Dating App Statistics 2026
Almost every dating app ranking you have read is built on user counts that no company actually publishes. This page ranks the apps by the one number they all disclose to the SEC — revenue per paying subscriber — and the order comes out backwards.
What is the number almost every dating app article gets wrong?
The user counts. Match Group, Bumble Inc. and Grindr Inc. report paying subscribers to the SEC — not users — so nearly every published "Tinder has 75 million users" figure is an estimate with no company behind it. Rank the apps by the number they genuinely disclose, monthly revenue per payer, and the familiar league table turns upside down: Tinder is the largest app in the industry and the second-cheapest per subscriber, while Hinge, at less than a quarter of Tinder's size, earns 89% more from each person who pays.
That inversion is the story of this page, and it matters beyond trivia. An industry that can no longer grow its audience but keeps growing its revenue is an industry raising prices on a shrinking pool of people — and a shrinking, higher-spending pool is exactly the population that romance-scam operators work hardest to reach.
Ranked by monthly revenue per paying subscriber, Tinder places 6th of 7 major dating apps at $17.56 — behind Hinge, Bumble, Grindr, Match Group Evergreen and Match Group Asia.
Which dating app makes the most money per subscriber in 2026?
Hinge, at $33.13 per paying subscriber per month in Q1 2026 — 89% more than Tinder's $17.56, despite having 2.0 million payers against Tinder's 8.6 million. Every figure in the table below comes from a quarterly filing or earnings release, which is why this ranking exists and the "user count" rankings do not.
| Rank | App | Monthly revenue per payer | Paying subscribers | Quarterly direct revenue | Payer change Y/Y |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hinge | $33.13 | 2.0M | $194.5M | +15% |
| 2 | Bumble app | $27.65 | 2.08M | $172.7M | -23% |
| 3 | Grindr | $24.25 | 1.26M | $91.6M (FY avg) | Growing |
| 4 | Match Evergreen & Emerging | $22.97 | 2.0M | $139.1M | -16% |
| 5 | Match Group Asia (Azar, Pairs) | $21.74 | 0.9M | $59.5M | -9% |
| 6 | Tinder | $17.56 | 8.6M | $454.7M | -5% |
| 7 | Badoo and other | $11.26 | 1.08M | $39.7M | -17% |
Match Group and Bumble figures are Q1 2026. Grindr figures are full-year 2025 averages, the most recent disclosed. Evergreen & Emerging covers Match.com, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish and Meetic.
Source: Match Group, Bumble Inc. and Grindr Inc. filings. Grindr is FY2025 average.
Now put the payer counts next to it. This is the same seven apps, ordered by size instead of price, and it is very close to the reverse of the chart above.
Source: company filings. Grindr is FY2025 average paying users.
Our math: Hinge holds 23.3% of Tinder's paying subscribers but generates 42.8% of Tinder's direct revenue — up from 34.0% a year earlier. That is an 8.8-point gain in a single year, or 26% in relative terms. On the current trajectory Hinge is not chasing Tinder's user base at all; it is chasing Tinder's revenue line, and it is closing roughly nine points of the gap a year.
How big is Tinder in 2026, and is it shrinking?
Tinder had 8.6 million paying subscribers in Q1 2026, down 5% year over year and down roughly 21% from its 2022 peak of about 10.9 million. Direct revenue was $454.7 million for the quarter, up 2% in reported dollars but down 3% on a currency-neutral basis — meaning the growth was an exchange-rate artefact, not a business improvement.
Q4 payer counts as reported in Match Group quarterly filings; final point is Q1 2026 actual. Full-year 2022 average payers were 10.9M, the highest annual figure Match Group has reported for Tinder.
The revenue history tells the same story with a delay, because price increases masked the subscriber decline for two years.
| Year | Match Group total revenue | Y/Y change | Tinder direct revenue | Y/Y change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | $2.98B | — | $1.65B | +22% |
| 2022 | $3.19B | +7.0% | $1.79B | +9% |
| 2023 | $3.36B | +5.3% | $1.92B | +7% |
| 2024 | $3.48B | +3.6% | $1.94B | +1% |
| 2025 | $3.49B | +0.2% | $1.86B | -4% |
What the blended rate hides: Match Group's revenue compounded at 4.0% a year across 2021-2025, which sounds like a slow but healthy business. Split it and the picture changes — 6.2% a year from 2021 to 2023, then 1.8% a year from 2023 to 2025. Tinder's split is more violent still: +7.8% a year to 2023, then -1.4% a year after it. The single blended number conceals a growth engine that stopped in 2023.
Match Group has responded by raising revenue per payer 7% year over year and cutting costs, lifting adjusted EBITDA 25% to $342.9 million in Q1 2026 on essentially static revenue. One genuine bright spot: new user registrations at Tinder returned to year-over-year growth in March 2026, the first increase in almost two years.
Why is Hinge growing while the rest of the industry shrinks?
Hinge grew direct revenue 28% year over year to $194.5 million in Q1 2026, with payers up 15% to 2.0 million and revenue per payer up 11% to $33.13 — the only major Western dating app growing on both price and volume at once. It is also the only one whose adjusted EBITDA grew faster than its revenue, up 66% to $71 million.
Match Group has publicly guided Hinge toward $1 billion in annual revenue by 2027, and the financial press has largely treated that as an ambitious stretch target. Run the arithmetic and it looks like the opposite.
Read this carefully: Hinge's Q1 2026 direct revenue annualises to a $778 million run rate. Reaching $1 billion two years out from there requires just 13.4% compound annual growth. Hinge is currently growing at 28%. If it merely holds that rate, it crosses a $996 million annualised run rate within twelve months — roughly a full year ahead of the stated target. The $1 billion goal does not describe management's ambition; it describes management assuming Hinge's growth rate will approximately halve.
The behavioural reason for the premium is structural rather than mysterious. Hinge's prompt-driven profiles take longer to build than a swipe-first profile, and a profile that took effort to make is a profile people are more reluctant to abandon — which raises both retention and willingness to pay. It also, incidentally, raises the cost of running a fake one, a point we return to in the verification section.
What happened to Bumble in 2025 and 2026?
Bumble Inc. lost 21% of its paying users in the year to Q1 2026, falling to 3.17 million, while total revenue dropped 14.1% to $212.4 million — the steepest contraction of any major dating app company. The Bumble app itself fell 23% to 2.08 million payers. Full-year 2025 revenue was $965.7 million, down 9.9% from $1.07 billion in 2024.
| Bumble Inc. metric | FY 2024 | FY 2025 | Change | Q1 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total revenue | $1.07B | $965.7M | -9.9% | $212.4M |
| Total paying users | 4.1M | 3.7M | -11.5% | 3.17M |
| Average revenue per payer (monthly) | $21.23 | $21.64 | +1.9% | $22.04 |
| Bumble app payers | 2.71M (Q1 25) | 2.2M (Q4 25) | -19% | 2.08M |
| Bumble app revenue per payer | $24.84 (Q1 25) | $27.61 (Q4 25) | +11.2% | $27.65 |
Bumble has framed this as a deliberate "quality reset" — purging low-intent and low-quality accounts to improve the experience for the people who remain. That framing is at least partly credible: net earnings rose 165% to $52.6 million in Q1 2026 and adjusted EBITDA margin jumped from 26.1% to 38.9%. A company can shed a quarter of its subscribers and become dramatically more profitable, and Bumble just did. Whether it can hold that position once the purge is finished is the open question.
Match Group and Bumble together lost 1.55 million paying subscribers in twelve months — about 4,240 every day — and their combined revenue moved by less than 0.1%.
The catch: combine the two largest Western dating app companies and the divergence becomes impossible to miss. In Q1 2025 they had 18.21 million paying subscribers between them and $1,059.5 million in direct revenue. In Q1 2026 they had 16.67 million payers — 8.5% fewer — and $1,060.3 million in revenue, a difference of eight-tenths of one million dollars, or 0.08%. Blended monthly revenue per payer rose 9.4%, from $19.39 to $21.21. Every single lost subscriber was paid for by a price rise on the people who stayed. This is not a growth industry that stumbled; it is a mature industry converting to a yield business, and 2026 is the year the transition became arithmetically undeniable.
What does Grindr disclose that no other dating app will?
Grindr is the only major dating app that publishes monthly active users alongside paying users — 15 million average MAU against 1.26 million average paying users in 2025, a payer conversion rate of 8.4%. Full-year revenue rose 28% to $439.9 million, with net income of $94.8 million and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 44.5%.
That single disclosure is the most useful number in the entire sector, because it is the only publicly verifiable bridge between "payers" and "users" anywhere in dating apps. Everyone else reports one side of the ratio and leaves the other to estimation.
Worth stating with the caveat attached: if Tinder converted paying subscribers at Grindr's 8.4% rate, its 8.6 million payers would imply about 102 million monthly active users. At a 12% conversion rate the implied figure is 72 million; at 17%, about 51 million. So the honest, defensible statement is that Tinder's monthly active user base is somewhere in the region of 50 to 100 million — a range, not a number. The ubiquitous "75 million" sits comfortably in the middle of that range, which is probably why it has survived so long, but no company has ever published it. Treat any article that states it as fact as an article that did not check.
Who actually uses dating apps in 2026?
37% of U.S. adults have ever used a dating site or app, but only 6% are currently using one, according to an SSRS survey of 2,012 adults conducted in January 2026. The gap between "ever used" and "currently using" is the most under-reported statistic in this category — roughly five in six people who have tried online dating are not doing it right now.
| Group | Ever used a dating app | Currently using |
|---|---|---|
| All U.S. adults | 37% | 6% |
| Ages 18-29 | 51% | 10% |
| Ages 30-49 | 53% | 8% |
| Ages 50+ | 20% | 2% |
| LGBTQIA+ adults | 63% | 14% |
| Non-LGBTQIA+ adults | 34% | 4% |
Among Americans who have ever used a dating app, Tinder leads on lifetime reach at 48%, followed by Plenty of Fish and Facebook Dating at 30% each, Bumble at 27%, and Hinge and Match at 21% each. Note how badly this diverges from the revenue ranking: Plenty of Fish ties Facebook Dating for second on lifetime usage while sitting inside Match Group's declining Evergreen segment, and Hinge — the revenue growth story of the decade — is joint last on reach. Lifetime usage measures who has ever downloaded something. It says nothing about who is there today or who is paying.
The margin of error on the SSRS survey is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points, and it is worth noting that Pew Research has consistently measured the "ever used" figure at around 30% of U.S. adults. The two are not contradictory so much as differently worded and differently sampled — another reason to treat any single dating-app statistic as a point in a range.
How much money is lost to romance scams in 2026?
Americans reported losing $1.16 billion to romance scams in the first nine months of 2025 alone, across 55,604 reports — a 22% increase in reports over the same period in 2024, according to FTC Consumer Sentinel data. That works out to roughly $4.25 million a day, or about $2,950 every minute, around the clock, all year.
A romance scam report is filed with the FTC every 7 minutes, and about $2,950 is reported lost every minute of every day.
Here is where most coverage of romance fraud goes wrong, in exactly the same way the user-count coverage goes wrong: it quotes an average.
Reality check: in Q3 2025 the FTC logged $398 million in romance-scam losses across just over 11,200 reports. That is a mean loss of about $35,500. The median reported loss in the same quarter was $2,218 — sixteen times smaller. The widely repeated "average romance scam costs victims $35,000" figure is technically accurate and practically misleading: it describes a small tail of catastrophic, often six-figure losses, not the typical experience. The typical person who reports a romance scam loses about two thousand dollars. If that is you, you are not an outlier and you are not alone — you are the median case, and the median case is 55,000 people a year.
Where these scams begin has shifted decisively. Nearly 60% of people who reported losing money to a romance scam in 2025 said it started on a social media platform, against about 30% for scams overall — meaning romance fraud is roughly twice as likely as the average scam to begin on social media rather than on a dating app or by text.
| Measure | Figure | Source and period |
|---|---|---|
| Romance scam losses reported | $1.16B | FTC, first 9 months of 2025 |
| Romance scam reports | 55,604 | FTC, first 9 months of 2025 |
| Median reported loss | $2,218 | FTC, Q3 2025 |
| Mean reported loss | ~$35,500 | CatfishFinder analysis of FTC Q3 2025 |
| Confidence and romance fraud losses | $929M | FBI IC3, full-year 2025 |
| Of which, victims aged 60+ | $584M (62.9%) | FBI IC3, full-year 2025 |
| All social media scam losses | $2.1B | FTC, full-year 2025 |
| Share of romance scams starting on social media | ~60% | FTC, 2025 |
Two further FTC and FBI findings are worth stating plainly. Social media scam losses of $2.1 billion in 2025 were eight times the 2020 level, which works out to compound growth of about 52% a year for five consecutive years. And among Americans aged 60 and over, IC3 recorded 201,266 complaints and $7.75 billion in total losses in 2025, a 59% jump on the prior year, with romance scams specifically up 30%.
If any of this is describing your situation right now, the practical next step is small and free: run the profile photo, the phone number and the username through independent checks before you send anything. Our reverse phone check and username consistency check exist for exactly this moment, and our catfishing statistics page covers the fraud patterns in more depth than fits here.
Do dating app verification systems actually reduce fake profiles?
Tinder reports that mandatory facial verification produced a 60% decrease in exposure to potential bad actors and a 40% decrease in bad-actor reports in markets where it launched. Face Check became mandatory for all new Tinder users in seven countries plus California as of October 2025, with Match Group planning to extend it across other portfolio apps during 2026.
The mechanism is worth understanding, because it explains both the strength and the limit. Face Check asks new members for a short video selfie, then stores a non-reversible encrypted face map — not the video, which is deleted after review. That face map lets Tinder detect when the same face appears across multiple accounts, which is the single most common signature of an organised catfishing operation running dozens of profiles from one set of stolen photos.
Two honest caveats belong next to those numbers. First, they are company-reported figures from company-selected markets, not independently audited results, and "exposure to potential bad actors" is a metric Tinder defines itself. Second, and more importantly, facial verification confirms that a live human took the selfie. It does not confirm that the human is who they say they are, that they live where they claim, that they are single, or that the person messaging you today is the person who passed verification months ago. A verified badge raises the cost of catfishing considerably. It does not make it impossible.
That gap is why independent checking still matters even on a verified profile — and it is more important, not less, on the platforms where contact actually begins. Given that roughly 60% of romance-scam losses now start on social media rather than a dating app, verification improvements at Tinder and Hinge only cover part of the surface area. You can run a free consistency check on a photo or a profile through our verification tool in about a minute.
Why do dating app statistics disagree so much from source to source?
Because downloads, monthly active users, daily active users and paying subscribers are four different numbers that differ from each other by an order of magnitude, and the companies only report the last one. This is the single largest source of error in dating app coverage, and it is why two reputable articles can put Tinder's size at 50 million and 100 million in the same week without either one lying.
| Metric | What it counts | Who actually publishes it | Typical error when misused |
|---|---|---|---|
| Downloads / installs | Cumulative installs, including reinstalls and deleted apps | Third-party app-intelligence firms only, by estimate | Wildly overstates current audience; counts one person many times |
| Registered users | Accounts ever created | Nobody, consistently | Includes years of dormant and deleted accounts |
| Monthly active users (MAU) | Distinct accounts opening the app in a month | Grindr only, among the majors | Quoted for Tinder and Bumble where no company figure exists |
| Daily active users (DAU) | Distinct accounts opening the app in a day | Nobody, publicly | Confused with MAU, understating by roughly 3-5x |
| Payers / paying subscribers | Accounts with an active paid subscription or purchase | Match Group, Bumble Inc., Grindr Inc. — audited | Reported as "users", understating audience by 5-15x |
Once you have that table in front of you, the contradictions resolve. Match Group's 8-K reports 8.6 million Tinder payers. A tech blog reports 75 million Tinder users. Neither figure is wrong; they measure things that differ by roughly an order of magnitude, and the second one is an estimate that has been recycled so many times it has acquired the appearance of a source. We have used payer figures throughout this page precisely because they are the only audited numbers available, and we have flagged every place where we cross the bridge to user counts as an estimate with a stated range.
The fraud statistics carry a parallel problem. The FTC's Consumer Sentinel logged $1.16 billion in romance-scam losses over nine months of 2025; the FBI's IC3 recorded $929 million in confidence and romance fraud across the full year. These are not competing estimates of the same quantity and they cannot be added together. Consumer Sentinel aggregates complaints from the FTC, state attorneys general, the Better Business Bureau and AARP; IC3 collects reports filed directly with the FBI. Some victims report to both, most report to neither. Both agencies are explicit that reported losses represent a fraction of true losses, because the majority of romance-fraud victims never file a report at all — which means every figure on this page, including the $2,950 a minute, should be read as a floor rather than a total.
A final note on our own derived figures. Every number labelled CatfishFinder analysis is computed from two or more sourced figures listed below — payer and revenue divergences from company filings, conversion-rate ranges from Grindr's disclosed MAU, and per-minute and mean-versus-median loss figures from FTC totals and report counts. Where a series had a gap, we left the gap visible rather than filling it.
What should you take away from the 2026 dating app data?
The dating app industry stopped growing its audience and started growing its prices, and the ranking that reveals it is the one almost nobody publishes. Hinge earns 89% more per subscriber than Tinder with less than a quarter of its payers. Match Group and Bumble shed 1.55 million paying subscribers in a year and finished with the same revenue they started with. Grindr, the only company that shows both sides of the ratio, converts 8.4% of its monthly users into payers — the one hard number that lets anyone check the estimates everyone else quotes as fact.
For anyone using these apps, the practical consequence of a maturing, price-focused, socially-distributed market is that the population still active is smaller and more valuable per head, and that most romance fraud has migrated to social platforms where there is no verification layer at all. Tinder's Face Check is a genuine improvement inside Tinder. Roughly 60% of romance-scam losses begin somewhere it does not apply. Verify independently, verify before money is ever discussed, and treat any published user-count statistic — including the ones you will read tomorrow — as an estimate until someone shows you the filing. Our online dating statistics page covers the broader behavioural picture.
Frequently asked questions
How many people use Tinder in 2026?
Tinder had 8.6 million paying subscribers in Q1 2026, the only audited figure Match Group publishes. Its total monthly active user base is not disclosed by any company. Applying Grindr's publicly reported 8.4% payer conversion rate suggests roughly 100 million monthly active users, while higher conversion assumptions imply 50 to 70 million. The commonly quoted 75 million figure sits inside that range but has no company source behind it.
Which dating app makes the most money per user?
Hinge, at $33.13 in direct revenue per paying subscriber per month in Q1 2026. Bumble is second at $27.65, Grindr third at $24.25 and Tinder sixth of seven at $17.56. Badoo is lowest at $11.26. Note that these are per paying subscriber, not per user, because paying subscribers are the only audited count available.
Is Tinder losing users?
Tinder is losing paying subscribers. The count fell 5% year over year to 8.6 million in Q1 2026 and is down about 21% from its 2022 peak of roughly 10.9 million. Whether total users are falling is unknown, since Match Group does not report them. One positive signal: Tinder's new user registrations returned to year-over-year growth in March 2026, the first increase in almost two years.
How much do people lose to romance scams on average?
The median reported loss was $2,218 in Q3 2025, while the mean was about $35,500 — a sixteen-fold gap caused by a small number of very large losses. The median is the more useful figure for judging typical risk. In total, Americans reported $1.16 billion lost across 55,604 romance-scam reports in the first nine months of 2025, and the FTC notes that most victims never report at all.
Do dating apps verify that profiles are real?
Partially. Tinder requires Face Check facial verification for new users in seven countries and California as of late 2025, and reports a 60% reduction in exposure to bad actors and a 40% reduction in bad-actor reports where it operates. Match Group plans to extend it to other apps during 2026. Verification confirms a live human took the selfie; it does not confirm their name, location, relationship status or intentions.
Where do most romance scams actually start?
On social media, not dating apps. Nearly 60% of people who reported losing money to a romance scam in 2025 said it began on a social media platform, roughly double the 30% share for scams overall. Facebook accounted for more reported losses than any other social media platform. This is why dating app verification improvements only cover part of the risk.
Why is Bumble shrinking so fast?
Bumble deliberately purged low-quality and low-intent accounts in what it calls a quality reset, cutting total paying users 21% year over year to 3.17 million by Q1 2026 and revenue 14.1% to $212.4 million. The strategy improved profitability sharply — net earnings rose 165% to $52.6 million and adjusted EBITDA margin climbed from 26.1% to 38.9% — but it has not yet demonstrated that the remaining user base can grow again.
Sources
- Match Group, Inc. Form 8-K, Q1 2026 shareholder letter and financial tables (SEC EDGAR) — Tinder, Hinge, Evergreen & Emerging and Asia segment payers, RPP and direct revenue.
- Match Group, Inc. Form 8-K, Q4 and full-year 2025 shareholder letter (SEC EDGAR) — FY2025 total revenue, Tinder and Hinge direct revenue and payer counts.
- Match Group Announces Fourth Quarter and Full-Year Results — FY2025 total revenue, payers and RPP.
- Bumble Inc. Form 8-K, Q1 2026 earnings exhibit (SEC EDGAR) — Bumble app and Badoo revenue, paying users and ARPPU.
- Bumble Inc. Form 8-K, Q4 and full-year 2025 earnings exhibit (SEC EDGAR) — FY2025 revenue, paying users and ARPPU.
- Bumble Q1 2026 results summary — Q1 2026 segment revenue, payers, ARPPU and margin figures.
- Grindr Inc. Form 10-K, fiscal year 2025 (SEC EDGAR) — average MAU, average paying users, ARPPU and revenue.
- FTC Data Spotlight: Reported losses to scams on social media eight times higher than in 2020 — social media scam losses, romance scam origin share, platform ranking.
- FTC press release: New FTC Data Show People Have Lost Billions to Social Media Scams — 2025 totals and category breakdown.
- FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, 2025 Internet Crime Report — confidence and romance fraud losses, victims aged 60 and over.
- SSRS: The Public and Online Dating 2026 — U.S. adult usage by age and LGBTQIA+ status, platform reach, methodology.
- Pew Research Center: Key findings about online dating in the U.S. — comparative baseline for lifetime usage rates.
- Tinder Press Room: Tinder to Expand Facial Verification Across the U.S. — Face Check rollout markets and reported safety impact.
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