Finding the best family cell phone plan is a great way to save money on your monthly wireless bill. But when we research plans, we're looking for more than just a low monthly rate.
We also take perks into consideration. Some family plans offer complementary streaming service subscriptions that save you money elsewhere in your budget. Others include travel benefits or let you mix and match cheaper plans for different lines of data. In fact, our favorite plans feature generous discounts as you add more lines, lowering the cost per line for big families.
1. Best overall family plan: T-Mobile
2. Most flexible family plan: Verizon
3. Best plan for bargain hunters: Mint
4. Best plan for small families: Xfinity Mobile
Families will be best served by opting for unlimited data, which generally offers the best mix of price, perks, and per-line discounts. Also, the advantage to picking one of the best unlimited data plans instead of one with a set amount of data is that you don't have to worry about family members consuming too much of your pooled data each month. Carriers like Verizon, AT&T and Mint even let you mix and match plans for each line of data.
Families of four can expect to pay between $120 to $220 a month for four lines from the major wireless carriers — in fact, four lines for $120 per month seems to be the sweet spot for plans these days. As a rule of thumb, the more expensive the plan, the better the perks. (We've also compared the cheapest unlimited data plans from AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon if you're on a budget.)
Here’s a closer look at the best family cell phone plan options.
The best family cell phone plans
Best family cell phone plan value
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Best family cell phone plan for coverage and speeds
Best family cell phone plan for bargain hunters
Best family plan for Comcast customers
AT&T's best family cell phone plan
Cheapest family plan on AT&T's network
Best bargain unlimited plan for families
How to pick the best family cell phone plans
Picking the right cell phone plan comes down to balancing the costs of multiple lines of data with the perks each carrier offers. If you do a lot of video streaming, for example, you’ll want to pick a plan that not only throws in a streaming service as a perk (Netflix with T-Mobile, multiple streaming services with Verizon) but also doesn’t slow your data if you consume a lot of data in a given month.
Because the thing about unlimited data is that, with the exception of one plan, it’s not truly unlimited. AT&T's Unlimited Extra customers will enjoy a 50GB cap, while Unlimited Elite subscribers face no cap at all. Verizon can slow data for Unlimited Plus customers once they use more than 30GB of data, while Welcome Unlimited customers can see data speeds slowed down whenever there's too much traffic on Verizon's network. T-Mobile Magenta and Go5G customers can see data slowed when they use more than 100GB during a billing cycle; there's no throttling for Magenta Max and Go5G Plus customers.
Use an MVNO like Mint or Cricket, and you can see your data speeds deprioritized in favor of other customers on the parent company's network (T-Mobile and AT&T, respectively).
We’ve focused on unlimited plans, as only AT&T is the only major carrier that continues to offer a tiered data option (a 4GB in this case). If you prefer tiered data, you'd want to turn to service like Mint, which offers plans with different data allocations.