New study says wireless bills dodged inflation, so why does yours still feel so pricey?

Your AT&T or T-Mobile bills haven’t necessarily gone up recently. In fact, prices have gotten much cheaper after inflation since 2007, according to a new analysis. Tell that to iPhone 18 Pro Max, Galaxy S26 Ultra or Google Pixel 11 Pro users who have been feeling the pinch for the past few years.

Compared to inflation, wireless prices fell while everything else rose

According to a new report coming from Recon Analytics founder Roger Entner (who previously led telecom research at Nielsen), since 2007 US wireless service has technically gotten much cheaper when you account for inflation. Here are the numbers:

• An average wireless connection brought in $33.14 monthly in revenue in 2025. This is versus the $49.26 monthly back in 2007.
• Prices overall rose 55% over those 18 years, making the 2007 figures equal roughly $76.49 in 2025 money. That’s a 57% drop.
• AT&T postpaid phone average revenue per user (ARPU) was $56.57 in the last quarter of 2025. That is up 1.9% from the $55.52 it was six years earlier.
• T-Mobile’s ARPU rose 10.7% to $50.71.
• Prices overall rose 26% over those same six years, so a phone line got 19% cheaper at AT&T and 12% at T-Mobile after inflation.

More data for less money per gigabyte

In 2019 the average smartphone used about 9GB of data a month. By 2025, this number was up to about 22GB. A phone gigabyte at AT&T went from about $6.03 to $2.56, and T-Mobile from $4.98 to $2.29.

If you were judging your bill by the price of each gigabyte then it would make sense to determine that it significantly dropped. Plainly put, in 2007 the average bill cost about 141 minutes of work at the average wage, while now that number falls to 55.

However, and this is a big one, both carriers have been slowly raising prices on their older plans. For example, AT&T added $10 more a month in April for a single line ($20 per multi-line account) and T-Mobile pushed customers off their legacy plans back in June, which T-Mobile says averages about $4 more per line. Verizon isn’t included in Entner’s numbers at all.



Basically, if you were grandfathered into a cheaper plan, you are now paying more. But if you’re on a current plan, you’re technically paying less.

What these numbers leave out of your phone payments

It should be noted that these figures only account for service revenue. This is where things get tricky and why our pockets feel emptier. There are two simple reasons for this:

• Device payment plans are not included in these numbers.
• Each line got cheaper, but households keep adding phones, watches and tablets. With each one of those come more phone lines.

The numbers don’t feel like the reality

As a former T-Mobile customer grandfathered into their older, cheaper plans, I can tell you that I personally felt the squeeze when I was eventually pushed out of my plan. Although the plan I was offered technically included more perks, they weren’t necessarily ones I was interested in.

I was shocked when I saw this report because it definitely doesn’t feel like my real-life experience when dealing with carriers.

Nowadays, I shop around more and am willing to jump from one carrier to the other if the deal suits me. I would personally love it if carriers were more transparent when it came to their billing practices because the numbers we see in the deals we are presented are not the ones that end up being withdrawn from our bank accounts.

More on carrier prices and the phones on their plans:

• How T-Mobile moved customers off its legacy plans
• Everything about the iPhone 18 Pro Max
• Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra

• Follow me on X and Threads

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