How Much Data Does the Average Person Use Per Month?

By Muninder Adavelli. Scraping, SEO, and proxies for over a decade.

Ask five sources how much data the average person uses in a month and you'll get five different answers: 21 GB, 5 GB, 767 GB, 100 GB, 25 GB. None of them are wrong. They're measuring different populations on different pipes with different device stacks. And the moment you flatten that back into a single "average," you've thrown away most of the story.

This article walks through the numbers that actually exist in the source data: what Ericsson's global smartphone average of 21 GB per month means and doesn't mean, why streaming accounts for roughly three-quarters of the answer, how the pool of "average users" has changed from 1 billion people to 6 billion in twenty years, and where the gaps that survive that growth still sit. Every specific figure below traces to one of 16 source URLs: telecoms reports (Ericsson via DataReportal), ISP listicles (Astound, Optimum, EarthLink, FlexMobile, PureTalk, HighSpeedInternet.com, Trident, OpenVault), the ITU's FactsFigures 2025 series, Sandvine's AppLogic-Networks per-subscriber traffic breakdowns, and IoT Analytics' device counts.

1. The number nobody quite agrees on

1.1 Ericsson: 21 GB per smartphone per month, globally

Ericsson's 2025 Mobility Report puts the average smartphone at 21 GB of mobile data per month, globally. DataReportal's summary of Ericsson's data reports the same figure, adds a growth curve (Q3 2018 was 4.9 GB per month, Q3 2024 was 21.6 GB), and notes that the range across regions runs from the low-20s to the mid-30s of GB per month.

Three things this number is not: it's not a per-person figure across all devices (it's per smartphone, and lots of people carry more than one), it's not a fixed-broadband figure (it counts cellular traffic only, so a heavy Wi-Fi user who is off cellular most of the day pulls the average down), and it's not a household total (it's per handset). It's a global mean of cellular smartphone traffic: the closest single number the source data provides for "the average person on their phone."

1.2 What consumer sources report: the 5 GB to 100 GB spread

The US consumer sources in the pool report a much wider spread than Ericsson's global figure, because they're describing narrower populations:

• 5 to 10 GB per month: realistic for a US user who spends most of the day on Wi-Fi at home and at work, per FlexMobile's guidance.
• About 25 GB per month: the US smartphone average at end-2025, per HighSpeedInternet.com.
• About 100 GB per month: heavy users on unlimited plans, per PureTalk.
• 2 GB per month or less: the average for older adults, per PureTalk.
• 15 to 25 GB per month: a working baseline for people who stream HD video off Wi-Fi, per FlexMobile.

These numbers don't fight each other. They fight the premise that there is one number. The Wi-Fi-heavy user, the unlimited-plan power user, the 65-year-old with a flip-phone habit, and the mobile-hotspot commuter live inside the same "average" and none of them consume like it.

1.3 OpenVault's answer is 767 GB, but that's a household on fixed broadband

OpenVault's Q4 2025 Broadband Insights report says the average US household consumes 767 GB of data per month, the first time the national average has crossed 700 GB, up nearly 10% year-over-year. This isn't a per-person number and it isn't a mobile number. It's total fixed-broadband consumption for the whole home: phones on Wi-Fi, laptops, smart TVs, gaming consoles, cloud-connected security cameras, everything.

For context, the same report puts the median US household at 532 GB per month and notes that roughly one in four households qualifies as a "power user" consuming 1 TB or more each month. Upstream traffic (data flowing from the home to the internet) is climbing about 20% year-over-year, three times the pace of downloads. That's video calls, cloud backups, and always-on cameras. Consumer guidance in the pool cites 30 to 100 GB per month for a single cloud security camera at 1080p, and about 60 GB for a Nest camera on medium settings; a couple of those in a home with heavy streaming will get you past 700 GB without doing anything unusual.

1.4 Why 21 GB, 767 GB and 5 GB can all be right

They're measuring different things. 21 GB is the global average of mobile data per smartphone per month. 767 GB is the US average of fixed broadband per household per month. 5 GB is a realistic monthly cellular usage for a US individual who mostly lives on Wi-Fi.

When someone quotes a number for "average data usage," four questions decide what it actually means: (1) per person or per household, (2) mobile or fixed, (3) which country or region, (4) which year. All four matter enough to move the answer by an order of magnitude.

2. Video is 76% of the answer

2.1 The share

Video is roughly 76% of mobile downstream traffic, the figure reported by Sandvine and echoed by AppLogic Networks' 2025 Global Internet Phenomena Report. On general internet traffic (fixed and mobile combined), the pool has an even higher figure: about 82% of internet data traffic is video.

Everything else (social, messaging, gaming, downloads) divides the remaining quarter. And even inside that quarter, most of the data is video too, because "social" today is autoplay video feeds.

2.2 The daily breakdown per subscriber (Sandvine)

Sandvine's report breaks the traffic mix down to per-subscriber-per-day volumes, which are the most concrete numbers in the pool:

Messaging, the app category people most associate with "using data," is the smallest data footprint in this table by a wide margin. Social media is bigger than messaging by more than 30×, and it's bigger largely because of embedded and autoplay video.

2.3 Per-hour app rates

If you want to see where a monthly cellular budget actually goes, the per-hour rates from the consumer listicles are useful:

The gap between video and everything else is what does the work in the traffic mix.

2.4 Seven hours of Netflix HD = Ericsson's 21 GB

The math is straightforward: 3 GB per hour of Netflix HD × 7 hours = 21 GB, which is Ericsson's global monthly smartphone average. In practice nobody's cellular budget is a straight line of Netflix; but the point is that 21 GB, the "average," is roughly what a modest video habit produces on its own, before you count anything else.

That is what the 76% share is really saying. The average smartphone user is, first and foremost, a video consumer. When you ask "how much data do people use," you're mostly asking "how much video do they watch on cellular."

3. From 1 billion online to 6 billion online

3.1 2005 to 2025: 15.6% online to 74% online

In 2005, ITU recorded global internet penetration at 15.6% (about 1 billion people online). By 2024, that had grown to 5.8 billion people, 72% of the world. By 2025, 6 billion people (74% of the world) are online. Year-on-year growth in 2025 is 3.3%, up slightly from 2.9% in 2024.

The "average person" is a moving target for a mechanical reason: the pool of people who are counted in the average has grown six-fold in twenty years. Whoever counted as an average user in 2005 (an urban, high-income, English-speaking, desktop-first minority) is not who counts as an average user today. The definition of "average" has been continuously rewritten by the last 5 billion people to come online.

3.2 2.6 billion people are still offline

More than a quarter of the world's population (2.6 billion people, per ITU 2025) remain offline, concentrated in Africa and South Asia. Their data usage contribution to the global average is exactly zero.

Any "average monthly data usage" figure is by construction an average over the 74% who are on the internet at all. The other 26% aren't below average: they're outside the sample. This is worth stating explicitly because averages hide it: the growth in per-user data consumption is being measured against a shrinking share of the world.

3.3 Mobile data per user has more than quadrupled since 2018

DataReportal's summary of Ericsson data documents the growth curve directly: Q3 2018 average smartphone traffic was 4.9 GB per month, Q3 2024 was 21.6 GB per month: a 4.4× increase in six years. Global cellular data went from 21.78 exabytes per month in Q3 2018 to 157.16 exabytes per month in Q3 2024, roughly a 7× increase in the same window.

Notice that per-user consumption grew 4.4× while total network volume grew 7×. The difference is that more people came online. Some of the traffic growth is heavier per-user habits (mostly video); some of it is population growth on the network.

3.4 US home internet is up 94% since 2019

OpenVault reports that US home internet data usage has increased 94% since 2019. Q4 2025 average was 767 GB per household, up nearly 10% year-over-year. The single largest spike in the curve is the 2019 to 2020 pandemic year, when remote work, schooling, and streaming pushed households onto their home networks all day. Usage has continued to grow steadily since then rather than reverting.

Household usage guidance from consumer sources in the pool puts the typical US home somewhere between 300 and 600 GB per month depending on device density and video habits (enough for a normal streaming diet), with everything above that reflecting heavy Wi-Fi camera loads, remote workers on daily video calls, and 4K TVs.

4. The gap that hasn't closed

The number of internet users globally has grown by nearly 45% since 2019, per ITU. Behind that growth, four gaps have barely narrowed in the same six years.

4.1 Urban 85%, rural 58% (Africa: 55% urban vs 21% rural)

Globally in 2025, 85% of urban populations use the internet compared with 58% of rural populations: a ratio of 1.47. The world ratio has come down from 1.60 in 2022 (with intermediate steps of 1.54 in 2023 and 1.49 in 2024), meaning the gap is closing, but slowly. Where it's already smallest (Europe at 94% urban / 87% rural, CIS at 96% / 88%), the population is close to universally online. Where it matters most, it's still wide:

The widest gap in the entire ITU dataset is the low-income countries' 2.85 ratio: 39% of urban dwellers online vs 14% of rural dwellers. That's less than one in seven rural residents in low-income countries with any internet access at all.

4.2 Youth 82%, the rest of the population 72%

ITU 2025 reports 82.2% of people aged 15 to 24 online globally, versus 71.9% of the rest of the population: a 10-point generational gap. The gap is widest where overall access is lowest. In low-income countries, youth are 1.9× more likely than the rest of the population to be online. In high-income countries the gap is roughly five percentage points (98.7% youth vs 93.6% non-youth).

Regionally, the youth figures are: Europe 97.8% (near-universal), Americas 96.5%, CIS 95.6%, Asia-Pacific 89.1%, Arab States 81%, Africa 49.6%. Every region's youth are more connected than its adults, but "youth" in Africa still means fewer than half. Among special groups: LDCs youth 49.5%, LLDCs youth 46%, SIDS youth 76%.

Youth internet-use "universality" (ITU's convention of at least 95%) has already been achieved in Europe, the CIS region, and the Americas.

4.3 280 million more men online than women; parity unchanged since 2019

Globally in 2025, 77% of men use the internet compared with 71% of women. That's about 280 million more male internet users than female worldwide. ITU's gender parity score (women's usage rate divided by men's) is 0.92 in 2025, exactly the same score as in 2019. Six years of growth, no progress on the gender ratio.

Parity has been achieved in Europe, the Americas, and the CIS region. The Arab States score has been stuck at 0.86 since 2019. The Asia-Pacific score has actually slipped slightly, from 0.92 in 2019 to 0.91 in 2025. Africa has improved from 0.70 (2019) to 0.78 (2025), the largest regional gain, but from the lowest starting point.

The one striking exception to the "parity correlates with development level" pattern is the SIDS group. Small island developing states have held a gender parity score at or above 1 between 2019 and 2025 (full parity), even though less than two-thirds of their population uses the internet. Being connected and being connected equally are not the same problem.

4.4 High-income 94% online, low-income 23% online

Regionally: CIS 92%, Europe 93%, Americas 88%, Asia-Pacific 77%, Arab States 70%, Africa 36%. ITU treats a penetration rate of at least 95% as "universality." Only high-income countries as a group are close to that line.

The spread from 94% down to 23% (a 71-percentage-point range across income brackets) is the widest of the four gaps in this section. Any "global average" is a weighted mean across a distribution this wide.

5. Infrastructure sets the ceiling

Data usage per person cannot exceed what the local network delivers. The ITU 2025 coverage figures explain a lot of the gaps in the previous section: you can't stream what the network won't carry.

5.1 5G reaches 55% of the world; 4% of low-income countries

ITU 2025: 5G networks cover 55% of the world's population. By region:

By income bracket:

The 4% coverage in low-income countries is the striking anchor. In practical terms, 96% of people in low-income countries have no 5G option at all, regardless of whether they own a compatible phone. Meanwhile, 92% of mobile users in China are already on 5G, per pool data.

5.2 4G covers 93% globally; only 38% of rural in low-income countries

4G is the workhorse network for mobile data in most places: 93% global population coverage, per ITU 2025. But the coverage is uneven. Nearly two-thirds of rural residents in low-income countries have no 4G service. Even where a phone exists and a subscriber wants to use it, the network simply isn't there.

5.3 21.1 billion IoT devices; more devices than there are people

IoT Analytics reports 21.1 billion connected IoT devices worldwide by end of 2025 (+14% year-over-year), trending toward 39 billion by 2030. China alone hosts more than 1 billion IoT devices.

"Data per person" as a framing already assumes one-device-per-person. In practice, we passed device parity years ago: there are already billions more IoT devices online than there are humans. The 21 GB Ericsson figure is per smartphone, not per person, and per human counting all connected devices, the total is a substantially larger and much noisier number.

5.4 The population that's not covered

About 4% of the world's population still lacks any mobile broadband coverage: no 3G, no 4G, no 5G. The rural-urban 5G gap illustrates the same story at a bigger scale: 66% of urban populations worldwide already have 5G access, compared with only 40% of rural populations. Extending coverage to the remaining people isn't just a matter of turning on more towers; in the hardest-to-reach communities it involves geographic isolation, energy access, and long-cycle capital investment.

For a share of the world's population, "average monthly data usage" is a question with an answer of zero.

6. So what does the average person actually use?

If you have to pick one number, pick Ericsson's: 21 GB per smartphone per month, globally, in 2025. It's the best available answer to the narrow question "how much cellular data does the typical smartphone consume." Regional variation runs from the low-20s to the mid-30s GB per month depending on the region.

If you're asking about your own usage as a US resident who lives on Wi-Fi at home and at work, 5 to 10 GB of cellular data per month is a realistic baseline, per consumer-listicle guidance. Total US smartphone average is higher (about 25 GB per month at end-2025, per HighSpeedInternet.com), because that mean is pulled up by heavy mobile-hotspot users and unlimited-plan power users.

If you're asking about your whole household on fixed broadband, the answer is much larger: the average US household used about 767 GB per month in Q4 2025 per OpenVault, up nearly 10% year-over-year and above 700 GB for the first time. Median US household is 532 GB; roughly one in four households is a "power user" consuming a terabyte or more.

What none of these numbers can tell you is what the offline population would use if they were online: the 2.6 billion people ITU counts as offline in 2025, the rural-low-income populations covered by neither 4G nor 5G, the 280-million gender gap that hasn't moved since 2019. Every "average" is a weighted mean over the 74% of the world that is online: mostly urban, mostly higher-income, mostly men.

That's what the average person uses. It's also what the phrase "the average person" hides.