We Checked If America Still Calls Mom. The Map Surprised Us.

Pondering · US Mobile · 2025
Does America Still Call Mom?

We looked at real call, text, and data patterns on Mother’s Day 2025 across every state. Some states showed up. Some sent a text. A few cities apparently went to brunch and forgot their phones entirely.

50 states + DC mapped 3 channels voice · text · data Mother’s Day 2025 vs surrounding Sundays
A note before we start

This is not a rigorous study. It’s more of a pondering. We had the data, we got curious, and we started pulling threads. The numbers are real. The theories about what they mean are just that: theories. Take them in the spirit they’re offered.

Step 1: Is there even a signal?

We started with the simplest possible question. On Mother’s Day 2025 (May 11), did Americans make more phone calls than on a typical Sunday?

Short answer: kind of. Barely.

~8%
typical voice lift on Mother’s Day vs the surrounding Sundays (May 4 and May 18)
~18%
typical text lift on Mother’s Day, bigger than the voice bump in most states

The text lift being larger than the voice lift was the first surprise. If you picture Mother’s Day as a Hallmark moment where families pick up the phone and call, the data gently suggests people are mostly texting “Happy Mother’s Day!! ❤️” and calling it good.

One theory: Mother’s Day used to be the single busiest calling day of the year in the landline era. Phone companies used to publish it. If our data is any indication, that crown may have quietly moved to the group chat.

We can’t say that for certain. Maybe our customer base skews younger. Maybe the landline era peak was a different kind of call behavior entirely. But the text-over-voice pattern showed up consistently enough to be worth noting.

Step 2: Where does the signal actually show up?

Nationally the effect is small. But averages hide things. So we broke it down by state, comparing each state’s Mother’s Day numbers against those two surrounding Sundays as a baseline.

The state map told a much more interesting story.

Mother’s Day Voice Lift by State
% change vs surrounding Sundays · Orthodox NY/NJ communities excluded

The lift was concentrated in a specific kind of place: rural, spread-out states, mostly in the Mountain West and the South. Wyoming led at +27%. South Dakota +17%. Arkansas and DC tied at +16%. Hawaii +16%.

The Northeast, the Pacific Coast, and most of the upper Midwest: mostly flat.

One theory about the geography

Pew Research has found that about 62% of rural adults live within an hour of extended family, compared to 50% of city dwellers. One interpretation of the calling pattern: if you live in a rural area and mom is 45 minutes away, you might still call rather than drive. If you’re in a city and mom’s 10 blocks away in traffic, maybe you just… go. Or maybe you text and make plans. The calling map could partly be a map of “my mom is far enough away that I need to call her.”

Could be. Could also just be that rural communities use voice calls as their primary channel year-round, and Mother’s Day just amplifies existing habits. The data doesn’t tell us which. Both feel plausible.

All states, all three channels

Here’s the full picture. Each state shows its Mother’s Day lift (or lack of one) across voice, text, and data. Sort by any column.

# ↕ State ↕ Region ↕ Voice lift ↕ Text lift ↕ Data lift ↕ How they show up ↕

Step 3: How you celebrate depends on where you live

Once we had the state data, we split the behavior into three buckets based on which channel showed the biggest lift. Three distinct personality types emerged.

📞
The Callers
WY · SD · AR · MS · HI

Voice and text both spike. These states are picking up the phone. Wyoming led all states at +27% voice lift.
💬
The Texters
DE · AK · GA · NH · SC

Voice barely moves but texts jump 20-50%. Mom gets a heartfelt message. Whether she appreciates that is outside the scope of this study.
📸
The Photo-Senders
MT · NV · ID · WV · SC

Data spikes alongside text. One theory: these are photo dumps. Montana led all states in data lift at +31%.
🤷
The Flat-Liners
CA · MA · PA · VA · UT

Nothing moved. Whether these people love their mothers is a question we are not equipped to answer.

Wyoming, notably, appeared in all three positive buckets. +27% voice, +29% text, +18% data. If there’s a most-mom-devoted state by pure signal strength, Wyoming has a reasonable claim. We’re not asserting it. Just noting it.

Step 4: The cities went to brunch

One thing we noticed: state-level averages can be dragged around by big cities. So we pulled New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston out separately and looked at them on their own.

NYC · LA · CHI · HOU
All four major cities showed flat or negative voice lift on Mother’s Day. Zero bump. Nothing.
Chicago -11%
Chicago and Houston both showed lower voice usage on Mother’s Day than a typical Sunday. Chicago did get a +11% data lift though.

Los Angeles and New York City: voice flat, text flat, data flat. Complete non-event.

Chicago: less voice than usual, more data than usual. Houston: less voice, more texts.

The brunch theory

One explanation is that city dwellers are more likely to spend Mother’s Day in person. You’re not calling mom if you’re sitting across from her at a restaurant. The data spike in Chicago might be people posting about the occasion rather than talking about it. This is entirely speculative. But it’s a fun theory and we’re committed to it.

Step 5: The rabbit hole

This is where things got genuinely strange.

Early in our analysis, New York and New Jersey had completely flat Mother’s Day numbers. Not small lifts. Zero. The signal that showed up everywhere else just… wasn’t there. We almost moved on. Then we looked closer at the underlying data.

New York’s average voice usage is already about 1,856 minutes per month. The national average is 714. That’s not a rounding error. New York’s baseline is 2.6x the rest of the country.

714 mins/mo
National average voice usage per line per month
~3,000 mins/mo
Average voice usage in certain NY/NJ zip codes, roughly 100 minutes of calls every single day

We traced it to specific communities. Monsey, NY. Spring Valley. Monroe and Kiryas Joel. Williamsburg and Borough Park in Brooklyn. Lakewood, NJ. These are predominantly Orthodox Jewish communities, and their voice usage runs 4 to 5 times the national average consistently, month after month.

When you’re already at 3,000 minutes a month, there’s no room for a Mother’s Day bump. The ceiling is already the floor.

The cultural context makes this pattern legible. These are close-knit communities where voice calls are a primary communication channel. In some of the more insular villages, like New Square in Rockland County, texting and data usage are far more restricted culturally, which means voice is essentially the only channel. New Square averaged 3,031 voice minutes per month with only 274 texts. For context, the national text average is around 296 per month.

One more thing we noticed. October 2025 showed a sharp dip in voice usage in these zip codes specifically, dropping from their usual ~2,800-3,000 range down to ~2,200. October 2025 contained Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, and Simchat Torah in close succession. On those holidays, observant Jewish people don’t use phones. You can see the Jewish High Holiday calendar in a telecom dataset if you look at the right zip codes.

Why Mother’s Day is flat here

When your community already talks on the phone at 4x the national rate every single day, Mother’s Day doesn’t register as a special occasion in the usage data. Every day is already a high-communication day. The Mother’s Day “signal” we found in Wyoming and South Dakota only shows up against a quiet baseline. There’s no quiet baseline here.

How we did this

Data source

US Mobile’s internal data warehouse. Daily voice, text, and data usage records for lines active during May 2025. We compared Mother’s Day (May 11, 2025) against the two surrounding Sundays (May 4 and May 18) as a baseline. Only consumer lines on phones (no B2B, no employee accounts).

What we excluded

Orthodox community zip codes (Monsey, Spring Valley, Monroe/Kiryas Joel, Williamsburg, Borough Park, Lakewood NJ) are excluded from the state-level analysis. Their extremely high baseline usage makes them incomparable on a percentage-lift basis. They’re discussed separately in Step 5.

New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston are reported separately from their states so their population weight doesn’t mask the state-level patterns.

The “theories” framing

We’ve been deliberate about calling our interpretations theories rather than findings. The data shows what happened. Why it happened is almost always a guess. We’ve offered the guesses we find most plausible and tried to flag when we’re speculating.

Cite this study

You’re welcome to reference or republish these findings with credit to US Mobile. If you write something based on this data, we’d love to see it.

US Mobile Signal Studies. "Does America Still Call Mom?" June 2026. usmobile.com/blog/does-america-still-call-mom