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What does spectrum cost?

Every US spectrum benchmark we can compute from public data, in one comparable unit, dollars per megahertz per person covered, with the working shown for each one.

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Estimate

n/aton/a

    This is a comparables range, not a valuation. It tells you what other buyers paid for roughly comparable spectrum, per person covered. What your spectrum is worth depends on encumbrances, build-out obligations, licence term, adjacency and who else wants it, none of which is in this data.

    The finding most people miss

    CBRS priority licences cleared at $0.198 per MHz-POP nationally. The median county paid $0.032, and only 16% of counties paid above the national average at all.

    Auction 105 sold 10 MHz priority licences county by county, which makes it the one modern auction where the whole price distribution is visible. It is extremely skewed: 22 counties out of 3,123 account for half of the $4.5B raised. Quoting the national average at a rural operator overstates their cost by roughly six times; quoting it in Chicago understates it by four.

    $0.01$0.10$1$10$100+
    3,123 counties, Auction 105 priority access licences, price per MHz-POP on a logarithmic scale. The long right tail is oil and gas country: Loving County, Texas, population 48, paid $241.67.

    $0.032

    Median county

    $0.198

    National weighted average

    16%

    Counties above that average

    22

    Counties = half the money

    What a large county paid, Auction 105Population$/MHz-POP
    Cook County, Illinois5,182,6170.769
    New York County, New York1,660,6640.599
    Los Angeles County, California9,757,1790.534
    Harris County, Texas5,009,3020.382
    Maricopa County, Arizona4,673,0960.382
    Miami-Dade County, Florida2,838,4610.309
    King County, Washington2,340,2110.180
    Loving County, Texas48241.667

    Every benchmark and its basis

    TransactionYearTotalMHz$/MHz-POPBasis
    Auction 113: AWS-320263.57Bn/a2.658per licence
    EchoStar → AT&T: 600 MHz + 3.45 GHz202620.25B~501.191national-equiv
    EchoStar → SpaceX: AWS-4, H, AWS-3202519.62B650.887national-equiv
    Auction 107: C-band202181.17B2800.852national-equiv
    Auction 110: 3.45 GHz202222.51B1000.662national-equiv
    Auction 105: CBRS PAL (weighted)20204.59B10/licence0.198per licence
    Auction 105: CBRS PAL (median county)2020n/a10/licence0.032per licence
    Auction 108: 2.5 GHz overlay20220.43B17.5–49.50.016per licence ⚠

    ⚠ Auction 108 sold overlay licences covering only the unassigned whitespace inside each county, so its denominator is county population while its actual coverage is far smaller. The figure is real arithmetic on real data and still not comparable with the rest, which is why it is on the list.

    Method and limits

    Where the numbers come from. Gross winning bids from the FCC’s published auction results files, retrieved 2026-09-17. County populations are the US Census 2024 vintage estimates. Market populations for CMA and BEA licences come from the FCC’s own market table in the ULS bulk licence files. Private transaction values come from EchoStar’s Forms 8-K, not from press coverage.

    Two ways of computing, and they are not the same. Where a licence’s market population is available, we compute price per licence and aggregate: the “per licence” basis. Where it is not, we divide the total by the bandwidth and by the whole US population: the “national-equivalent” basis, which assumes every licence sold and every person was covered.

    What we cannot compute, and why. The C-band and 3.45 GHz auctions were licensed by Partial Economic Area. The FCC’s market table leaves PEA populations empty, and the reference file that would fill the gap is not machine-fetchable. So those two appear only as national-equivalent figures.

    Low band. The 700 MHz (Auction 73) and 600 MHz (Auction 1002) result files return 404 on the FCC’s current path, so low band appears here only inside the blended EchoStar–AT&T figure and the estimator returns no separate low-band range.

    Not a valuation, and not investment advice. A comparables range built from public transactions. It does not account for encumbrances, build-out obligations, remaining licence term, adjacency, incumbent clearing costs or competitive dynamics.

    Data as of 2026-09-17 · Method version 1.0
    Every figure is reproducible from the sources named. Show us one that is wrong and we will change it and say what changed.