Sixteen percent of Americans — roughly one in six — say they feel lonely or isolated from the people around them all or most of the time, according to Pew Research Center’s latest social-connections study. That figure splits almost evenly between men and women. It also breaks the assumption that loneliness is mostly an old-age problem: adults under 50 report feeling lonely often at more than double the rate of adults 50 and older — 22% versus 9%. A separate report from Cigna backs up the pattern, finding Gen Z and millennials post far higher loneliness rates than baby boomers. However connected people look on paper — jobs, partners, full group chats — plenty of them are alone in the way that actually matters.
Loneliness Skews Younger, Not Older
Pew’s survey of 6,204 U.S. adults, conducted September 3–15, 2024 through its American Trends Panel with an added SSRS oversample, found 16% of adults lonely “all or most of the time,” with roughly equal shares of men and women reporting it. The age breakdown is the part that upends the stereotype: 22% of adults under 50 say they feel lonely often, compared with just 9% of adults 50 and older, and a full 66% of adults 65 and up say they hardly ever or never feel lonely. Another 38% of all U.S. adults say they’re sometimes lonely, and 47% say they hardly ever or never are — meaning the 16% who feel it “all or most” of the time aren’t an outlier fringe so much as the sharp edge of a much larger, ordinary experience most people brush up against sometimes.
A Second Survey Finds the Same Generational Skew
Cigna’s “Loneliness in America 2025” report measured loneliness on a different scale than Pew, but landed on a similar shape: 67% of Gen Z respondents and 65% of millennials reported feeling lonely, compared with 60% of Gen X and 44% of baby boomers. Cigna’s researchers also flagged an important twist — older lonely adults, while fewer in number, show worse downstream effects. Lonely Gen X respondents in the report rated their own mental health roughly 30 points lower than non-lonely Gen X peers, meaning loneliness is more common among the young but appears to compound in severity with age. The same report found more than half of American workers describe themselves as lonely, and unpaid caregivers report loneliness at even higher rates, 62% to 71%, climbing to 72% among caregivers ages 18 to 34.
It Isn’t Just About Being Single, Either
Pew’s report notes that adults with some college or less education, those with lower incomes, and those who are not married are among the groups most likely to say they feel lonely all or most of the time — which lines up with an intuitive story about loneliness tracking with fewer stabilizing relationships and resources. But the same report complicates the “just get a partner” fix: men and women are about equally likely to say they have at least one close friend, and most people do, according to Pew’s data. Having a friend on paper and feeling genuinely supported by one aren’t automatically the same thing, and the loneliness numbers suggest it’s the second one that actually determines how isolated someone feels.
Having People Around Isn’t the Same as Feeling Connected
Loneliness isn’t the same condition as simply being alone. It’s the felt gap between the connection someone wants and the connection they actually have, which is exactly why it shows up so heavily among people with full calendars, live-in partners, and social media followings in the hundreds. Pew’s data also found no meaningful gender gap in how often people report frequent loneliness, even though men are measurably less likely than women to reach out to their own networks for emotional support when they need it — a quieter kind of isolation that doesn’t always show up as “alone” from the outside, and that a partner or a full contacts list doesn’t automatically resolve.
Real connection turns out to have less to do with how many people are technically in your life and more to do with how many of them actually know what’s going on inside it. That’s a harder problem to fix than adding one more friend, one more group chat, or one more follower — and the data suggests a lot of well-connected-looking Americans haven’t fixed it yet.
