Just over half of American adults with siblings, 54%, say they’re extremely or very close to at least one of them, according to a Pew Research Center report published in April 2026. That leaves close to half who aren’t, despite sibling relationships carrying an assumption of automatic closeness that few other relationships get. Pew’s survey of nearly 6,900 U.S. adults also found real gaps by race and gender in who feels close to a sibling and who actually turns to one for support, complicating the idea that shared parents alone guarantee a bond.
The Number Behind the Assumption
Pew’s researchers surveyed 6,871 U.S. adults between June 16 and 29, 2025, asking specifically about closeness to siblings rather than simple contact or family obligation. Of that group, 24% described themselves as extremely close to at least one sibling and another 30% said very close, adding up to the 54% figure. Framed the other way, nearly half of adults with siblings don’t describe themselves as close to any of them, a group that rarely gets discussed the way sibling estrangement does, even though it represents a much larger population than estrangement alone.
That’s the gap between the cultural script and the data. Sibling relationships get treated as a given, something that exists by default because two people share parents or a childhood home. Pew’s numbers suggest closeness has to be built the same way it does in any other relationship, and for close to half of adults, that building never quite happened.
The Racial Gap Nobody Talks About
The report found meaningful differences in closeness by race and ethnicity. Black adults reported the highest rate of sibling closeness at 64%, followed by Hispanic adults at 63%. White adults reported the lowest rate among the groups measured, at 50%, with Asian adults in between at 56%. Those gaps are wide enough that race turns out to be a stronger predictor of sibling closeness in this data than most people would probably guess going in.
Pew’s report doesn’t offer a single tidy explanation for the gap, and it would be a mistake to invent one. What the numbers do make clear is that “family closeness” isn’t a uniform cultural default; it varies in ways tied to broader patterns in how different communities structure extended family and mutual support, patterns that show up consistently across other Pew family research too.
Women Carry More of the Emotional Weight
A second gap shows up along gender lines, and it’s less about who feels close and more about who does the emotional labor once that closeness exists. Women were more likely than men to report being close to a sibling, 57% versus 52%, a modest but real difference. The bigger split appeared in support-seeking: 44% of women said they’d be extremely or very likely to turn to a sibling for emotional support, compared with just 31% of men. The pattern reversed direction too. Among women, 31% said a sibling turns to them often for support; among men, only 16% said the same.
That means women aren’t just marginally closer to their siblings on average. They’re doing noticeably more of the giving and receiving of actual emotional support within those relationships, a dynamic that mirrors patterns researchers have documented in other family and friendship contexts, where women tend to occupy the role of default emotional caretaker regardless of birth order or age.
It’s Not Just Whether You’re Close, But to Whom
A separate 2026 study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, led by Alexander Jensen and colleagues, followed nearly 1,000 young adults with multiple siblings and found closeness isn’t spread evenly even within the same family. People consistently named one sibling, usually the closest in age, as either their primary confidant or their biggest source of conflict, sometimes both. Greater closeness to that one sibling tracked with better psychological well-being overall, while high conflict tracked with worse outcomes, regardless of how many other siblings someone had.
That study reinforces what Pew’s numbers already suggest: sibling closeness isn’t a single family-wide setting. It’s built dyad by dyad, and a person can be deeply close to one sibling while feeling nearly nothing toward another who grew up in the same house.
What “Automatic” Closeness Actually Requires
None of this data suggests sibling relationships are doomed or declining. It suggests they follow the same rules as every other close relationship: they require ongoing investment, and biology alone doesn’t guarantee it happens. Adults who grew up in the same house, with the same parents, can still end up on opposite sides of that 54% line, one calling their sibling for every bad day, the other barely speaking beyond holidays. The difference isn’t usually a single dramatic falling-out. It’s closer to years of small choices about who reaches out, who shows up, and who does the harder work of staying connected once nobody’s making you share a bedroom anymore.
