What is Mosaic?

Mosaic is Experian’s proprietary segmentation solution that classifies all U.S. households into 19 distinct Groups and 70 Types by shared characteristics, preferences, and behaviors that come from hundreds of data attributes. 

It provides instant and comprehensive insight into the socioeconomic, life stage, demographic, and behavioral dynamics that shape consumer think, live, and act – without the time or cost of building a segmentation from scratch.​ 

Mosaic creates a consistent framework to understand customers, prospects, and markets from strategy to activation. It helps organizations quickly identify their most valuable audiences, develop more relevant marketing, and uncover opportunities for growth and expansion. 

Why use Mosaic?

Mosaic helps teams understand their most valuable audiences, shape communications and marketing strategies that resonate, and identify clearer paths to growth, across location, market, and product strategy.​ See more detail below.

Know who drives growth

Mosaic delivers immediate clarity into who drives revenue and what influences how they buy because it is anchored in affluence and life stage – the strongest purchase predictors – and refined with multidimensional insight​.

Align teams with a shared view

Mosaic creates a consistent definition of your customers across analytics, strategy, and media teams using a national segmentation that integrates socioeconomic, demographic, and behavioral dimensions in one.

Develop marketing strategies that resonate and activate them anywhere

Each segment combines values and intent with channel and media preferences, guiding more effective messaging and media investment across digital and traditional channels​.

Define a clearer path to market expansion

See where high value segments live and over index at a national, regional, local, and household level to guide more confident market expansion, site selection, and product strategy​.

Getting started

Mosaic is not a standalone product. It is accessed through multiple Experian solutions depending on your use case:

  • Marketing Attributes: Append Mosaic to your data for analysis and customer segmentation 

  • Enrichment: Have Experian append Mosaic to your data on your behalf 

  • Syndicated Audiences: Activate Mosaic audience segments directly across media channels

Common use cases

While there are many ways to apply Mosaic, the following are common examples.

  • Classify current customers based on their lifetime value and quantify segment reach​

  • Expand into new Mosaic segments aligned to growth goals or product direction​ 

  • Select media channels most relevant to your Mosaic target​ and directly activate

  • Uncover national or local areas with concentration of target Mosaic segments, but limited brand presence or competition​ 

  • Tailor messaging and creative design by segment, aligning offers to lifestyle and life stage

Why Experian Mosaic for your segmentation solution

Trusted data foundation

Covers 126 million households and 250 million individuals, backed by 50 years of data stewardship, and ranks number one in accuracy for demographics by Truthset

Unified national framework

Integrates multivariate insight into a single segmentation rather than stitching together separate datasets or segmentation solutions. Unites data from the following categories in the development of each Group and Type:

  • Socioeconomic, income and financial profiles    
  • Household/family composition and life stages    
  • Location and community context    
  • Professional and educational backgrounds    
  • Auto preference and commute styles    
  • Lifestyle, interests, and values   
  • Shopping and purchase behaviors    
  • Attitudes and opinions  
  • Media, digital and communication behaviors 

Household build

Starts at a highly granular household level for structural integrity then scales consistently across all geographic levels

Predictive backbone

Built with attributes that go through rigorous testing for their ability to predict purchase behavior and differentiate Groups and Types

Consistent from insight to activation

Provides a consistent audience definition from CRM to media activation to guide loyalty and acquisition strategies

Continuously refreshed

Rescored monthly using updated data and geographic change with periodic rebuilds aligned to Census releases

Interactive Portal

Accompanied by an interactive portal to compare audience profiles, see top insights, and visualize geographic concentration to guide targeting, product strategy, and market planning

FAQ for Experian Mosaic

Demographic data provides individual attributes such as age or gender. Mosaic combines hundreds of attributes into segments, offering a broader, more contextual understanding of consumers. For use cases that require specific demographic detail, Mosaic is often used alongside individual attributes (such age or income) to add a holistic view of the customer while maintaining the specificity from individual demographic attributes.

Mosaic is updated regularly, including monthly updates and periodic model refreshes every 2 to 4 years. Mosaic is entirely reconstructed approximately every 10 years to align with the Census releases. All updates to Mosaic ensure accuracy and recency over time.

Mosaic is built at the highly granular household level for structural integrity and scales consistently across all geographic levels (national, regional, and local).

Yes, please request this document from your Experian team.

FAQs for the May 2026 Experian Mosaic Rebuild

Mosaic is updated on an ongoing basis, including monthly rescoring and periodic model refreshes. These updates ensure the segmentation stays current with changes in consumer data.  A rebuild, however, is a larger structural event. Rebuilds typically align with the release of new Census data and other major shifts in foundational inputs. The Census provides a comprehensive reset of demographic and household insight across the country, making it the right moment to reassess the segmentation from the ground up.  While this Mosaic rebuild would typically have occurred earlier, the 2020 Census was delayed due to COVID-related disruptions. 

For this rebuild, we incorporated Census Current Year Estimates (CYE) to ensure the most current view of the population. These estimates combine Census data with additional sources, such as public records and proprietary inputs, to reflect what the data would look like if it were continuously updated to date.

The Mosaic rebuild is a reconstruction of the segmentation system to reflect updated national benchmarks, expanded data depth, and evolving household dynamics. Key enhancements include:

  • A refreshed and expanded data universe
  • Reassessing the relative influence (weight) of input signals within the model
  • Enhancing and rerunning the clustering methodology using the full, updated data universe and weighting
  • Derving new Groups and Types, and their names and definitions, to better reflect current household dynamics and consumer behaviors

The core concept of Mosaic has not changed. It remains a household-based segmentation that classifies consumers into Groups and Types based on socioeconomic and lifestyle characteristics.  

What has changed is how those Groups and Types are defined, which is why they have been rebuilt. The foundational principles, such as affluence, life stage, and multidimensional clustering, are the same.

Yes. Because this is a rebuild (not a refresh or minor update), segment definitions and household assignments will change.

Yes, but please note that there is no one to one match because the new Groups and Types are not incremental adjustments of the prior system. 

Even where names may appear similar (for example, Group A), the underlying households within that group may have shifted so overlap percentages may vary significantly. This is expected in a rebuild and reflects modernization, not instability.

Yes. The prior version, or version 7, will remain available during a transition period to support evaluation and migration. The following are retirement dates:

  • February 2027: Mosaic V7 Syndicated Audiences retiring
  • August 2027: Mosaic V7 data attributes retiring

Yes, we recommend you start receiving both sets in your deliveries so that our team can help address any questions early on and assist with the transition.

If you are using Mosaic through Experian Audiences, you will see new Mosaic segments (Version 8) introduced on May 1, 2026. Because this is a rebuild, segment definitions and composition will change, which could impact targeting.

Both versions will be available during the transition period, allowing you to evaluate differences and update targeting strategies. The legacy version (Version 7) will be available until February 2027, at which point it will be retired and only the new V8 audiences will remain. To support this transition, descriptions for the legacy (V7) audiences have been updated to reflect their future retirement.

As a platform hosting Mosaic audiences, you will receive the new version of Mosaic segments as part of the scheduled data release starting May 1, 2026, along with the legacy version (Version 7). 

Both versions will be included in our syndicated taxonomy during the transition period, until the legacy version retires in February 2027. Release notes for the May 2026 data release, covering Mosaic audiences, have been sent to all platform partners.