The Minimum Digital Living Standard House
Developed from our research, this free resource highlights the essential combination of goods, services, skills, and understanding necessary for digital inclusion today.
The Minimum Digital Living Standard (MDLS) is a national benchmark, defined by members of the public, for what households need to be digitally included. This free resource highlights the goods, services, skills and understanding households need today. All are needed, in combination, for digital inclusion.
The full set of research and outputs from the MDLS collaboration, led by the University of Liverpool, can be found at: www.mdls.org.uk
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Image of a house divided into rooms. Each room has an icon and text. Ground floor: Devices; Home Broadband; Mobile Data. First floor: Getting set up. Doing tasks online. Managing devices and data. Second floor: Evaluating information seen online. Evaluating what to share online. Loft space: Managing security. Chimney: Digital wellbeing.
Learn more about the Minimum Digital Living Standard
We now have a single MDLS, developed through a series of discussion groups with working-age and pension-age households, and households with children, in urban and rural areas. Grounded in people’s lives, MDLS helps us focus on the holistic nature of digital inclusion and how we can work together to achieve this. This briefing outlines what is in the MDLS for UK Households in 2025, and how MDLS can be used to inform policy, provision, and partnership working.