The average U.S. household currently uses approximately 514 Gigabytes (GB) per month. This is as of 2022. Data consumption at home is soaring as the majority of U.S. consumers find themselves with a streaming subscription of one kind or another, often with more than one, and as these streaming platforms cast sports, entertainment and other content to any screen that’s properly connected.

As Covid hit with life-changing lockdowns data provided by OpenVault in 2020 and published in the Wall Street Journal showed that the average use was about 400 GB per household. As of 2022, the average use climbed to about 514 GB per month. The increase from 2020 to 2021 was +11% Year-over-Year and the increase from 2021 to 2022 was another +16%.

Many people expected to be back working full-time in offices and factories by the start of 2022 but it didn’t happen that way. Office workers returned to the office slowly and in some cases for one or two days a week only in 2022 as employers attempted to get people back into the office who had fully adapted their work-life balance to eliminate a commute. It’s not possible to generalize based on the great scope of U.S. household activities but it’s believed that many people took time during lockdowns to learn internet business opportunities that can be run from a home office. Thus, a worker shortage developed in many fields. All in all, home internet use is soaring.

OpenVault data now reports that the average U.S. household has a whopping 25 connected devices. That seems hard to digest but when you add up cell phones, laptops, tablets, smart TVs, security cameras, Bluetooth speakers and the internet of things for smart appliances, there you go.

The biggest data users among online activities are video calls, HD streaming, 4k streaming and online gaming. Social media now consumes almost as much as video calls because social media is increasingly about videos and moving images consume more data. If you need to lower your data use to conform with your service plan look at how much you are streaming each month. You may want to keep a household diary where everyone reports in what they’re doing. Once you know what you’re currently using then you can make a plan to economize on data use when necessary.