Choose the question before the number
A dating statistic might describe experience with an app, a current relationship, or how an established couple first met. Those questions have different populations and time frames. A useful answer names both before giving a percentage.
| Your question | The evidence you need | Where to start |
|---|---|---|
| How many adults have used online dating? | A survey that distinguishes ever-use from a specific recent period. | Pew’s July 2022 U.S. survey |
| How many households include a cohabiting couple? | A household measure with all households as the denominator. | ACS coupled-household estimates |
| How many people have never married? | A marital-status table for a stated age group, place and period. | Current marital-status research |
| How did couples meet? | A survey of couples or partners with a defined relationship cohort and meeting question. | This question is not answered by an app-use percentage. |
Source definitions: Pew Research Center’s online-dating report; Census ACS B11009 households and B12001 marital status.
Read the survey evidence
- How many adults have tried online dating?
A 2022 U.S. survey distinguishes ever-use from use within the past year.
Read a dating survey in four steps
- Identify the population. A percentage of all U.S. adults answers a different question from a percentage of app users, people in relationships, or couples formed in a particular year.
- Read the question and lookback period. Having ever used a service is different from using it in the past year. Neither directly measures who is using it today.
- Check the fieldwork date. The Pew findings linked here were collected July 5–17, 2022 and published February 2, 2023. A later page review does not update the behavior being measured.
- Check how the sample was weighted. The Pew report describes a weighted survey. Its total sample size alone does not reproduce the uncertainty for every estimate or subgroup.
Read the original methodology and questionnaire and responses.
Does “never married” mean single or looking for a partner?
No. Never-married people can be cohabiting or in relationships. Currently unmarried can also include people who are divorced or widowed. A marital-status category does not tell us whether someone has a partner or wants one.
Our marital-status profiles retain those categories as legal-status descriptions. They do not create dating-availability scores or rankings of places to find a relationship.
Does an online-dating user share tell us how couples meet?
No. An ever-use survey counts people with a particular experience. A study of how couples met needs a relationship population and a meeting measure. Treating the two as equivalent would change both the numerator and denominator.
Research on meeting pathways, current partnership status and dating by age will be added only when questions, samples, weights, fieldwork and reuse terms have been reviewed. Those topics are not represented by invented estimates in this release.
Use and cite the findings
Cite the original study, its survey population and fieldwork period. Our survey explainer keeps those details beside the finding. Survey findings are summarized with attribution; we do not offer source microdata or source graphics for download.