15% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

Fifteen percent of US adults do not use the Internet.

The size of this group has changed little over the past three years, despite recent government and social service programs to encourage internet adoption. But that 15 percent figure is substantially lower than in 2000, when Pew Research first began to study the social impact of technology. That year, nearly half (48 percent) of American adults did not use the internet.

A 2013 Pew Research survey found some key reasons that some people do not use the internet. A third of non-internet users (34 percent) did not go online because they had no interest in doing so or did not think the internet was relevant to their lives. Another 32 percent of non-internet users said the internet was too difficult to use, including 8 percent of this group who said they were “too old to learn.” Cost was also a barrier for some adults who were offline – 19 percent cited the expense of internet service or owning a computer. The latest Pew Research analysis also shows that internet non-adoption is correlated to a number of demographic variables, including age, educational attainment, household income, race and ethnicity, and community type.

Despite some groups having persistently lower rates of internet adoption, the vast majority of Americans are online. Over time, the offline population has been shrinking, and for some groups that change has been especially dramatic. For example, 86 percent of adults 65 and older did not go online in 2000; today that figure has been cut in half. And among those without a high school diploma, the share not using the internet dropped from 81 percent to 33 percent in the same time period.


15% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?