Club Benefits
Leave it to T-Mobile to shake up the best family cell phone plan landscape. The carrier is starting the new year with a new family plan option that's not only aggressively priced but also loaded down with perks. And that's why T-Mobile's new Better Value plan now claims the top spot, beating out AT&T's slightly more affordable Unlimited Extra plan.
1. Best overall: T-Mobile
2. Best alternative: AT&T
3. Best value: Total Wireless
4. Most flexible: Verizon
5. Cheapest: Mint Mobile
Other criteria considered for the picks below include what perks come with a plan. As an example, some family plans offer free (or heavily discounted) subscriptions to the best streaming services and that can save money from other parts of your budget.
Our highlighted plans that cover families of four, though below, you'll also find what two lines on a plan will cost you each month. Families of four can expect to pay between $120 to $220 a month for four lines from the major wireless carriers. Plans on the lower end of that range tend to have fewer perks — hotspot data, complementary streaming services, and more — so take that into consideration when making your choice.
The best family cell phone plan overall
Best alternative family plan
Best family plan value
The most flexible family cell phone plan
Cheapest family plan
Best family cell phone plans compared
Here are all the best family cell phone plans we've recommended shown side by side so you can better see how the prices compare. We've included the prices for two lines of data as well as for families of four to illustrate how adding additional lines reduces the per line cost.
As a reminder, you don't get per-line discounts with Mint's plans, but all lines in a family plan qualify for the same discount when you pay for a year of service upfront.
Phone carrier plan | Data amount | Monthly cost per line (2 lines) | Monthly cost per line (4 lines) |
T-Mobile Experience More | Unlimited | $85 (with free third line) | $42.50 |
AT&T Extra 2.0 | Unlimited | $60 | $40 |
Total Wireless Total 5G Unlimited | Unlimited | $42.50 | $27.50 |
Verizon Unlimited Plus | Unlimited | $62.50 | $40 |
Mint 5GB plan | 5GB per line | $15 (with $360 annual payment) | $15 (with $720 annual payment) |
How to pick the best family cell phone plans
For families, 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's add-ons) but also doesn’t slow your data if you consume a lot of data in a given month. Getting a plan with HD streaming can also be a good idea if you plan to stream on a screen larger than your smartphone's display.
As we've noted, many family plans also feature the best unlimited data plans at each carrier. But unlimited data still comes with some limits on just how much data you can use before your speed can slow down at some carriers. AT&T's Extra 2.0 customers will enjoy a 100GB cap, while Elite 2.0 subscribers face no cap at all. Other plans featured here — the ones from T-Mobile, Verizon and Total Wireless — don't have those caps.
Use an MVNO like Mint , 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). That said, in our testing, we never ran into those kind of slowdowns.
