones than land lines. Just 17 percent of households surveyed relied solely on a land line phone for calls.

Of the households with land line phones, many of them already receive the majority of their calls on their mobile phone. This portion of the homes with land lines represents almost 15 percent of the remaining households.

Over 60 percent of adults that share a flat with other roommates and a third of those aged 18-29 also rely exclusively on mobile phones to communicate.

Other groups relying solely on mobile phones are 40 percent of all renters and 25 percent of Hispanic households. On the other end of the scale are homeowners, of which only 9 percent have cut out their home phones.

Stephen Blumberg of the CDC, an author of the report, believes, “that with the recession, we’d see an increase in the prevalence of wireless only households, above what we might have expected had there been no recession.” After all, if a family has to choose between the two, they’re more likely to keep the mobile phone that they can carry with them.

BACKGROUND:
For many years, NHIS has included questions on residential telephone numbers, to permit recontacting of survey participants. Starting in 2003, additional questions were asked, to determine whether the family’s telephone number was a landline telephone. All survey respondents were also asked whether “you or anyone in your family has a working cellular telephone.”

A “family” can be an individual or a group of two or more related persons living together in the same housing unit (a “household”). Thus, a family can consist of only one person, and more than one family can live in a household (including, for example, a household where there are multiple single-person families, as when unrelated roommates are living together).