The share of Americans ages 18 to 29 who say they have ever used a dating app or dating site dropped from 65% to 51% in a single year, according to new polling from SSRS’s 2026 survey on the public and online dating, compared with the research firm’s own 2025 findings on the same question.
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Active use collapsed even faster than lifetime use. In 2025, 16% of young adults told SSRS they were currently using a dating app or site. A year later, that figure had slipped to 10%, a decline of more than a third in the exact age group that once drove the online dating industry’s growth.
A Broader Retreat From Dating Itself
The falloff in app usage lines up with a wider pullback from dating in general among the same age group. A separate 2026 report from the Wheatley Institute and Institute for Family Studies found that only about 30% of unmarried young adults said they were dating, whether casually or exclusively, a pattern researchers labeled a “dating recession.”
For most of the past decade, apps like Tinder, Hinge and Bumble were treated as the default on-ramp to relationships for anyone under 30. SSRS’s numbers suggest that assumption no longer holds for roughly half of that age group, who now say they have simply never tried one at all.
The 2026 data also shows 18-to-29-year-olds are no longer the age group most likely to have tried online dating. SSRS found 53% of adults ages 30-49 have used a dating app or site, edging out the 51% among the youngest adults for the first time in the firm’s tracking.
- 65% to 51%: share of 18-29-year-olds who have ever used a dating app or site, 2025 to 2026
- 16% to 10%: share currently and actively using one over the same period
- Both figures come from SSRS’s nationally representative Opinion Panel Omnibus surveys
SSRS’s 2026 sample included 2,012 U.S. adults surveyed in early and mid-January, with a margin of error of roughly 2.5 percentage points. Its 2025 sample included 2,016 adults surveyed in February, with a comparable margin of error, which means the year-over-year gap is too large to be explained by polling noise alone.
Attitudes toward the apps themselves may help explain the exodus. Among adults who have ever used one, SSRS found 47% said the effect on their dating life was neither positive nor negative, while 20% called it mostly negative. Safety is also a lingering concern: 43% of adults nationally said meeting someone from a dating app felt “not too” or “not at all” safe, with women far more likely to say so than men.
Dating app companies have acknowledged younger users’ fatigue with swiping culture in their own public statements before, though the scale of this particular one-year drop is new. Whatever is driving it, burnout, cost-consciousness, or a genuine shift toward meeting people offline, the apps that spent a decade positioning themselves as essential to young adult dating now have to reckon with a generation that is opting out in growing numbers.
