For many Americans, going online is a crucial way to connect with friends and family, shop, get news, and search for information. Yet today, 7% of U.S. adults say they do not use the internet, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted Jan. 25-Feb. 8, 2021.
Internet non-adoption is linked to several demographic variables but is strongly connected to age – with older Americans continuing to be among the least likely groups to use the internet. Today, 25% of adults 65 and older report never going online, compared with much smaller shares of adults under the age of 65.
Educational attainment and household income also indicate a person’s likelihood of being offline. Some 14% of adults with a high school education or less do not use the internet, but that share falls as educational attainment increases. Adults living in households earning less than $30,000 a year are far more likely than those whose annual household income is $75,000 or more to report not using the internet (14% vs. 1%).
No statistically significant differences exist in non-internet use by gender, race, ethnicity, or community type.
Despite some groups having persistently lower internet adoption rates, most Americans are now online, as ongoing government and social service programs encourage internet adoption in underserved areas. Over time, the nation’s offline population has been shrinking; for some groups, that change has been theatrical. For example, 86% of adults ages 65 and older did not go online in 2000; today, that figure has fallen to just a quarter.
The share of offline adults ages 50 to 64 has dropped eight percentage points since 2019, from 12% to 4%. The shares of offline Black and Hispanic adults have also fallen significantly during that period, from 15% to 9% among Black people and 14% to 5% among Hispanics.
