You probably think you talked with a friend today, caught up with a neighbor, or sat across the table from someone you love. Maybe you did. But according to the newest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American now spends just 35 minutes a day socializing and communicating face to face, and only 30 percent of people do it on a given day at all. Ten years earlier, in 2015, that number was 41 minutes, with 38 percent of people socializing daily. Go back to 2010, and BLS’s own diary-based survey shows Americans were logging 42 minutes a day connecting with each other, with 37 percent participating. The line has been sliding for a decade and a half, and the newest federal snapshot suggests it hasn’t leveled off.
What the Government’s Own Numbers Show
The American Time Use Survey isn’t a poll people fill out from memory. It’s the federal government’s standardized time diary, tracking how tens of thousands of Americans actually spend each hour of their day, published annually by the Bureau of Labor Statistics since 2003. That pedigree is what makes the newest 2025 ATUS release hard to shrug off: “People were less likely to engage in socializing and communicating on an average day in 2025 than in 2015 — 30 percent compared with 38 percent,” the agency reported, adding that “they also spent less time in these activities in 2025 than in 2015 — 35 minutes compared with 41 minutes.” Set that against the bureau’s own 2010 results, which put the average at 42 minutes a day with 37 percent participation, and you can see the decline didn’t begin last year. It has been compounding for well over a decade.
Young Adults Are Losing the Most Ground
If you assume this is mostly an older-generation story — landlines giving way to texting, that sort of thing — the data says otherwise. An analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics time-use data by Axios found the decline “cuts across every generation,” with average daily socializing sliding from 45 minutes to 35 minutes over the last 20 years of the survey. But the steepest drop belongs to the group you would expect to be most socially connected: 15- to 24-year-olds went from spending roughly an hour a day hanging out with other people in person to just 35 minutes — a decline that comes close to cutting their social time in half. That is precisely the age range still building the friendships, dating patterns, and social habits that tend to carry into adulthood.
Where the Missing Minutes Are Going
The government’s own numbers point to a clear substitute. Time spent playing games or using a computer for leisure, a category that includes social media, climbed from 25 minutes a day in 2015 to 37 minutes in 2025, according to the 2025 ATUS report, with 15- to 19-year-olds logging closer to 90 minutes daily, more than any other age group measured. Television absorbs even more of the day: 2.6 hours on average, or roughly half of all reported leisure time. Separately, a Gallup survey found that 51 percent of U.S. teens spend an average of 4.8 hours a day on social media platforms, with 17-year-olds averaging 5.8 hours daily — screen time that dwarfs the 35 minutes their generation now spends face to face with other people.
What This Means for You
None of this means Americans have stopped valuing other people. It means the raw minutes have been rerouted, and the shift has happened gradually enough that most of us haven’t noticed it happening to our own week specifically. If you assumed you were still spending a normal evening’s worth of time with the people in your life, the federal data suggests the “normal” baseline itself has fallen by nearly half over two decades, and measurably further in just the last ten years. That is worth treating as more than a statistic. Face-to-face time doesn’t find its way back into a schedule on its own; a screen is simply too available, too immediate, and too easy to reach for at the end of a long day. If any of this sounds like your own week, the fix isn’t complicated, even if it isn’t effortless: a standing dinner that stays on the calendar, a weekly call you actually take, a visit that doesn’t get traded for a text. The data shows what happens when connection is left to chance. It quietly shrinks — one unremarkable evening at a time.
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