A new Pew Research Center survey finds younger Americans are especially likely to feel they use their phones too much, while nearly half of adults have tried to cut back.
The average American adult spends somewhere around four and a half hours a day on their smartphone, depending on which tracker you ask. eMarketer puts the figure at 4 hours and 39 minutes. Older Pew-sourced estimates cited by ConsumerAffairs put it closer to 4 hours and 30 minutes. Other trackers that count all screens, not just phones, put total daily screen time as high as 6 to 7 hours. The numbers move depending on whether a study is tracking active app use, total time with the screen on, or something people self-report from memory, but they all land in the same range: several hours a day, every day, on a single device.
Given that, it’s not surprising that more than half of U.S. adults think it’s too much.
The self-assessment: 53% say they overdo it
According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted May 26 to June 1, 2026, just over half of U.S. adults, 53%, say they spend too much time on their smartphone. About a third say their use is about right, and just 3% say they spend too little time on it.
That feeling isn’t spread evenly by age, and the age pattern lines up closely with how much time people actually report being on their phones. Seven in ten adults under 30 say they spend too much time on their phone, as do about two-thirds of those 30 to 49. That share drops to roughly half among adults 50 to 64, and to about a quarter among those 65 and older.
It shows up again in a related Pew question: how often people say they check their phone at all. About one in four U.S. adults say they’re on their phone “almost constantly,” and another 60% say they check it several times a day. Broken down by age: 42% of adults under 30 report near-constant use, compared with 33% of those 30 to 49, 21% of those 50 to 64, and just 9% of adults 65 and older, a steady decline that roughly tracks the generational pattern seen in overall screen time estimates.
Trying to put it down
Nearly half of U.S. adults, 45%, say they’ve tried to cut back on their smartphone use in the past year. Predictably, the people most likely to try are the same people who feel they’re overusing it: 62% of adults who say they spend too much time on their phone have made an attempt to cut back.
But trying and succeeding aren’t the same thing. Among adults who tried, only a quarter say they were extremely or very successful. Just over half call their effort “somewhat successful,” and 23% say it didn’t work at all.
What the time is actually costing people
Pew’s survey also asked Americans to weigh the trade-offs of all that screen time. The upside is real: about three in four adults say their smartphone helps them stay informed, and about half say it helps them feel connected to others.
The downside concentrates almost entirely in one place, sleep. Forty-one percent of adults say their smartphone hurts how much sleep they get, compared with just 5% who say it helps. That effect is steepest among the youngest adults, the same group logging the most hours on their phones: 62% of adults under 30 say their phone use hurts their sleep, the only age group where a majority feels that way.
A note on the data
Precise minutes per day figures for the U.S. overall vary by tracker and methodology, so any single number should be read as a range, not a fixed fact. A reliable, current minutes per day breakdown specifically for Latino adults does not appear to exist; the most recent Hispanic-specific figures are years old and outdated for a 2026 comparison. What is current and well-sourced is a related trend: Pew’s separate tracking shows the share of Hispanic adults who are “smartphone dependent,” meaning their phone is effectively their only way online, rose from 20% in 2023 to 28% today.
