Americans have spent years replacing legacy household services with mobile and internet-based alternatives, but one of the clearest changes is now showing up in federal survey data. The household item more people are getting rid of without much disruption is the landline telephone, with new CDC figures showing wireless-only living has become the national norm.
Federal data shows the scale of the landline decline
The latest federal snapshot came on June 24, 2025, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics released its early estimates for July through December 2024. That report found that 78.7% of U.S. adults and 86.9% of children lived in households with only wireless telephone service during that period, meaning those homes had no landline at all. The report described those figures as the most up-to-date federal estimates on wireless-only households, giving one of the clearest national measures of how far the traditional home phone has fallen.
The same report showed the shift is broad, but not uniform. Among adults ages 25 to 29, 88.9% lived in wireless-only households in late 2024, and the figure was 88.3% for adults ages 35 to 44. Even among adults 65 and older, a group long associated with keeping traditional home phones, 57.9% were living in wireless-only households, which means the landline is no longer the default even for older Americans.
The decline is also visible in federal communications data. In the Federal Communications Commission’s most recent Voice Telephone Services report, released in 2026 using Form 477 data, retail switched access lines fell to 15.0 million by June 2025, down sharply from 27.2 million in June 2022. Over the same period, mobile voice subscriptions climbed from 366.7 million to 394.5 million, underscoring that households have not stopped paying for phone service so much as shifted the service to mobile devices.
Labor data points in the same direction. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has long tracked telephone spending and has reported that consumer spending on cellular service surpassed spending on residential landline service back in 2007. More recent BLS material still separates wireless telephone service from landline service in the Consumer Price Index, a sign that both categories remain economically measurable, but no longer equally central to household life. Taken together, the CDC, FCC and BLS data show that the landline is not disappearing overnight, but it is steadily moving out of the mainstream American home.
The shift is national, but the impact is uneven from one household to the next
What the federal data confirms is a nationwide behavioral change rather than a single company decision or a one-state event. The CDC’s release covers the United States as a whole, and its new supplemental tables for 2023 also include state-level estimates, showing that the move away from landlines is not isolated to one region. Still, the newest headline figure, the 78.7% adult wireless-only estimate, is a national number for the second half of 2024, not a state-by-state late-2024 breakdown.
That distinction matters for readers trying to understand local impact. The CDC has not released a full late-2024 state list in the main early-release summary, so it is not yet possible to say from that report alone exactly which states saw the biggest year-over-year changes during the second half of 2024. What is clear is that wireless-only living has spread across demographic groups, and older households, while still more likely than younger ones to keep a landline, are no longer resisting the shift at anything close to past levels.
For apartment residents and renters, the practical effect is often less dramatic than it would have been a decade or two ago. Newer buildings are more likely to be planned around broadband and mobile connectivity than around copper phone jacks, and many households now treat voice calling as one feature inside a wireless plan rather than as a separate utility. In that environment, eliminating a landline can mean one less monthly bill, one less device to maintain and one less service appointment tied to the home.
There are still exceptions. Some households keep landlines for medical alert systems, home security setups, business use, habit or call reliability during emergencies. The CDC’s work does not say Americans never need a landline; it says most now live without one. That is an important difference, especially in rural areas, among older residents, or in homes where mobile coverage remains unreliable. But nationally, the evidence shows that for most people, giving up the home phone has become an ordinary adjustment rather than a disruptive one.
Mobile-first habits, spending patterns and infrastructure changes explain why
The core reason behind the shift is straightforward: Americans increasingly organize communication around mobile devices, not place-based home phones. Pew Research Center reported in 2025 that mobile device ownership remains widespread in the United States, reinforcing the long-running pattern that the smartphone has become a central access point for calls, messaging and internet use. When one device handles voice, texts, banking, navigation, work messages and emergency contact, the separate household landline becomes easier to drop.
Spending patterns help explain the same trend. BLS has reported that cellular service spending overtook residential landline spending in 2007, a milestone that showed households were already reallocating communications budgets years ago. That pattern has likely been reinforced by bundled wireless plans, family plans and internet-based calling, all of which reduce the value of paying for a separate residential line. While the latest BLS expenditure release does not center on landlines, the agency still tracks residential phone service as a much smaller component inside broader telephone spending categories.
Network economics are part of the story as well. The FCC’s latest voice subscription data shows mobile subscriptions rising while traditional switched access lines keep falling, indicating the market itself is being reshaped around wireless and internet-based voice services. As fewer households keep copper-based service, carriers have less incentive to maintain aging legacy infrastructure at prior scale, and consumers are less likely to encounter landlines as a standard household default.
For residents, the meaning is practical rather than symbolic. In most households, dropping the landline now means relying on a mix of smartphones, broadband and sometimes VoIP instead of a wall-connected phone. Federal data does not suggest every household should do that, and it does not erase concerns about backup communications during outages. But as of the CDC’s June 24, 2025 release, the numbers show that landline-free living has moved from a generational trend to the dominant American household model.