The States With the Worst Cell Coverage, Ranked. See Where New York Lands
Anyone can complain about a dropped call.
DeadCellZones.com collects those complaints one address at a time, and Holafly turned them into a per-million-resident score for every state.
A few rural states expected it. New York expected to skip the list entirely.
But one NYC zip code skewed the results.
Here’s the ranking of the states with the worst cell coverage in the country, and exactly where New York fits into it.
How This Ranking Works
This ranking of the states with the worst cell coverage comes from a Holafly Research analysis of complaints filed on DeadCellZones.com, a site where people report dead spots by address.
Researchers counted every complaint by state, then divided by population.
That “per million residents” math keeps a small state from looking better than it should just because fewer people live there to complain in the first place.
Same math, every state, so it’s a fair fight.
No exceptions.
The Math Behind a “Per Million” Score
This cell-coverage ranking runs on a “per million” trick that keeps a huge state from automatically looking worse than a tiny one.
A raw complaint count would always crown a giant state the loser, simply because more people live there to file one.
Dividing each state’s total complaints by its population, then scaling that rate up to “per million,” puts Vermont’s roughly 640,000 residents on the same footing as a state fifty times its size.
1. Hawaii
Hawaii logs 282 per million residents in dead-zone complaints, the highest rate of any state in the country.
Rugged volcanic terrain and island geography block signals the way flat mainland ground never does.
Tourist season doesn’t help.
A summer surge in visitors strains the same towers year-round residents rely on, and coverage thins out fastest in remote areas like rural Kauai.
Some Kauai residents fought a proposed cell tower there, telling a local reporter they’d rather keep the dead zone than see a tower rise 100 feet above every other building nearby.
Not everyone wants the fix.
2. Maine
Maine’s cell coverage ranks second-worst in the country, with 264 complaints per million residents in the same analysis.
Dense forest and a long, jagged coastline swallow signal the way Hawaii’s volcanoes do.
York, a coastal town that fills with tourists every summer, has felt it hardest.
Residents there have pushed back against new towers for years, so the town is trying small cells tucked into streetlights instead, a workaround that avoids a full tower fight.
It’s a compromise.
Not a cure.
3. Vermont
Vermont completes the ranking of the three worst states for cell coverage, with 252 complaints per million residents.
Green Mountain ridgelines and a famously thick tree canopy do the same job Maine’s forests do, cutting off line of sight between phones and towers.
North Tunbridge has leaned into the gap rather than fight it.
A free public payphone still sits outside the town’s general store, kept alive by a local college graduate who collects old phone booths.
Locals still use it.
Where New York Lands
New York isn’t one of the states Holafly names as having the worst coverage.
Zoom into one zip code, though, and the picture changes.
Manhattan’s 10018 zip code, which covers the Garment District, posts 808 dead-zone complaints per million people, the single worst zip code anywhere in New York state.
That number is higher than any whole state’s average in the same analysis, Hawaii included.
A technical adviser at the Wireless Infrastructure Association explained why to researchers: The frequencies carriers use don’t pass through steel or concrete well, and steel and concrete make up almost all of Manhattan.
Concrete wins every time.
So New York misses the state-by-state list, but its own skyline builds a private dead zone the ranking never sees.
Psst! See exactly how New York’s worst zip code and neighboring states compare, number for number.
Tap any column to sort, or search for your own state.
America’s Single Worst Spot
Cincinnati, Ohio logs the single worst mark in the entire analysis, state or city.
The city logs 534 complaints per million residents, well above even Hawaii’s state average.
One zip code near a golf course logs nearly three times as many complaints as any other zip code in the country, dragging Cincinnati’s whole number higher than any state in the ranking.
Residents there have resisted new towers going up nearby for years.
So the worst spot in America isn’t a remote mountain pass.
Great golf, terrible signal.
State With the Fewest Complaints
South Dakota sits at the exact opposite end of this same ranking.
The state logs just 41 dead-zone complaints per million residents, the lowest rate anywhere in the country.
That’s roughly a seventh of Hawaii’s rate.
Open, flat terrain lets fewer towers cover more ground without losing the signal to a ridge or a rainforest canopy.
A smaller population means less strain on the towers that are already there.
Geography built South Dakota’s advantage, no tower fight required.
South Dakota packs just 11.7 people into every square mile, according to Census Bureau data.
A rancher near the Badlands and a commuter in Sioux Falls pull a signal off the same handful of towers without ever crowding each other out.
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