Americans Are Socializing Less: The Time-Use Data

If meeting people feels harder than it used to, that isn't just nostalgia. The federal government measures how Americans spend their day, minute by minute, and one of the clearest trends in that data is the shrinking amount of time people spend with each other in person.

What the American Time Use Survey Measures

The American Time Use Survey (ATUS) is run by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Each year, a sample of people age 15 and older in the civilian noninstitutional population are interviewed by phone and walked through a time diary of the previous day, from 4 a.m. to 4 a.m. In 2025, about 6,100 people were interviewed. Results are reported for an "average day," which includes people who did none of a given activity on their diary day.

One of the categories ATUS tracks is socializing and communicating. BLS defines it as "face-to-face social communication and hosting or attending social functions." That definition matters: it's in-person time. Texting, scrolling and group chats don't count here.

Americans Are Socializing Less Than in 2015

The 2025 results, released June 25, 2026, show a clear decline over the decade:

• 35 minutes a day spent socializing and communicating in 2025, compared with 41 minutes in 2015.
• 30% of people engaged in any socializing and communicating on an average day in 2025, compared with 38% in 2015.

For context, the same survey found people averaged about 5.2 hours of leisure and sports time per day, and 2.6 hours of that was watching TV, half of all leisure time. Face-to-face socializing gets a fraction of what screens do.

The Busiest Years Have the Least Free Time

ATUS also breaks leisure down by age, and the pattern will be familiar to anyone in the middle of a career. People ages 35 to 44 averaged 3.9 hours of leisure and sports per day, less than any other age group. Adults 75 and older had the most, at 7.4 hours.

Work is a large part of that squeeze. On days they worked, full-time employed people averaged 8.1 hours of work, and 8.5 hours on an average weekday. Add commuting, household work and, for many people in their late 30s, childcare, and the hours available for meeting someone new get thin. That's the practical backdrop to dating when you're too busy to date.

How Many Americans Feel Lonely?

Time data measures behavior, not feelings. For the second part, the best recent source is Pew Research Center's report Men, Women and Social Connections, based on a nationally representative survey of 6,204 US adults conducted September 3–15, 2024.

Two patterns in the Pew data are especially relevant to dating:

• Age. Adults younger than 50 were much more likely than those 50 and older to say they often feel lonely, 22% vs. 9%.
• Partnership. Adults who are unpartnered, or living with a partner they aren't married to, were among the groups most likely to say they feel lonely or isolated all or most of the time.

Pew also found men and women report loneliness at similar rates, and are about equally likely to have a close friend. The difference is in contact: women more often text, message or call close friends regularly, while men (31%) are slightly more likely than women (28%) to say they frequently see friends in person.

Why Less Social Time Makes Dating Harder

Relationships have always come disproportionately from social overlap: friends of friends, coworkers, classmates, people you keep running into. Stanford's research on how couples meet, covered in our post on what Stanford's data shows, documents how online dating displaced many of those channels. The time-use data is the other side of the same shift. When fewer people spend any part of their day in face-to-face social settings, there are fewer chances for an introduction to happen on its own.

That leaves most people with two options, and both have costs:

1. Rebuild ambient social time on purpose. Recurring activities (a class, a run club, a standing dinner with friends) put you around the same people repeatedly, which is how familiarity turns into interest. Our guide to where NYC professionals meet people outside of apps goes through what tends to work.
2. Use a channel designed to produce introductions. Apps do this at scale but convert poorly and burn hours, which is a bad trade for the age group with the least free time. The case for curation, whether a matchmaker or a vetted platform, is that it spends someone else's time on filtering so yours goes to actual dates.

What to Do With This Data

Three takeaways that hold up:

• You're not imagining it. In-person social time across the population fell meaningfully between 2015 and 2025. If your social life feels thinner than it did, the national data points the same way.
• Protect in-person time specifically. The ATUS category that's shrinking is face-to-face contact. More texting doesn't replace it, a point that also applies to texting between early dates.
• Budget time honestly. If you're in the 35-to-44 squeeze, the constraint isn't willingness, it's hours. Choose formats that respect that: shorter first meetings, fewer but better-screened dates, and plans that don't take a full evening before you know there's something there.

Sources:

• American Time Use Survey — 2025 Results — U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, released June 25, 2026
• American Time Use Survey Technical Note — U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
• Men, Women and Social Connections — Pew Research Center, January 2025, survey of 6,204 US adults conducted Sept. 3–15, 2024
• Emotional well-being and Where men and women turn for emotional support and social connection — chapters of the same Pew report