Fact · Accessibility and health
5.88percent
About 1 in 17 US adults reports a hearing disability, according to the CDC's breakdown of disability types.
Quote found word for word on the live source, last checked October 19, 2026
In the source's own words
“Mobility disability was the most common disability, reported by approximately 1 in 7 adults, followed by cognition (1 in 10), independent living (1 in 15), hearing (1 in 17), vision (1 in 21), and self-care (1 in 27).”
Prevalence of Disabilities and Health Care Access by Disability Status and Type Among Adults, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 2025, Main findings, Disability findings.
Open the original- What it measures
- The CDC's breakdown of six disability types, from 2016 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System data analyzed in an MMWR report and summarized on the CDC page. People with hearing loss who rely on captions or lip reading may find dictation and its on-screen text a different way to check their words.
- What it does not show
- Self-reported in a telephone survey. A hearing disability is not the same as deafness, and the share of adults with a hearing disability is lower than the share with any disability.
In the data
A row of Disability Statistics: Conditions That Make Typing Hard, as CDC 2016, hearing disability, US adults: 5.9 percent.
- Condition
- Hearing loss
- Who
- US adults
- Country
- United States
- How measured
- Self-reported
- Year
- 2016
- Note
- 1 in 17 is 5.88 percent, rounded to two decimals.