Online Dating Statistics 2026
A timeline of what actually happened to online dating between 2019 and 2026 — built from Pew Research survey data, audited SEC filings from Match Group and Bumble, and FTC Consumer Sentinel fraud reports. Every figure is linked to its source.
Why does everyone think online dating is still growing?
Because the money kept going up while the people quietly left. Online dating stopped adding users around 2019 and started losing paying ones in 2022 — every headline since has been powered by charging a shrinking pool more, and that shrinking pool is exactly where romance-scam losses are now running at a record pace. That is the argument of this page, and the numbers below are what force it.
The belief is almost universal: dating apps are eating the world, everyone is on them, the graph only goes up. It was true once. It has not been true for years. Pew Research Center found that the share of U.S. adults who have ever used a dating site or app was 30% in 2023 — statistically unchanged from 2019. Four years of cultural saturation, zero net growth in reach.
Meanwhile Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge, Match, OkCupid and Plenty of Fish, finished 2025 with 13.8 million paying users, down 5%, and Bumble finished with 3.7 million, down 11.5%. Both companies grew revenue per user in the same year. That is not a growth market. It is a maturing one being monetised harder — and for the person on the other end of a suspicious message, that distinction matters more than it sounds.
* 2025 annualised by CatfishFinder from the FTC nine-month figure of 1.16B. Source: FTC Consumer Sentinel Network
How many people actually use online dating in 2026?
About 30% of U.S. adults have ever used a dating site or app, but only 9% used one in the past year — a gap most published statistics quietly collapse into a single number. Applied to the roughly 266.9 million U.S. adults counted by the Census Bureau in mid-2024, that is around 80 million people who have tried it and around 24 million who were actually active in a given year.
Read this carefully: the headline number is 3.3 times larger than the active one. Roughly 56 million American adults are counted as dating-app users in "30% of adults" statistics despite not having opened one in over a year. When a report says a market has 80 million users and a company reports 14 million payers, both are true — they are measuring different populations. This is the single most common error in online dating coverage.
Within that active pool, the age skew is steep. Pew's ever-used figures by age:
| Age group | Ever used a dating site or app | Relative to 65+ |
|---|---|---|
| 18–29 | 53% | 4.1× |
| 30–49 | 37% | 2.8× |
| 50–64 | 20% | 1.5× |
| 65+ | 13% | 1.0× |
Source: Pew Research Center
Marital status splits it even harder than age. Among never-married adults, 52% have used a dating platform. Among people living with a partner it is 46%, among divorced, separated or widowed adults 36%, and among married adults just 16%. Sexual orientation matters too: 51% of LGB adults versus 28% of straight adults. Men (34%) out-use women (27%) by seven percentage points, which is a 26% relative gap — a distinction most write-ups blur.
When did online dating actually stop growing?
Reach flatlined around 2019 and paid usage peaked in 2022. The timeline is unusually clean once you line up survey data against audited filings.
| Period | What happened | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| 2013–2019 | Genuine mass adoption; swipe apps go mainstream | Pew ever-used share climbs to 30% |
| 2019–2023 | Reach stops moving; ever-used stays at 30% | Pew, 2023 survey vs 2019 survey |
| Q3 2022 | Match Group paying users peak near 16.5 million | Match Group quarterly disclosures |
| 2024 | Payers fall to 14.9M (−5%); revenue per payer rises to $19.12 (+8%) | Match Group FY2024 results |
| 2025 | Full-year payers fall to 14.2M (−5%); revenue per payer rises to $20.09 (+5%); Q4 payers 13.8M | Match Group FY2025 results |
Downloads tell the same story from a different angle. Sensor Tower measured global dating-app downloads falling 9% year over year in Q3 2024 and monthly active users falling 3%, with Tinder alone down 11%. In the U.S. the decline was sharper: downloads −14%, active users −8%. By Q4 2025 Match Group was still reporting Tinder monthly active users down 9% year over year.
Match Group paying users fell from about 16.5 million at their 2022 peak to 13.8 million at the end of 2025 — a 16% decline in roughly three years.
What happened to the money when the users left?
Revenue barely moved, because price per user rose almost exactly as fast as users disappeared. Match Group booked $3.5 billion in 2025, flat year over year, on 5% fewer payers. Bumble booked $965.7 million, down 9.9%, on 11.5% fewer payers — with revenue per paying user still edging up 1.9% to $21.64.
| Metric | 2024 | 2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Match Group revenue | $3.5B | $3.5B | Flat |
| Match Group payers (full year) | 14.9M | 14.2M | −5% |
| Match Group revenue per payer (full year) | $19.12 | $20.09 | +5% |
| Tinder direct revenue (Q4) | $478M | $464M | −3% |
| Bumble Inc. revenue | $1.07B | $965.7M | −9.9% |
| Bumble paying users | 4.1M | 3.7M | −11.5% |
| Bumble revenue per paying user | $21.23 | $21.64 | +1.9% |
| Hinge direct revenue (Q4) | $148M | $186M | +26% |
Our math: on a like-for-like full-year basis, the two largest listed dating companies went from a combined 19.0 million paying users in 2024 to 17.9 million in 2025, a decline of 5.8%. Their combined revenue went from roughly $4.55 billion to $4.45 billion — down just 2.2%. Revenue is falling 2.6 times more slowly than the paying audience. Each remaining subscriber is carrying more of the industry than the one before them.
Hinge is the exception that proves the shape of the market. Its direct revenue grew 26% year over year in the fourth quarter of 2025, to $186 million, and its Q4 paying users grew 17% to 1.9 million, at the highest revenue per payer in the portfolio ($32.96 per month). Growth has not vanished from online dating — it has concentrated into one intent-driven product while the swipe-volume model contracts.
How much money is lost to romance scams, and how has that changed?
Americans reported losing nearly $1.2 billion to romance scams in 2024 across more than 59,000 reports, with a median loss of $2,000 per victim — and the first nine months of 2025 alone produced $1.16 billion across 55,604 reports, a 22% jump in complaints versus the same period a year earlier.
| Year | Reported losses | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 | $493M | Baseline year |
| 2020 | $730M | +48% year over year |
| 2021 | $1.3B | Record highs declared by the FTC |
| 2022 | $1.3B | Nearly 70,000 reports |
| 2023 | $1.14B | Median loss $2,000 |
| 2024 | ~$1.2B | 59,000+ reports, median $2,000 |
| 2025 (Jan–Sep) | $1.16B | 55,604 reports; median loss $2,218 in Q3 |
What the flat line hides: losses grew at a 62% compound annual rate between 2019 and 2021, then went sideways — a −2.6% annual rate from 2021 to 2024. Anyone reading only the last three years would conclude romance fraud had stalled. Annualise the FTC's nine-month 2025 figure and you get roughly $1.55 billion, which would be the largest year on record by a wide margin. The plateau appears to be over.
Turn the national total into something a person can feel. Nearly $1.2 billion reported in 2024 works out to about $2,280 lost every minute, around the clock, all year. Spread across every U.S. adult it is roughly $4.50 each. But it is not spread evenly — it lands on tens of thousands of individual people in chunks of $2,000, $20,000 and occasionally far more. The FBI's 2024 Internet Crime Report found that 7,500 complainants aged 60 and over lost more than $100,000 each, and that the average loss across all victims in that age group was $83,000.
Reported romance-scam losses in 2024 came to roughly $2,280 every minute — with a median individual loss of $2,000.
Where do romance scams actually start?
Only 19% of romance scams begin on a dating site or app — 40% begin on social media, according to the FTC's most recent published breakdown of reports by contact channel. That single pair of numbers should reorganise how people think about their own risk, and almost no coverage states it plainly.
Remaining reports did not specify a channel. Source: FTC Data Spotlight
Among reports that named a specific social platform, 29% named Instagram and 28% named Facebook. The opening move is usually an unexpected direct message from a stranger — no profile browsing, no matching, no mutual opt-in. Dating apps at least require both parties to signal interest. Social media does not, which is precisely why it is the more productive channel for a scammer.
The catch: social media is 2.1 times more likely than a dating app to be the origin point of a reported romance scam, yet essentially all of the industry's verification investment — photo checks, ID checks, face liveness — sits on the dating side. If you apply the dating-app share to 2024 losses, roughly $228 million originated on dating platforms and around $480 million originated on social media. Verification is being built where the problem is smaller.
Older adults absorb a disproportionate share of the damage. The FBI's IC3 recorded 147,127 complaints from people aged 60 and over in 2024, totalling nearly $4.8 billion across all fraud types, of which confidence and romance fraud accounted for close to $400 million. The FTC separately reported that adults over 60 lost $2.4 billion to fraud overall in 2024.
What is the online dating experience actually like right now?
It splits almost exactly down the middle — 53% of users describe their overall experience as positive and 46% as negative — and the split is not random. It is gendered, and it is largely about safety.
| Experience measure | Share reporting it | Group |
|---|---|---|
| Overall positive experience | 53% | All users |
| Overall positive experience | 57% | Men |
| Overall positive experience | 48% | Women |
| Overall negative experience | 51% | Women |
| Encountered someone they believed was a scammer | 52% | All users |
| Encountered someone they believed was a scammer | 63% | Men under 50 |
| Sent unwanted sexually explicit messages or images | 56% | Women under 50 |
| Contacted repeatedly after saying no | 43% | Women under 50 |
| Called an offensive name | 37% | Women under 50 |
| Threatened with physical harm | 11% | Women under 50 |
Two of those rows deserve a second look together. More than half of all dating-app users — 52% — say they have run into someone they thought was a scammer, and the figure is highest among men under 50 at 63%. The stereotype of the romance-scam victim as an isolated older woman is not what the survey data shows. Scam contact is close to a universal experience on these platforms, and men encounter it more often than women do.
52% of dating-app users say they have encountered someone they believed was a scammer — rising to 63% among men under 50.
Payment behaviour follows income more than enthusiasm: 35% of users have paid for a dating app, rising to 45% among upper-income users and falling to 22% among those under 30. Older users pay more readily than younger ones (41% of those 30 and over versus 22% under 30), which is part of why revenue per payer keeps climbing even as the youngest cohort drifts away.
What changed in dating-app verification between 2024 and 2026?
2025 was the year facial verification stopped being optional. In October 2025 Tinder announced it was expanding mandatory Face Check — a short video selfie completed during signup — to new users across the United States, having already made it compulsory in seven countries including Canada, Australia, India and Colombia.
The reported early results are meaningful rather than cosmetic: Match Group cited a more than 60% decrease in exposure to potential bad actors and a more than 40% decrease in bad-actor reports where Face Check was deployed alongside its other safety measures. The company said it would begin rolling the check out across its other apps during 2026.
Take the claim seriously but not uncritically. Those figures are the platform's own, measured on its own definitions, released in a press announcement — not audited, not independently replicated, and not broken out by market. They also address only the front door. A verified face at signup does not stop an account from being sold, borrowed, or repurposed later, and it does nothing at all about the 40% of romance scams that begin on social media, where no comparable requirement exists.
Why do online dating statistics disagree so much?
Because at least four different populations get reported under the same word: "users." This is the section to read before you trust any number on any other page about online dating.
| What is being counted | Typical 2026 U.S. figure | Who reports it |
|---|---|---|
| Ever used a dating site or app | 30% of adults (~80M) | Pew Research Center survey |
| Used one in the past 12 months | 9% of adults (~24M) | Pew Research Center survey |
| Monthly active users | App-specific, self-reported | Platform disclosures, Sensor Tower |
| Paying users | 13.8M (Match Group, global) | Audited SEC filings |
Four honest sources, four wildly different answers, and no contradiction between them. The failure happens when a writer takes Pew's ever-used share, calls it "current users," and pairs it with a company's revenue figure to compute a per-user number that describes nobody.
Three more places the sources fight each other, and how we resolve them:
- Market size. Research-firm estimates for the global online dating market in 2025 range from about $7 billion to about $11 billion — a spread of nearly 60% on the same year. Match Group and Bumble together booked roughly $4.47 billion of audited revenue in 2025. The high-end estimates therefore require the entire rest of the world's dating industry to out-earn the two dominant Western players combined. We treat SEC filings as the floor and anything above roughly $8 billion as an estimate with a wide error bar, not a fact.
- Global versus U.S. figures. Match Group's 13.8 million payers are worldwide. Pew's percentages are U.S. adults only. Mixing them produces nonsense ratios, and it happens constantly.
- Reported losses versus actual losses. Every FTC figure on this page counts money people reported losing. The FTC itself notes the vast majority of fraud is never reported. Romance scams carry unusually heavy shame, so the real total is certainly higher than $1.2 billion — we simply cannot say by how much, and neither can anyone else. Treat every loss number here as a floor.
One more disambiguation worth owning: "married couples who met online." The most-cited academic source is Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld's How Couples Meet and Stay Together project, which found that by 2017 about 39% of heterosexual couples met online, making it the most common way American couples formed. That measures how existing couples met — a backward-looking stock, not a current flow. It is not evidence that dating apps are growing today, and it is routinely presented as if it were.
What does all this mean if you think it is happening to you?
The base rates are on your side: suspicion is normal, and acting on it early is what limits the damage. Fifty-two percent of dating-app users say they have encountered someone they believed was a scammer. You are not being paranoid, and you are not unusual.
What the data suggests, practically:
- Note where contact started. An unsolicited direct message on Instagram or Facebook falls into the 40% bucket, which is more than twice as likely to be a scam origin as a dating-app match. A cold DM from a stranger deserves more scepticism than a mutual match, not less.
- Check consistency, not identity. The useful question is never who this person is — it is whether the same photos, phone number, email address or username appear anywhere else, and whether those appearances agree with the story you are being told. A reverse phone consistency check, an email check or a username check answers that question without requiring you to confront anyone.
- Watch for the money moment. The median reported loss is $2,000 and the median in Q3 2025 was $2,218 — these are not typically life-savings-in-one-go events. They start small. A first request for a modest, urgent, emotionally-framed sum is the single clearest signal in the FTC data.
- Do not wait for certainty. Reports rose 22% year over year in 2025 while platform verification improved, which tells you enforcement is not keeping pace with volume. Independent checking is not redundant with a blue tick.
You can run a check yourself in a couple of minutes. For the fraud-specific numbers behind all of this, our catfishing statistics page goes deeper on losses, methods and recovery rates.
Frequently asked questions
What percentage of adults use online dating in 2026?
About 30% of U.S. adults say they have ever used a dating site or app, but only 9% used one in the past 12 months, according to Pew Research Center. Applied to roughly 266.9 million U.S. adults, that is around 80 million who have tried online dating and around 24 million active in a given year. The 30% figure has been essentially flat since 2019.
Is online dating declining?
Yes, by paying users. Match Group ended 2025 with 13.8 million payers, down 5% year over year and down about 16% from its 2022 peak near 16.5 million. Bumble ended 2025 with 3.7 million paying users, down 11.5%. Sensor Tower measured global dating-app downloads falling 9% year over year in Q3 2024. Revenue has held up far better than user counts because both companies raised revenue per payer.
How much money is lost to romance scams each year?
Americans reported losing nearly $1.2 billion to romance scams in 2024 across more than 59,000 reports, with a median loss of $2,000, according to the FTC Consumer Sentinel Network. The first nine months of 2025 produced $1.16 billion across 55,604 reports, up 22% in complaint volume year over year. Because most fraud goes unreported, these figures are floors rather than totals.
Do most romance scams start on dating apps?
No. Only 19% of reported romance scams began on a dating site or app, while 40% began on social media, according to FTC data. Among reports naming a specific social platform, 29% named Instagram and 28% named Facebook. Unsolicited direct messages from strangers are the more common opening move than a dating-app match.
How many dating app users encounter scammers?
Roughly 52% of people who have used a dating site or app say they have encountered someone they believed was a scammer, according to Pew Research Center. The rate is highest among men under 50, at 63%. Encountering a suspected scammer is close to a majority experience on these platforms rather than a rare one.
Does facial verification stop catfishing on dating apps?
It reduces it at signup but does not eliminate it. Match Group reported a more than 60% decrease in exposure to potential bad actors and a more than 40% decrease in bad-actor reports where Tinder Face Check was deployed with its other safety measures. Those are company-reported figures, not independently audited, and they do not cover accounts compromised after verification or the 40% of romance scams that originate on social media.
Why do different sources give different online dating user numbers?
Because four different populations get called "users": people who have ever used a platform (30% of U.S. adults), people who used one in the past year (9%), monthly active users (self-reported by apps), and paying users (13.8 million worldwide for Match Group). Pew figures are U.S.-only while company figures are global, so mixing them produces ratios that describe no real group of people.
Sources
- Pew Research Center — Key findings about online dating in the U.S.
- Pew Research Center — From Looking for Love to Swiping the Field
- Match Group — Fourth Quarter and Full-Year 2025 Results
- Match Group — Fourth Quarter and Full-Year 2024 Results
- Match Group Q4 2025 earnings call transcript
- Bumble Inc. — 2025 full-year results (SEC Form 8-K)
- FTC — Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024
- FTC — Love Stinks, when a scammer is involved
- FTC Data Spotlight — Romance scammers' favorite lies exposed
- Global Dating Insights — FTC nine-month 2025 romance scam data
- FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center — 2024 Internet Crime Report
- U.S. Census Bureau — National Population by Characteristics
- Sensor Tower — Users Separate from Dating Apps (Q3 2024 download and MAU trends)
- FTC — Protecting Older Consumers 2024–2025 report to Congress
- Tinder — Face Check expansion across the U.S.
- Stanford — How Couples Meet and Stay Together (HCMST)
Derived figures marked as CatfishFinder analysis are computed by us from the sourced numbers above. Where a calculation required an assumption — such as annualising the FTC's nine-month 2025 total — the assumption is stated in the callout. Nothing on this page is estimated for a year we do not have a source for.
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