147 Texting Statistics October 2026

Texting statistics show US carrier texting alone at nearly 2.2 trillion SMS and MMS messages in 2024, about 42 billion more than in 2023 and more than in any year except 2020 (CTIA, Sep 2025), and that count leaves out every iMessage, RCS chat and WhatsApp message. WhatsApp alone was carrying roughly 100 billion messages a day back in 2020 (Meta, Oct 2020). In a February 2026 YouGov survey of 2,442 US adults, 85% said they use text messaging or messaging apps several times a week, the most used way of keeping in touch in every generation (YouGov, Feb 2026).

Most messages are still typed with two thumbs on a phone keyboard, often while people walk, work or drive. The data below covers how many texts are sent per day, who texts most, how voice messages and dictation compare with typing, how fast and accurately people type on phones, how dangerous texting while driving is, and how businesses, employers and scammers use the channel.

Every number links to the organization that produced it and carries the date of its data. Older studies stay on the page where nobody has repeated the count since, and each is labelled with its year. The page is refreshed monthly.

How many texts are sent per day?

Carrier texting in the US is not shrinking. It has held near 2 trillion messages a year since 2020, but the growth has moved to messaging apps, and carriers count none of that traffic.

How many text messages do Americans send each year?

Nearly 2.2 trillion carrier SMS and MMS messages in 2024, or roughly 6 billion a day if you divide CTIA's 2024 total by 366 days (our arithmetic). CTIA's annual survey is the main source of US text message statistics, and it covers carrier traffic only: provider-reported messaging traffic does not include over-the-top apps, which appear only in data traffic (FCC, Dec 2024).

• Americans also spent more than 2.4 trillion minutes on voice calls in 2024, nearly 30 billion minutes more than the year before (CTIA, Sep 2025).
• In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, Americans exchanged 2.2 trillion SMS and MMS messages, over 119 billion more than in 2019, driven by a 28% rise in MMS messages such as GIFs, memes and videos; voice traffic reached 2.9 trillion minutes (CTIA, Jul 2021).
• In 2021, Americans exchanged 2 trillion text messages, over 63,600 every second (CTIA, Sep 2022).
• In 2022, US wireless customers exchanged more than 2.1 trillion text messages, 6% more than in 2021, and spent nearly 2.5 trillion minutes on voice calls (CTIA, Jul 2023).
• In 2023, Americans exchanged over 2.1 trillion SMS and MMS messages, more than 67,000 every second (CTIA, Sep 2024).
• The US now supports nearly 603 million wireless connections, roughly 1.8 for every American; CTIA's 2026 edition reports no messaging totals, so 2024 remains the latest SMS and MMS year (CTIA, Sep 2026).
• There are 9.2 billion mobile-cellular subscriptions worldwide in 2025, or 112 for every 100 people (ITU, Nov 2025).
• 82% of people aged 10 and over worldwide own a mobile phone, but only 53% do in low-income economies (ITU, Nov 2025).

How many messages go through WhatsApp, iMessage and RCS?

Far more than go through carriers, though only WhatsApp has ever published a daily message count and Apple publishes no iMessage figures at all. WhatsApp has more than 2 billion daily active users, the same scale as Facebook (Meta, Jan 2026). Every number in this section is reported by the platform itself.

• An average of 3.60 billion people used at least one of Meta's apps every day in June 2026, up 3% from a year earlier (Meta, Jul 2026).
• Google Messages passed 1 billion monthly active users with RCS turned on, the last RCS user count Google has published (Google, Nov 2023).
• Telegram has "significantly over" 1 billion monthly active users, which its founder says makes it the second most popular messaging app in the world, not counting the China-specific WeChat (Telegram, Mar 2025).
• The average Telegram user opens the app 21 times a day and spends 41 minutes in it daily (Telegram, Mar 2025).
• Snapchat had 971 million monthly active users in the second quarter of 2026 (Snap Inc., Aug 2026).

Are messaging apps replacing SMS?

They are adding to texting more than replacing it. Among US adults who message, 29% say they do it more than they did a year ago and 9% say less, the largest net rise of any communication method in the YouGov survey (YouGov, Feb 2026). The reasons people give below show where messaging app usage and standard texting differ.

• Americans who stick with standard texting (SMS or built-in messaging, including iMessage) most often say it is simple and familiar (15%), already built into the phone (12%) or works with nearly everyone they contact (11%) (YouGov, Feb 2026).
• Messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Messenger stand out for working with the user's own network (9%), media sharing (8%) and international messaging (7%) (YouGov, Feb 2026).
• In 2015, 36% of US smartphone owners used messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Kik or iMessage, rising to 49% of owners aged 18 to 29 (Pew Research Center, Aug 2015).
• WhatsApp use in the US splits sharply: 56% of Hispanic adults and 54% of Asian adults use it, against 23% of White adults, and 44% of urban adults against 17% of rural adults (Pew Research Center, Nov 2025).

Who texts the most, and do people prefer texting to calling?

Young people still text the most, but regular messaging now reaches every US generation at about the same rate, while fewer than six in ten adults still make voice calls regularly.

How much do teens text?

More than any other age group on record. In the last Pew count, the median US teen texter sent 60 texts a day in 2011, up from 50 in 2009, and the median for 14- to 17-year-olds jumped from 60 to 100 a day in two years (Pew Research Center, Mar 2012). Teenagers' texting has since moved into apps, where it shows up as notifications and pickups rather than a text count.

• US teens sent or received an average of 3,339 texts a month in the second quarter of 2010, more than six for every waking hour, with teen girls averaging 4,050 and teen boys 2,539, by Nielsen's billing data (Nielsen, Oct 2010).
• 43% of US teens said texting was their main reason for getting a cellphone, overtaking safety, which had been the top reason in 2008 (Nielsen, Oct 2010).
• 55% of US teens use Snapchat and 24% use WhatsApp, up from 17% in 2022 (Pew Research Center, Dec 2025).
• In a week of phone tracking, US 11- to 17-year-olds picked up their phones a median of 51 times a day, ranging from 2 to 498 pickups (Common Sense Media, Sep 2023).
• 97% of the tracked 11- to 17-year-olds used their phones during school hours, for a median of 43 minutes a school day (Common Sense Media, Sep 2023).

How much do adults text, and does it change with age?

Nearly every adult messages now, but volume still falls with age. In the last full count, US adult texters sent or received an average of 41.5 messages a day, with a median of 10, and 73% of adult cell owners texted (Pew Research Center, Sep 2011). Today the age gap shows up in phone ownership and app use more than in whether people text at all.

• 18- to 24-year-old texters averaged 109.5 texts a day (median 50), more than double the figure for 25- to 34-year-olds and 23 times that of texters 65 and older, and 23% of them exchanged more than 100 texts a day (Pew Research Center, Sep 2011).
• More than two-thirds of US adults aged 18 to 29 said they sent and received text messages "a lot" the previous day, as did nearly half of those aged 30 to 49, making texting the most common form of non-personal communication for Americans under 50 (Gallup, Nov 2014).
• 97% of US adults aged 18 to 29 own a smartphone, compared with 78% of those 65 and older, and 16% of adults 65 and older still carry a cellphone that is not a smartphone (Pew Research Center, Nov 2025).
• Regular messaging barely varies by generation in the US: 87% of Millennials and Gen X, 85% of Gen Z and 83% of Baby Boomers and older message multiple times a week (YouGov, Feb 2026).
• Across the EU, 82% of people aged 16 to 74 used the internet for instant messaging such as WhatsApp, Messenger or Viber in 2025, from 93% of 16- to 24-year-olds down to 59% of 65- to 74-year-olds (Eurostat, Apr 2026).
• On an average day in 2025, 19.2% of Americans aged 15 and older spent time on telephone calls, mail and email as a main activity, about 11 minutes a day averaged across the population; the survey does not count texting separately (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Jun 2026).

Do people prefer texting or calling?

More people now lean toward texting than in 2011, when 53% of US adult texters preferred to be reached by a voice call and 31% by a text, with 14% saying it depended on the situation (Pew Research Center, Sep 2011). Heavy texters already preferred texts then, and teens followed.

• Even in 2011, 55% of people exchanging more than 50 texts a day preferred to be reached by text, and only 27% by a voice call (Pew Research Center, Sep 2011).
• 63% of US teens exchanged text messages every day, against 39% who made daily cellphone calls and 35% who socialized face to face outside school (Pew Research Center, Mar 2012).
• US teens' cellphone talk time fell 14% in a year to an average of 646 minutes a month, and 78% said texting was more functional and convenient than calling (Nielsen, Oct 2010).
• Texting became US teens' favorite way to communicate with friends, chosen by 35% in 2018, while in-person contact fell from 49% in 2012 to 32% (Common Sense Media, Sep 2018).
• Millennials are the most likely to say messaging has replaced most of their calls (42%), ahead of Gen Z (39%) and Baby Boomers and older (31%) (YouGov, Feb 2026).
• 58% of US adults still make voice calls regularly, the second most used channel after messaging, while 21% use video calls regularly, rising to 30% of Gen Z against 12% of Baby Boomers and older (YouGov, Feb 2026).
• People who still choose a call say it feels more personal or emotionally connected (11%), avoids misunderstandings (9%) and suits urgent or sensitive conversations (8%) (YouGov, Feb 2026).

Are voice messages replacing typed texts?

Voice notes have not replaced typed texts in the US: few adults send them regularly, and speaking a message is faster than typing it. Platforms are now adding transcripts so recipients can read voice messages.

How many voice messages are sent each day?

Billions on WhatsApp alone. WhatsApp users send 7 billion voice messages on an average day, the latest count the company has published (WhatsApp, Mar 2022). No other platform publishes a daily count, so voice message statistics rest on that disclosure plus surveys.

• WhatsApp now generates voice message transcripts on the user's own phone, so WhatsApp cannot read them; the feature started with a few languages (WhatsApp, Nov 2024).
• 41% of US adults say voice notes do not apply to them at all, against 2% who say the same of messaging (YouGov, Feb 2026).
• Voice note use is flat: 11% of respondents say they use them more than a year ago, 12% say less and 30% about the same (YouGov, Feb 2026).
• Two-thirds (67%) of US adults had not used any built-in AI feature in a messaging app in the month before the survey, rising to 78% among Baby Boomers and older (YouGov, Feb 2026).
• When Americans do use AI in messaging apps, the top jobs are rewriting or editing a message (13%) and drafting one from scratch (13%); among Gen Z the rewriting share is 22% (YouGov, Feb 2026).
• 46% of US adults used a voice assistant in 2017, and 42% used one on a smartphone, the most common device for talking to software (Pew Research Center, Dec 2017).

Is speaking a message faster than typing it?

Yes, by a wide margin in lab tests, and the recognizer got most characters right on the first pass. In a Stanford, University of Washington and Baidu study, 96.7% of the final characters in speech-entered messages came straight from the first recognition pass, with corrections making up the remaining 3.3% (Ruan et al., IMWUT 2017, Dec 2017). Dictating into a voice-to-text keyboard combines the two sides: the sender speaks, the recipient reads.

• Mandarin speakers fixed far fewer errors while dictating than while typing: a corrected error rate of 6.67% for speech against 17.73% for the keyboard, 62.4% lower (Ruan et al., IMWUT 2017, Dec 2017).
• Speech left slightly more mistakes in the final message than the keyboard: 2.06% against 1.22% uncorrected errors in Mandarin and 0.55% against 0.35% in English (Ruan et al., IMWUT 2017, Dec 2017).
• When a dictated message needed fixing, participants did 86.0% of the correcting on the keyboard and only 14.0% by voice (Ruan et al., IMWUT 2017, Dec 2017).
• In 2,438 recorded English telephone conversations, people talked at an overall average of 196 words per minute (Yuan, Liberman and Cieri, Interspeech 2006, Sep 2006).
• OpenAI trained its Whisper speech recognizer on 680,000 hours of multilingual audio, and the best model scored a 2.5% word error rate on the LibriSpeech test-clean benchmark without any fine-tuning (Radford et al., arXiv 2022, Dec 2022).
• On 25 real-world recordings, the best professional transcription service (computer-assisted) beat Whisper's aggregate word error rate by only 1.15 percentage points, and fully human services by a fraction of a point (Radford et al., arXiv 2022, Dec 2022).
• Speech recognition is not equally accurate for everyone: five commercial systems from Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM and Microsoft averaged a 35% word error rate for Black speakers against 19% for white speakers (Koenecke et al., PNAS 2020, Mar 2020).
• 22% of US voice assistant users said a major reason they use one is that speaking feels more natural than typing (Pew Research Center, Dec 2017).

Who relies on voice input most?

People who want their hands free, and people for whom a small touchscreen keyboard is hard to use. Among US voice assistant users in 2017, 55% said a major reason they used one was operating a device without their hands (Pew Research Center, Dec 2017). The figures below describe device use and how common disabilities are; they say nothing about voice input as a treatment.

• Voice assistant use skewed young: 55% of US adults aged 18 to 49 used one, compared with 37% of those 50 and older (Pew Research Center, Dec 2017).
• 72% of US adults with a disability own a smartphone, 16 points below the 88% of adults without one (Pew Research Center, Sep 2021).
• In a survey of 466 smartphone and tablet users with visual impairments, 87.4% said mainstream devices are replacing traditional assistive aids (Martiniello et al., Assistive Technology 2019, Nov 2019).
• 56% of those visually impaired users disagreed that physical buttons are essential on a device, describing dictation and on-screen braille as effective for short text entry, while extensive typing and editing still favored traditional tools (Martiniello et al., Assistive Technology 2019, Nov 2019).
• At least 2.2 billion people worldwide have a near or distance vision impairment (WHO, Feb 2026).
• More than 2.5 billion people need one or more assistive products, a figure WHO expects to reach 3.5 billion by 2050 (WHO, Jan 2024).
• More than 1 in 4 US adults have a disability; 12.2% have a mobility disability and 5.5% a vision disability (CDC, Jul 2024).
• 7.5 million US students aged 3 to 21, 15% of all public school students, received special education services in 2022-23, and specific learning disabilities were the most common category at 32% (NCES, May 2024).

How fast and accurate is typing on a phone?

Phone typing is slow and error-prone: people type at a fraction of their speaking rate and leave more mistakes than on a laptop. For desktop benchmarks and speaking rates, see the typing speed statistics hub.

How fast do people type on a phone keyboard?

Most people type in the 30s of words per minute on a phone, and two thumbs, youth and typing in their own language push that up. In an online typing test of 37,370 volunteers, 74% said they type with two thumbs, and two-finger typists averaged 37.7 WPM against 29.2 WPM for those using one (Palin et al., MobileHCI 2019, Oct 2019).

• In a US subsample of 1,475 people matched to the population by gender, age and phone operating system, 20- to 29-year-olds typed fastest at 39.0 WPM, while people aged 50 to 59 averaged 24.8 WPM (Palin et al., MobileHCI 2019, Oct 2019).
• Native English speakers typed 37.8 WPM on their phones, while people who never type in English managed 25.6 WPM, a gap of more than 12 WPM (Palin et al., MobileHCI 2019, Oct 2019).
• Researchers put the point where a keyboard stops limiting how fast people write, the "inviscid" entry rate, at 67 WPM; the fastest rate they found reported for an on-screen QWERTY keyboard was 40 WPM (Kristensson and Vertanen, MobileHCI 2014, Sep 2014).
• Messaging apps took 82.7% of all keystrokes in a three-week field study that logged 30 people's everyday typing on their own Android phones; the web browser was a distant second at 6.7% (Buschek et al., CHI 2018, Apr 2018).
• Chat apps produced 60% of the text logged from US English users of Google's Gboard keyboard, and the average logged sentence was 4.1 words long (Hard et al., Google, Feb 2019).
• Thirty smartphone users in a Finnish eye-tracking study reported spending 11.6 hours a week typing on a phone keyboard, against 16.7 hours on a physical keyboard (Jiang et al., CHI 2020, Apr 2020).

How often do typos and autocorrect get in the way?

Constantly, and fixing them pulls attention away from the message. Phone typists in an eye-tracking study kept their eyes on the keyboard about 60% of the time, against 20% for touch typists on a physical keyboard, and glanced up to check their text 3.4 times per sentence against 0.92 (Jiang et al., CHI 2020, Apr 2020).

• Despite leaving more mistakes, phone typists pressed Backspace less often than desktop typists, 1.89 against 2.29 times per sentence, which the researchers put down to the higher cost of correcting on a phone (Palin et al., MobileHCI 2019, Oct 2019).
• Typing with two thumbs, people made errors on 12.23% of characters before fixing most of them, against 9.38% with one finger, so the faster posture is also the sloppier one (Jiang et al., CHI 2020, Apr 2020).
• In everyday use, 8.9% of all keystrokes were presses of the delete key, rising to 11.3% of keystrokes typed with the right thumb, against 7.6% of those typed with two thumbs (Buschek et al., CHI 2018, Apr 2018).
• Among the 16 people in that field study who used autocorrect, the keyboard changed a median of 15.3 words per person per day (Buschek et al., CHI 2018, Apr 2018).
• The share of words a person autocorrected rose with typing speed (r = 0.237), while the share picked from the prediction bar fell with it (r = -0.183); prediction-only users typed about 10 WPM slower than autocorrect users (Palin et al., MobileHCI 2019, Oct 2019).
• Without any typing aids, faster phone typists made fewer errors (r = -0.16), but that link vanished for people using autocorrect or prediction, which the researchers read as the aids covering for slower typists' mistakes (Palin et al., MobileHCI 2019, Oct 2019).
• In live tests with real Gboard users, the three suggestions shown above the keyboard included the word the person typed next only 13.75% of the times they appeared (Hard et al., Google, Feb 2019).
• Swiping words on a gesture keyboard left more mistakes than tapping in a four-week study on people's own phones: a 4.14% character error rate by the end of the study against 1.65% for tap typing (Reyal, Zhai and Kristensson, CHI 2015, Apr 2015).

Does texting on the move make it worse?

Yes. Texting slows people down on foot, pulls them off a straight line, cuts their typing speed and makes pedestrians skip the checks they would otherwise make at a crossing. At 20 high-injury intersections in Seattle, 29.8% of 1,102 pedestrians were doing something distracting while crossing, and 7.3% were texting (Thompson et al., Injury Prevention, Dec 2012).

• Pedestrians who were texting took 1.87 seconds (18%) longer to cross the average intersection and were 3.9 times as likely as undistracted walkers to cross unsafely, by ignoring the lights, crossing mid-block or not looking both ways (Thompson et al., Injury Prevention, Dec 2012).
• Only 34.9% of all pedestrians observed looked left and right before stepping into the road, and texting walkers were four times as likely as undistracted ones to skip the check (odds ratio 4.00) (Thompson et al., Injury Prevention, Dec 2012).
• Walking while texting cut people's pace from 1.33 to 1.01 meters per second, about a quarter slower, and they drifted further from a straight line than when reading or walking with no phone (Schabrun et al., PLOS ONE, Jan 2014).
• While walking, the same 26 adults typed only 23.0 correct words per minute on their own phones (Schabrun et al., PLOS ONE, Jan 2014).
• Nine of the 26 adults in that study said they had already had an accident while texting, including falls, trips and walking into obstacles or other people (Schabrun et al., PLOS ONE, Jan 2014).
• 77% of US adults say it is generally fine to use a cellphone while walking down the street, about the same share that accepts phone use on public transit (Pew Research Center, Aug 2015).

How dangerous is texting while driving?

Police crash reports miss most phone use, so the official death count is a floor. Naturalistic driving data make the risk plain: the phone tasks that pull eyes off the road carry the highest crash odds, and hands-free voice texting still adds mental workload.

How many people die in distracted-driving crashes?

Thousands a year by police count, and several times that by other measures. Police reports tied 437 deaths in 2024 to crashes in which at least one driver was talking, listening or otherwise using a cellphone, 14% of distraction-related deaths and the highest share in NHTSA's 2020-2024 series (NHTSA, Apr 2026). Texting while driving statistics built on crash reports depend on what officers can see and what drivers admit.

• When NHTSA's cost study estimated distraction from naturalistic driving observation instead of police reports, it found distraction involved in about 29% of all crashes in 2019, resulting in 10,546 deaths and 1.3 million nonfatal injuries (NHTSA, The Economic and Societal Impact of Motor Vehicle Crashes, 2019 (Revised), Feb 2023).
• 41% of the people killed in distraction-affected crashes in 2024, 1,300 people, were the distracted drivers themselves; 856 were in other vehicles and 639 were pedestrians, cyclists and other people outside any vehicle (NHTSA, Apr 2026).
• 264 people died in 2024 crashes involving distracted teen drivers aged 15 to 19, and 47% of those killed were teens (NHTSA, Apr 2026).
• Counting only drivers who tapped, swiped or otherwise handled their phones, telematics recorded phone manipulation in the 30 seconds before impact 590 times across 15,301 two-vehicle crashes, while police reports for the same crashes recorded it 17 times (IIHS, Aug 2026).

How much does texting raise crash risk?

A lot, and the riskiest tasks are the ones that take a hand and the eyes to the phone. In the SHRP 2 naturalistic driving study, dialing a handheld phone carried crash odds 12.2 times those of attentive driving, and reaching for a phone 4.8 times (Dingus et al., PNAS 2016, Feb 2016). No form of texting at the wheel, dictation included, is risk-free.

• Talking on a handheld phone raised crash odds 2.2 times, close to the 2.0 times for any distraction, and handheld phone use of all kinds was present 6.40% of the time drivers were on the road (Dingus et al., PNAS 2016, Feb 2016).
• Some observable distraction was present in 68.3% of the 905 injury and property-damage crashes recorded, and drivers were doing something distracting during 51.93% of ordinary driving time (Dingus et al., PNAS 2016, Feb 2016).
• Removing distraction could prevent about 36% of US crashes, roughly 4 million of the nearly 11 million that happen each year, by the study's population-attributable-risk estimate, which the authors note may run high because the sample over-represents young drivers (Dingus et al., PNAS 2016, Feb 2016).
• On a 1-to-5 cognitive workload scale, sending and receiving texts and emails through a speech-to-text system scored 3.06, higher than a handheld phone call (2.45) or a hands-free call (2.27) (AAA Foundation, Jun 2013).
• Even a voice-texting setup with perfect speech recognition scored 3.08 on the same scale, and using Siri hands- and eyes-free to send texts and update social media scored 4.15 (AAA Foundation, Oct 2014).
• Mental impairment lingered for up to 27 seconds after drivers finished a voice-command task, enough to travel more than three football fields at 25 mph (AAA Foundation, Oct 2015).

How many drivers still text, and what do the laws say?

Drivers condemn handheld texting and excuse hands-free use. 94% of drivers rated manually texting or emailing at the wheel as very or extremely dangerous, but only 16% said the same of hands-free phone use, and 59% had used hands-free tech to talk, text or email while driving in the past month (AAA Foundation, Dec 2025).

• 79% of drivers support a law against holding and talking on a phone while driving, but only 40% support one against reading, typing or sending texts hands-free (AAA Foundation, Dec 2025).
• At a typical daylight moment in 2024, 4.5% of US drivers were seen visibly manipulating a handheld device, up from 3.0% in 2023, a statistically significant rise equal to about 537,946 drivers (NHTSA, Apr 2026).
• Among drivers aged 16 to 24, 8.7% were visibly manipulating a handheld device in 2024, the highest rate since NHTSA began collecting the measure in 2005 (NHTSA, Apr 2026).
• 39.0% of US high school students who drove had texted or emailed while driving at least once in the past 30 days, in the 2019 Youth Risk Behavior Survey (CDC, Aug 2020).
• Texting while driving climbed steeply with age among high school drivers: 59.5% of students aged 18 or older did it, against 15.5% of 14- and 15-year-olds (CDC, Aug 2020).
• 49 states, plus DC, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the US Virgin Islands, ban texting for all drivers, and all but six of those laws allow primary enforcement (GHSA, Jun 2026).
• 33 states and DC ban all drivers from using handheld phones, and 36 states and DC ban all phone use, hands-free included, by novice drivers; no state bans all phone use for every driver (GHSA, Jun 2026).
• In the first year of Iowa's hands-free law (July 2025 to May 2026), phone-motion distraction among drivers on Cambridge Mobile Telematics' platform averaged 6.9% below the pre-law baseline, which CMT's model credits with preventing an estimated 470 crashes (Cambridge Mobile Telematics, Jun 2026).

How do businesses, workplaces and scammers use text messages?

Text reminders measurably change behavior in randomized healthcare trials, and scam texts now cost the people who report them more than email scams do.

Do text reminders and business messages work?

Yes, and the most reliable business texting statistics come from randomized trials. Text reminders worked about as well as phone-call reminders, which reached 80.3% attendance (risk ratio 0.99 across three trials and 2,509 people) (Gurol-Urganci et al., Cochrane 2013, Dec 2013).

• In two trials, a text reminder cost 55% and 65% as much per attendance as a phone-call reminder, about 35% to 45% less (Gurol-Urganci et al., Cochrane 2013, Dec 2013).
• Adding the cost of a missed appointment to an NHS hospital's text reminder cut the no-show rate from 11.1% to 8.4% in a randomized trial of 10,111 outpatients, and a second trial of 9,848 patients replicated it at 8.2% (Hallsworth et al., PLOS ONE 2015, Sep 2015).
• Switching to the better-worded text would mean 5,800 fewer missed appointments a year at that one NHS trust, at no additional cost (Hallsworth et al., PLOS ONE 2015, Sep 2015).
• In a randomized trial of 93,354 patients of a US health system, one text reminder sent a day after vaccine-eligibility notice raised COVID-19 vaccine appointment bookings by 6.07 percentage points (84%) and vaccinations by 3.57 points (26%) (Dai et al., Nature 2021, Aug 2021).
• Across 19 text-message nudges sent to 47,306 patients before a primary care visit, flu vaccination rose by an average of 2.1 percentage points (5%), and the best script, two texts costing less than a dime, raised it by 4.6 points (11%) (Milkman et al., PNAS 2021, Apr 2021).
• Meta's "other revenue" in its Family of Apps reached $1 billion in a quarter for the first time in Q2 2026, up 73% year over year, driven mainly by WhatsApp paid messaging and subscriptions (Meta, Jul 2026).

How much of texting is spam and scams?

Texts start a minority of fraud reports, but text scams cost more per victim than email scams. Texts were the third most common way fraud reached people in 2024, at 16% of fraud reports that named a contact method, behind email (25%) and phone calls (19%) (FTC, Mar 2025).

• Text scam reports fell from 332,000 in 2020 to 247,000 in 2024, yet the share of reports in which money was lost more than doubled, from 5% to 11% (FTC, Apr 2025).
• Fake package-delivery problems, phony job offers, fake fraud alerts, bogus unpaid-toll notices and "wrong number" openers made up about half of all text fraud reports in 2024, with fake USPS delivery texts the most reported (FTC, Apr 2025).
• The median reported loss to a text scam in 2024 was $1,000, below phone calls ($1,500) but above email ($600), social media ($409) and websites or apps ($200) (FTC, Mar 2025).
• In 2025, texts were where 7% of money-losing fraud reports started, far behind websites and apps (31%) and social media (28%); the 2025 figures exclude the weeks of the government shutdown, when the FTC collected no reports (FTC, Apr 2026).
• Complaints to the FCC about unwanted texts rose more than 500%, from about 3,300 in 2015 to 18,900 in 2022, before the FCC adopted its first rules aimed at scam texts (FCC, Mar 2023).
• WhatsApp detected and banned more than 6.8 million accounts linked to criminal scam centers worldwide in the first six months of 2025 (WhatsApp, Aug 2025).

How many messages do workers handle a day?

Work chat now arrives on top of email all day, and the volume is still rising. Chat messages per person rose 6% year over year worldwide, by more than 20% in Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and by more than 15% in the UK and South Korea (Microsoft Work Trend Index, Jun 2025). Email volumes per worker are covered in the email statistics hub.

• Chats sent outside the 9-to-5 workday are up 15% year over year, and the average user now gets 58 such messages over a rolling 28-day period, weekends included (Microsoft Work Trend Index, Jun 2025).
• The most-pinged fifth of Microsoft 365 users are interrupted by a meeting, email or chat every 2 minutes during core hours, or 275 times counted across the full 24-hour day (Microsoft Work Trend Index, Jun 2025).
• 48% of employees and 52% of leaders say their work feels chaotic and fragmented, in a survey of 31,000 workers in 31 markets (Microsoft Work Trend Index, Jun 2025).
• In late 2020, 57% of Americans working from home all or most of the time used instant messaging platforms such as Slack or Google Chat and 43% used them often, rising to 49% of teleworkers under 50 against 30% of those 50 and older (Pew Research Center, Dec 2020).

Methodology and Sources

Every statistic on this page was traced to the organization that produced the data: regulators and statistics agencies (NHTSA, CDC, FTC, FCC, BLS, NCES, Eurostat, ITU, WHO), peer-reviewed studies, company filings and platform disclosures (Meta, WhatsApp, Google, Snap, Telegram), the wireless industry's own carrier survey (CTIA), and research organizations that ran their own surveys or measurements (Pew Research Center, YouGov, Common Sense Media, Nielsen, Gallup, AAA Foundation, IIHS, Cambridge Mobile Telematics, Microsoft). We do not cite statistics roundups, marketing blogs or vendor claims that repeat other people's numbers, and we exclude vendor open-rate claims for SMS that do not trace to a published study. Each link was opened on 2 October 2026 to confirm the page loads, the number appears on it and the date is right; PDFs were downloaded and read in full. Platform figures are labelled as self-reported, older foundational studies carry their year, and surveys, lab tests, telematics and police counts are never combined into one claim. The page is refreshed monthly, with platform volumes, scam losses and driving data replaced first.

Glossary

• SMS: short message service, the original carrier text message of up to 160 characters.
• MMS: multimedia messaging service, carrier messages that carry photos, GIFs, video or audio.
• RCS: rich communication services, the carrier messaging standard that adds typing indicators, read receipts and media to texting, used by Google Messages.
• CTIA: the US wireless industry association, which runs an annual survey of carriers.
• FCC, FTC: the US Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission.
• ITU: International Telecommunication Union, the UN agency for digital technologies.
• WPM: words per minute.
• Corrected and uncorrected error rate: errors a typist makes and then fixes, against errors left in the finished text.
• NHTSA: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
• SHRP 2: the second Strategic Highway Research Program, whose naturalistic driving study filmed thousands of US drivers in their own cars.
• Odds ratio: how many times more likely an outcome is with a factor present than without it.
• IIHS: Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
• GHSA: Governors Highway Safety Association.
• CMT: Cambridge Mobile Telematics, which measures driving behavior through phone apps and sensors.
• NHS: the UK's National Health Service.
• CDC, NCES, WHO, BLS: the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Education Statistics, World Health Organization and US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• CHI, MobileHCI, IMWUT, Interspeech: peer-reviewed computer science and speech conferences and journals where the typing and speech studies on this page were published.

Sources

• AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety: 2024 Traffic Safety Culture Index
• AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety: Measuring Cognitive Distraction in the Automobile (2013)
• AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety: Measuring Cognitive Distraction in the Automobile II (2014)
• AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety: Measuring Cognitive Distraction in the Automobile III (2015)
• Buschek, Bisinger and Alt: ResearchIME, A Mobile Keyboard Application for Studying Free Typing Behaviour in the Wild, CHI 2018
• Cambridge Mobile Telematics: Distracted Driving Down in First Year of Iowa's Hands-Free Law
• CDC: Disability Impacts All of Us
• CDC, MMWR: Transportation Risk Behaviors Among High School Students, Youth Risk Behavior Survey 2019
• Common Sense Media: Constant Companion, A Week in the Life of a Young Person's Smartphone Use (2023)
• Common Sense Media: Social Media, Social Life 2018, Executive Summary
• CTIA: 2021 Annual Survey Highlights
• CTIA: 2022 Annual Survey
• CTIA: 2023 Annual Survey Highlights
• CTIA: 2024 Annual Survey Highlights
• CTIA: 2025 Annual Survey Highlights
• CTIA: 2026 Annual Survey Highlights
• Dai et al.: Behavioural nudges increase COVID-19 vaccinations, Nature 2021
• Dhakal, Feit, Kristensson and Oulasvirta: Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes, CHI 2018
• Dingus et al.: Driver crash risk factors and prevalence evaluation using naturalistic driving data, PNAS 2016
• Eurostat: Individuals, internet activities (isoc_ci_ac_i)
• FCC: 2024 Communications Marketplace Report (FCC 24-136)
• FCC: Targeting and Eliminating Unlawful Text Messages, Report and Order (FCC 23-21)
• FTC: Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024
• FTC: Data Spotlight, Top text scams of 2024
• FTC: Data Spotlight, Reported losses to scams on social media eight times higher than in 2020
• Gallup: The New Era of Communication Among Americans
• GHSA: Distracted Driving laws
• Google: New features to celebrate Messages' 1 billion RCS users
• Gurol-Urganci et al.: Mobile phone messaging reminders for attendance at healthcare appointments, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2013
• Hallsworth et al.: Stating Appointment Costs in SMS Reminders Reduces Missed Hospital Appointments, PLOS ONE 2015
• Hard et al., Google: Federated Learning for Mobile Keyboard Prediction
• IIHS: Study shows police reports undercount cellphone use before crashes
• ITU: Facts and Figures 2025, Mobile phone ownership
• ITU: Facts and Figures 2025, Subscriptions
• Jiang et al.: How We Type, Eye and Finger Movement Strategies in Mobile Typing, CHI 2020
• Koenecke et al.: Racial disparities in automated speech recognition, PNAS 2020
• Kristensson and Vertanen: The Inviscid Text Entry Rate and its Application as a Grand Goal for Mobile Text Entry, MobileHCI 2014
• Martiniello et al.: Exploring the use of smartphones and tablets among people with visual impairments, Assistive Technology 2019
• Meta: Second Quarter 2026 Results Conference Call transcript
• Meta: Meta Reports Second Quarter 2026 Results
• Meta: Fourth Quarter 2025 Results Conference Call transcript
• Meta (Facebook, Inc.): Third Quarter 2020 Results Conference Call transcript
• Microsoft Work Trend Index: Breaking Down the Infinite Workday
• Milkman et al.: A megastudy of text-based nudges encouraging patients to get vaccinated at an upcoming doctor's appointment, PNAS 2021
• NCES: Students With Disabilities, Condition of Education
• NHTSA: The Economic and Societal Impact of Motor Vehicle Crashes, 2019 (Revised), DOT HS 813 403
• NHTSA: Distracted Driving in 2024, Research Note DOT HS 813 790
• NHTSA: Teens and Distracted Driving in 2024, DOT HS 813 792
• NHTSA: Driver Electronic Device Use in 2024, Research Note DOT HS 813 788
• Nielsen: U.S. Teen Mobile Report, Calling Yesterday, Texting Today, Using Apps Tomorrow
• Palin et al.: How do People Type on Mobile Devices? Observations from a Study with 37,000 Volunteers, MobileHCI 2019
• Pew Research Center: Americans and Text Messaging (2011)
• Pew Research Center: How Americans Use Text Messaging (2011)
• Pew Research Center: Teens, Smartphones and Texting (2012)
• Pew Research Center: Mobile Messaging and Social Media 2015
• Pew Research Center: Americans' Views on Mobile Etiquette (2015)
• Pew Research Center: Nearly half of Americans use digital voice assistants, mostly on their smartphones (2017)
• Pew Research Center: How the Coronavirus Outbreak Has and Hasn't Changed the Way Americans Work (2020)
• Pew Research Center: Americans with disabilities less likely than those without to own some digital devices (2021)
• Pew Research Center: Americans' Social Media Use 2025
• Pew Research Center: Social Media Fact Sheet
• Pew Research Center: Mobile Fact Sheet
• Pew Research Center: Teens, Social Media and AI Chatbots 2025
• Radford et al.: Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision (Whisper), arXiv 2022
• Reyal, Zhai and Kristensson: Performance and User Experience of Touchscreen and Gesture Keyboards in a Lab Setting and in the Wild, CHI 2015
• Ruan, Wobbrock, Liou, Ng and Landay: Comparing Speech and Keyboard Text Entry for Short Messages in Two Languages on Touchscreen Phones, IMWUT 2017
• Schabrun et al.: Texting and Walking, Strategies for Postural Control and Implications for Safety, PLOS ONE 2014
• Snap Inc.: Snap Inc. Announces Second Quarter 2026 Financial Results
• Telegram: Pavel Durov, official channel post, March 2025
• Thompson et al.: Impact of social and technological distraction on pedestrian crossing behaviour, Injury Prevention 2012
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: American Time Use Survey, Table 1, 2025 annual averages
• WhatsApp: Making voice messages better
• WhatsApp: Introducing Voice Message Transcripts
• WhatsApp (Meta Newsroom): New WhatsApp tools and tips to beat messaging scams
• WHO: Blindness and vision impairment fact sheet
• WHO: Assistive technology fact sheet
• Yuan, Liberman and Cieri: Towards an Integrated Understanding of Speaking Rate in Conversation, Interspeech 2006
• YouGov: How Americans communicate in 2026, the rise of messaging and AI trends