Average Internet Bill 2026: The Typical US Home Plan Lists at About $90 a Month, and the Price per Mbps Fell 90% Since 2017

The average internet bill for standalone US home service, at full non-promotional price, is $98.49 a month in the FCC’s 2026 Urban Rate Survey, and the median offered plan is $89.95. That median plan now delivers 500 Mbps, against 45 Mbps in 2017, so the price per Mbps fell 90% while the monthly price barely moved after inflation.

Most pages that rank for this question quote a single number from a vendor’s plan sample. We downloaded the FCC’s own rate files instead: every broadband Urban Rate Survey from 2018 to 2026, in which a random sample of internet providers report the standard, non-discounted monthly price of every standalone residential plan they sell in sampled urban census tracts. The 2026 file alone holds 12,336 plan prices from 240 providers. We weighted each price with the FCC’s own survey weight and built price distributions by speed tier, technology, year, and state. We then set the result against the Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index for internet services.

How much is internet per month at each speed?

FCC 2026 Urban Rate Survey, fixed broadband, rates collected in 2025. Total monthly charge (monthly charge plus other mandatory charges and surcharges as published by the FCC), weighted with the FCC survey weight. Price per Mbps is the weighted median of each plan’s price divided by its advertised download speed. Hover a rung for the mean.

Price climbs with speed, but not evenly. The cheapest tier is not the slowest one: plans of 100 to 299 Mbps have a median of $45, below the $70 median for plans under 100 Mbps. The sub-100 tier is mostly DSL and fixed wireless (91% of its weighted offers), and slow DSL is not discounted: AT&T’s DSL plans in the file list at about $70 at every speed from 10 to 100 Mbps. The 100 to 299 Mbps tier is pulled down by Comcast, whose 100 Mbps plan at $30 and 200 Mbps plan at $45 together carry 47% of the tier’s weight. Above 300 Mbps the ladder is steady: $80 for 300 to 499 Mbps, $84.99 for 500 to 999 Mbps, $101.25 for 1 Gig, and $141.54 for 2 Gig and faster, where the upper quartile reaches $255.

Share of offers is the share of total FCC survey weight, which reflects how many households the provider serves in the sampled tract divided across the plans it offers there. It is not the share of households that buy each tier: the survey records what is offered, not what is bought.

At exact common speeds, the 2026 medians are $55 for 100 Mbps (942 plan prices), $80 for 300 Mbps, and $100 for 1,000 Mbps (1,905 plan prices). In the 2018 survey, the same tiers cost $82.99, $104.99, and $119.99 before inflation.

Fiber vs cable vs DSL vs fixed wireless

FCC 2026 Urban Rate Survey. Mean column is computed from the published file and matches the weighted means in Table 4 of the FCC’s 2026 methodology report to the cent.

Fiber and cable have the same median price, $95, but the median fiber offer is 1,000 Mbps down and 1,000 Mbps up, against 500 down and 35 up for cable. Fiber’s mean ($121.05) sits far above its median because of multi-gig tiers: 71% of weighted 2 Gig and faster offers are fiber, and that tier’s upper quartile is $255. DSL is the worst value per Mbps: a median of $70 for 50 Mbps, or $1.40 per Mbps, against $0.10 for fiber. Fixed wireless, which in this survey includes 5G home internet from mobile carriers, is the cheapest by monthly price ($66.25 median), but its median advertised download speed is only 25 Mbps.

Data caps are fading from list prices. 17% of weighted offers in the 2026 survey carried a monthly usage allowance, down from 59% in the 2018 survey. 8% of cable offers still had one, against 5% of fiber offers.

Is internet getting cheaper per Mbps while bills stay flat?

FCC Urban Rate Survey, survey years 2018 to 2026, plotted by the year the rates were collected (each survey collects rates the year before it is used; the 2018 survey’s rates are as of September 2017). Weighted medians of all offered plan prices. 2025 dollars use the BLS CPI-U all-items annual average.

The path was not smooth. The median jumped to $99.95 in the 2024 survey (rates collected in 2023), then fell back to $86. The FCC enlarged the sample from about 550 to 2,000 provider-tract units in 2022 and changed its weights in 2025 and 2026, so single-year moves are partly design changes. The long direction holds across the series: the real median stayed between $88 and $106 in 2025 dollars in every survey, while the median speed rose in steps from 45 to 500 Mbps.

Exact-speed medians use plans advertised at exactly 100 or 1,000 Mbps download. Means are the weighted means of our cleaned file (see Methodology) and can differ slightly from FCC published summaries.

What the price index says

BLS consumer price index for all urban consumers (CPI-U), US city average, not seasonally adjusted, series CUUR0000SEEE03 (base December 1997 = 100) and CUUR0000SA0 rebased to December 1997. Latest month: Sep 2026. BLS published no October 2025 index, so that month is missing. The sharp swings in mid-1999 and late 2006 are in the series as BLS publishes it.

The CPI tracks what the same basket of services costs over time, so it is not an average bill. It tells the same story from a different source. From December 1997 to Sep 2026, the index for internet services fell 14% while all prices rose 109%. Over the window covered by the FCC surveys (July 2017 to July 2025), internet services rose 12.2% and all items rose 32.0%, so internet service got cheaper relative to everything else even as list prices crept up. In the 12 months to Sep 2026, the internet index rose 0.2% against 3.7% for all items.

Internet prices by state

The FCC file records the state of every sampled census tract, and the FCC says its weight can be used for subnational estimates. But the survey samples by provider and census division, not by state, and covers urban tracts only. We therefore show only the 31 states and territories with at least 20 sampled tracts in the 2026 survey; the other 21 (Arkansas, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, Wyoming) had too few for a stable figure. Treat each row as the offered price mix of the providers sampled in that state’s urban areas, not a statewide average bill.

FCC 2026 Urban Rate Survey (rates collected 2025), weighted. Sorted by median price. 1 Gig price shown where a state has at least 10 plan prices from 1,000 to 1,999 Mbps. Alaska is surveyed in full as its own stratum and is excluded from the FCC’s continental benchmark model, but its rows are included here and in our national figures, matching the FCC’s published summary statistics.

Medians bunch at a few price points because a state’s urban median is set largely by its biggest provider’s price list. The largest provider carries a median 48% of a state’s survey weight. In the 15 states where Comcast carries the most weight, 10 have a median of exactly $95 and the other 5 sit at $80; in the 10 states led by Charter, 6 sit at $80 to $81. The spread is $66 to $99.99. Alaska tops the table at $99.99, and Idaho is lowest at $66. Alaska’s median plan is 50 Mbps at $99.99, the worst value per Mbps of any state in the table. For whether households in each state subscribe at all, see our internet access statistics, which use Census survey data rather than prices.

What the data does not show: your actual bill

The Urban Rate Survey is a provider-reported record of US home internet prices, certified by an officer of each responding company, but it records list prices, not bills. Providers must report the standard, non-discounted price a new residential customer would pay for broadband sold on its own. That leaves out promotional rates, bundle discounts, autopay credits, low-income plans, grandfathered plans, one-time activation fees, and modem or router rental, all of which the FCC collects separately or excludes. 14% of weighted 2026 offers carried an extra mandatory charge or surcharge on top of the monthly rate (median $1.25 where present). The survey also covers only urban census tracts and only terrestrial service (cable, fiber, DSL, and fixed wireless), so satellite service is outside it; our Starlink statistics cover that market. The survey is residential only: business plans are excluded by design.

The Affordable Connectivity Program, which took up to $30 a month off eligible households’ bills ($75 on qualifying Tribal lands), ended on June 1, 2024, when Congress did not add funding, according to the FCC. Because the survey records pre-discount prices, the end of the ACP does not show up in these figures. For households that had been enrolled, it removed up to $30 a month of support from the bill.

What this means for MSPs

Use the residential ladder as a floor, not a quote. The FCC data is residential, so it says nothing directly about business-class internet with service-level agreements or static IPs. What it does give is a defensible floor: in 2025 the median standalone residential list price was $45 for 100 to 299 Mbps and $101.25 for 1 Gig. A business quote below those numbers should prompt questions about what is being left out.

Ask for symmetric upload. Upload speed matters for backups, cloud sync, and video calls. In the 2026 survey, symmetric 1 Gig plans (upload equal to download) had a median price of $90.47, against $110 for asymmetric 1 Gig plans, whose median upload was only 35 Mbps. Symmetric plans were 24% of weighted 1 Gig offers.

Price a failover line from the cheap end of the ladder. A second, different-technology connection for a small office or a key remote worker does not need gig speed. The 25th percentile price was $39.99 for a 100 to 299 Mbps plan, and fixed wireless (including 5G home internet) had a median of $66.25. Check the cap: 41% of fixed wireless offers and 8% of cable offers carried one. Hosted phones ride on the same lines, which matters more as business lines move to VoIP, as our VoIP statistics show.

Budget home-office stipends on medians. For remote staff, $89.95 a month covers the median offered plan nationally, and $110 covers three quarters of offers before equipment fees.

Frequently asked questions

What is the average internet bill per month?

In the FCC’s 2026 Urban Rate Survey (rates collected in 2025), the weighted mean standalone, non-promotional home internet price was $98.49 a month and the median offered plan was $89.95. Half of offers fell between $70 and $110. These are list prices before promotions, bundles, or modem rental.

Is $70 a month a lot for internet?

No. 26% of weighted plan offers in the 2026 survey cost $70 or less, so $70 is below the $89.95 median. It is the median price of a plan under 100 Mbps ($70), but a plan in the 100 to 299 Mbps tier has a median of $45.

Is $100 a month a lot for internet?

It depends on speed. $100 is above the all-plan median of $89.95 (37% of offers cost $100 or more), but it is the typical price of a 1 Gig plan: the median for 1,000 to 1,999 Mbps plans was $101.25.

Is $120 a month a lot for internet?

For most speeds, yes. Only 18% of weighted offers in the 2026 survey cost $120 or more. The 2 Gig and faster tier is the exception, with a median of $141.54.

Is internet getting cheaper?

Per Mbps, sharply: the median price per Mbps of download speed fell from $1.56 in 2017 to $0.16 in 2025, down 90%. The median monthly price rose from $69.99 to $89.95, which is 2% less after inflation, while the median plan speed rose from 45 to 500 Mbps.

What are internet prices by state?

Among the 31 states and territories with at least 20 sampled urban census tracts in the FCC’s 2026 survey, the median offered plan ranged from $66 to $99.99 a month. The FCC samples urban tracts by provider and region, so these are urban offered prices, not statewide bills.

Methodology

References

1. FCC, Urban Rate Survey Data and Resources (broadband results files 2018 to 2026 and methodology reports). Accessed October 2026.
2. FCC, 2026 Urban Rate Survey, Fixed Broadband Service: Methodology Report. Accessed October 2026.
3. FCC, DA 25-1088, Results of 2026 Urban Rate Survey for Fixed Voice and Broadband Services (December 19, 2025). Accessed October 2026.
4. FCC, DA 26-640, Urban Rate Survey 2027 Timeline (June 26, 2026). Accessed October 2026.
5. FCC, Urban Rate Survey User Guide and Required Broadband and Voice Rate Elements. Accessed October 2026.
6. BLS, CPI-U: Internet services and electronic information providers, US city average (CUUR0000SEEE03). Accessed October 2026.
7. BLS, CPI-U: All items, US city average (CUUR0000SA0). Accessed October 2026.
8. FCC, Affordable Connectivity Program. Accessed October 2026.
9. USAC, Affordable Connectivity Program. Accessed October 2026.