Analysis of the Federal Communications Commission’s Urban Rate Survey (URS) data from 2020 to 2025 shows that:

• Broadband service offerings at the highest speeds are expensive, growing in prevalence, and driving up average broadband prices.
  
  • For plans with download speeds of 2 Gigabits per second (Gbps) or more, the average price was $179 per month, more than twice what URS found that plans between 100 Megabits per second (Mbps) and 1 Gbps cost (about $80 per month).
  • The average price across all broadband plan offerings grew by 4.8% in inflation-adjusted (“real”) terms from 2024 to 2025.
  • Very high-speed (i.e., 2 Gbps or higher download) plans now make up 16% of the 2025 URS sample, nearly double the figure from 2024 (9%).
  • Fiber plans are also far more common in the 2025 URS than a few years ago, now making up 47% of the sample compared with 23% in 2022.
  • Fiber-optic home broadband plans have seen price increases in real terms – by 12.8% in 2025 compared to the prior year and 40.1% since 2020.
  • Inflation overall increased by 25.1% between 2020 and 2025.
• Prices for mid-tier plans (i.e., those with download speeds between 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps) declined 8.5% in real terms between 2024 and 2025 and 28.9% since 2020.
• Lower tier plans also witnessed price declines. For services with download speeds of 100 Mbps or less, prices fell by 13.4% from 2024 to 2025 and 15.0% since 2020.
• Fixed-wireless service – potentially an attractive option for those on a budget – saw price declines of 20.0% from 2024 to 2025 and 50.7% since 2020.
• There are far fewer low-cost plans available than in the recent past, according to URS data.
  
  • When the Affordable Connectivity Program was in operation, 9% of all service offerings captured in the URS were $30 per month or less. That figure fell to just 3% in the data for 2025.
  • Similarly, slower speed (and less expensive) plans became less common. Plans with speeds of 100 Mbps or less were 32% of the 2025 sample, down from 57% in 2022. 

Taking a Look at Urban Rate Survey Broadband Pricing Data

USTelecom recently published an analysis that heralded declines in “real prices” for popular broadband services in 2025.[1] The analysis used the URS data to examine price changes over time, noting that, since 2015, prices for “today’s most popular broadband services have fallen by 63.4% in real terms” (i.e., adjusted for inflation), with year-to-year declines of 8.7% in real terms. The USTelecom analysis focuses on prices for two tiers of service, with speeds between 100 Mbps and 940 Mbps and the 1 Gigabit tier (defined as between 940 Mbps and 1 Gbps).

The USTelecom emphasis on two speed tiers for one year (2024 to 2025 in its report) and a ten-year look back is illuminating, but limited. Consumers have service choices that fall outside of the two speed tiers. Additionally, simply looking at the change from one year to another and then comparing that to ten years ago excludes worthwhile data. Examining URS pricing trends over the past decade and across a wider range of service offerings adds greater nuance to interpret trends. Analyzing data from 2020 to 2025, which coincides with the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic and the associated increase in inflation, offers additional insight.[2]

Below are two tables that present the URS's findings on average monthly prices offered to consumers by technology type and a selection of speed tiers.[3]

Table 1: Nominal prices by technology type

Table 2: Nominal prices by speed tier

Comparing 2024 to 2025 Prices

Overall results show price increases from 2024 to 2025: Broadband prices increased across all types of service offerings between 2024 and 2025, according to the URS. The nearly $7 average “sticker price” increase translated into a 4.8% growth in prices in real terms. As Table 3 shows, only the fastest speed tier (2 Gbps or greater offerings) showed real price growth of 1.1%. Why? There were nearly twice as many 2 Gigabit-plus plans in 2025 URS sample than in the prior year and they were expensive at $178.49 per month. This pulled the average upward for 2025 relative to 2024.

Consumers who want the fastest speeds at home pay more. This is understandable from providers’ perspectives, as charging high prices to those willing to pay aligns price with consumer demand and helps carriers recoup the capital costs of deploying high-speed broadband infrastructure.

Table 3: Change in real broadband prices 2024-2025

The good news: Other speed tiers saw declines in real prices, with the slowest (and generally least expensive) plans seeing nominal price declines that translated into a 13.4% real price drop for 100 Mbps or less plans and an 8.5% drop for plans greater than 100 Mbps and less than 1 Gbps. As to technology, the price of fixed-wireless service offerings fell between 2024 and 2025 (after an increase in 2023), while fiber plans increased in price in real terms by 12.8%, and cable offerings remained unchanged. Digital subscriber line (DSL) plans saw a small price increase in nominal terms, which translated into a small price drop in real terms.

Mixed news for the budget-conscious: Although prices for lower-tier plans have dropped, there are fewer of them on offer, at least as represented in the URS. The year 2022 was the high-water mark for the number of service plans priced at $30 or less per month in the URS, with 9% of the overall URS sample containing such plans. By 2025, with the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) a thing of the past, only 3% of the URS sample had plans of $30 or less per month.

It appears that the ACP encouraged carriers to offer low-cost plans in the expectation that any revenue loss associated with them would be offset by the $30 per month ACP subsidy. In fact, focusing only on plans at $30 or less per month, the mean price was $19.63 in 2022, when ACP operated, and increased to $27.67 in 2025 after the program ended. For households with little discretionary income, a cost increase of $8 per month is consequential – and an additional negative impact on their finances beyond the termination of the ACP subsidy and the ongoing struggle to keep pace with inflation.

Changes in the URS Sample – Market Offerings over Time

The changing composition of the URS sample: An equally important part of the story is the composition of the URS sample and how it has changed over time. As the URS methodology explains, it is a representative sample that uses 2,000 sampling units to capture the range of offerings in the marketplace in urban areas.[4] Because the FCC deployed this sampling strategy starting in 2022, Table 4 below begins there.

Table 4

The number of fiber offerings in the URS has doubled since 2022, from 23% of the sample to 47%, while the share of DSL plans is about half the size since then, and the share of cable technology has declined as well. With fiber supporting higher speeds that are more expensive than other service offerings, its growing presence in the market has increased the weight of pricier plans in overall broadband price trend figures. There has been a huge growth in 2 Gbps+ service offerings in the URS in recent years. Some 16% of the 2025 URS sample was 2 Gbps+ plans, up from 9% in 2024 and 3% in 2022.

There has also been a decline in the availability of slower (less than 100 Mbps) plans since 2022. On the one hand, this is a desirable trend; those speeds are below the threshold for broadband. In general, the market offering ever faster speeds is a good thing. At the same time, plans in the lower-speed tier generally cost less than faster plans and may meet the needs of households on a tight budget. Yet these offerings have declined in representation in the URS sample from 56% in 2022 to 32% in 2025.

The share of fixed-wireless plans in the sample warrants comment. Recent CostQuest analysis of FCC broadband mapping data shows that licensed, fixed-wireless services can serve more than 50 million broadband serviceable locations nationwide and approximately 40% of urban locations.[5] The URS sample finds a smaller number of service offerings (7.4%) in urban areas. The gap may be a sampling issue for future consideration, or it may reflect that carriers may not aggressively market in all areas they are capable of serving. Fixed-wireless service is an affordable offering, relative to fiber and cable. But the technology comes with slower download speeds; the average download speed for fixed wireless plans in URS is about 110 Mbps compared with over 800 Mbps for cable.[6]

A longer time frame: 2020 to 2025

Taking a longer view, URS data show an overall pattern of steady prices, with significant price decreases in real terms for gigabit-plus services. Because these service offerings tend to be more expensive and have become more important in the URS sample, they have exerted an upward pull on the average broadband price. Table 5 shows how prices have changed over the 2020-2025 period in real terms. Prices for fiber plans have increased sharply in real terms, while prices for fixed wireless plans have declined by just over 50% in real terms.

Table 5: Change in real broadband prices 2020-2025​

What does all this say about affordability?

Households interested in low-cost internet access are facing the anomaly of falling prices but fewer affordable options. Lower-cost, slower-speed service offerings are less prevalent in the marketplace than just a few years ago. With fewer $30-and-under plans available, the falling prices evident in tiers that would appeal to budget-conscious consumers (i.e., greater than 100 Mbps but less than 1 Gbps) are helpful, but only to a point. These plans cost $79.47 in 2025. That is $5 cheaper than the year before, but a monthly broadband bill at that price level is likely to present problems for many lower-income households. In a 2024 survey of households with annual incomes below $50,000, 56% said a monthly bill of up to $75 was too expensive for their household budgets, with many expressing the view that paying anything for broadband was too expensive for them. [7]

These developments are unfolding against declining real purchasing power among lower-income Americans. A recent analysis examining changes in wages and prices found that wage growth was only narrowly outpacing inflation – after several years when pay exceeded inflation by larger margins. But for lower-income workers, the news was troubling: their purchasing power was not keeping pace with inflation.[8]

What about service speed and price?

The USTelecom analysis also includes network speeds. If speeds increase at a greater rate than price, USTelecom argues that consumers are getting more for their money on a “per bit basis.” Say that the price for 200 Mbps service in 2021 was $50 per month, and by 2025, the price for 400 Mbps service was $50 per month. That is a 50% improvement in “dollar per bit” basis – and closer to 60% after taking inflation into account. USTelecom calls this a gain in consumer “purchasing power” and points to a 46.5% decline in the real price per megabit for gigabit service between 2017 and 2025. Using this logic, USTelecom finds that the “price per megabit per second” fell from $0.13 in 2017 to $0.07 in 2025.  

The math underlying this metric may be accurate, but the reality for consumers is very different. They are not able to buy broadband on a “per Mbps” basis. Many consumers – perhaps lower-income ones – may be quite content to have 200 Mbps service at $0.07 Mbps, or $14 per month. There are few, if any, such plans. For example, Xfinity Internet Essentials costs $14.95 for up to 75 Mbps – about $0.20 per megabit.[9] A wide range of consumers might be interested in a 500 Mbps service at $0.07 per megabit, or $35 per month. Such sticker prices are rare; the 2025 URS shows the average price for plans advertised at 500 Mbps is about $85, and only 10 offerings in the sample (out of more than 1,200 plans specifying speeds of 500 Mbps) are priced at less than $40 per month. There is no question that broadband speeds have increased, giving households greater functionality of service. But since carriers do not offer service broken down by “price per Mbps,” touting these network improvements as part of an analysis of service affordability is not very meaningful.   

Methodological Note

This analysis examines URS data and, where appropriate, adjusts differences in monthly service price offerings for inflation. To do this, this analysis uses the Consumer Price Index, specifically, its level halfway through each year in the analysis. A sample calculation might start with a monthly service price of $20 at Time 1 when the CPI was 100, a value of 0.20 per 100 units in the CPI. The service offering might be $25 at Time 2 when the CPI is 150, a value of 0.17 per 100 units in the CPI. That makes the second value less expensive than the first (by 15%) even though the nominal price increased by $5. In other words, there was an inflation-adjusted price decline of 15% between Time 1 and Time 2, even as the nominal price increased from $20 to $25.

The overall goal of the URS is to capture rates offered for broadband service throughout the United States. The primary purpose of the survey is to establish “reasonable comparability benchmarks for every possible service tier” in the country so that companies receiving universal service support offer services at rates reasonably comparable to rates in urban areas.[10] This entails a sampling strategy that aims to capture geography in a representative way in urban areas and also rates offered in those areas.

For the 2026 URS, the sample frame is the primary sampling unit (i.e., a pair consisting of an urban census tract and a broadband provider). For 2026, there were 321,818 PSUs in the United States, and the URS drew a sample of 2,000 for analysis. Only 3 of the 2,000 PSUs were ineligible (i.e., an eligible provider had stopped offering service there,) and there were 17 non-responses to the survey. Since carriers offer multiple rates to customers, the 1,953 total responses resulted in (for 2025 data for the URS data labeled 2026 per the FCC’s practice) 12,336 cases in the URS dataset. Given that the FCC began using 2,000 sampling units for the URS starting in 2022, the data in Table 4 is appropriate for trend analysis of the sample composition from 2022 to 2025.

The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society is a non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring that all people in the U.S. have access to competitive, High-Performance Broadband regardless of where they live or who they are. We believe communication policy - rooted in the values of access, equity, and diversity - has the power to deliver new opportunities and strengthen communities.

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