Loneliness Statistics 2026: The Complete Research Overview

1 in 4

adults worldwide feel very or fairly lonely

Meta-Gallup, 2023

61%

of young adults report feeling seriously lonely

Harvard, 2021

15 cigs

per day, the mortality risk comparison for weak social ties

Holt-Lunstad, 2010; US Surgeon General, 2023

26%

increased risk of premature death linked to loneliness

Holt-Lunstad et al., 2015

15%

of US men now have no close friends (vs 3% in 1990)

Survey Center on American Life, 2021

9M

people in the UK often or always feel lonely

Jo Cox Commission, 2017

4×

rise in Americans with no close friends since 1990 (3% to 12%)

Survey Center on American Life, 2021

2

countries have appointed Ministers for Loneliness: UK and Japan

UK 2018, Japan 2021

Approximately 1 in 4 adults worldwide report feeling lonely.

The Meta-Gallup "Global State of Social Connections" survey, run in 142 countries between June 2022 and February 2023, found that 24% of people aged 15 and over felt "very" or "fairly" lonely. That is more than a billion people.

Source: Meta-Gallup, Global State of Social Connections, 2023

The US Surgeon General declared loneliness an epidemic in May 2023.

In one of the most significant public health statements of recent years, US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued an advisory calling loneliness and isolation an epidemic and an underappreciated public health crisis. It noted that about one in two American adults reported experiencing loneliness.

Source: US Surgeon General Advisory, May 2023

The WHO established a Commission on Social Connection in 2023.

In November 2023 the World Health Organization launched a three-year Commission on Social Connection to make social isolation and loneliness a recognized global health priority. Its co-chairs are US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy and Chido Mpemba, the African Union Youth Envoy.

Source: World Health Organization, 2023

The UK appointed the world's first Minister for Loneliness in 2018.

Following the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness, the UK government created a dedicated ministerial role to address loneliness as a social policy issue. The Commission found that more than 9 million people in the UK always or often felt lonely.

Source: UK Government / Jo Cox Commission, 2018

Japan appointed a Minister for Loneliness in 2021.

Japan, which has among the world's highest rates of social isolation among older adults, made loneliness a cabinet-level priority after a pandemic-era spike in suicide rates, particularly among women.

Source: Japanese Cabinet Office, 2021

61% of young adults aged 18 to 25 reported feeling seriously lonely.

Harvard's Making Caring Common project surveyed 950 Americans across age groups and found young adults were dramatically lonelier than older cohorts. The report, titled "Loneliness in America," was based on a survey taken during the pandemic, in late 2020.

Source: Harvard Making Caring Common, "Loneliness in America," 2021

Young adults report the highest loneliness of any age group worldwide.

Contrary to the widespread assumption that loneliness mainly affects elderly people, the Meta-Gallup survey found that 27% of adults aged 19 to 29 felt very or fairly lonely, compared with 17% of those aged 65 and over.

Source: Meta-Gallup, Global State of Social Connections, 2023

15% of American men now report having no close friends, up from 3% in 1990.

The Survey Center on American Life tracked male friendship patterns from 1990 to 2021 and found a dramatic collapse in men's close social networks. Women showed a smaller but still significant decline: 10% report no close friends in 2021 vs 2% in 1990. The trend is most pronounced among younger men.

Source: Survey Center on American Life / American Enterprise Institute, 2021

61% of US adults scored as lonely in Cigna's 2020 survey, up from 54% in 2018.

Cigna's index uses the 20-item UCLA Loneliness Scale, a snapshot survey of around 10,000 adults. Among Gen Z respondents the figure was 79%, against 71% of Millennials and 50% of Baby Boomers. Relationship quality matters as much as quantity: people can have frequent interactions and still feel alone if those interactions lack depth.

Source: Cigna, Loneliness and the Workplace: 2020 U.S. Report

Loneliness raises the risk of premature death by about 26%.

Julianne Holt-Lunstad's 2015 meta-analysis of 70 studies (about 3.4 million people) found that loneliness raised mortality risk by 26%, social isolation by 29% and living alone by 32%. Her earlier 2010 meta-analysis of 148 studies (about 308,000 people) found that people with strong social relationships had a 50% greater likelihood of survival, an effect the US Surgeon General compares to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.

Source: Holt-Lunstad et al., Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2015; Holt-Lunstad et al., PLOS Medicine, 2010

Loneliness and social isolation are associated with a 29% increased risk of heart disease and 32% increased risk of stroke.

A 2016 systematic review and meta-analysis of 23 studies, published in the BMJ journal Heart, found that poor social relationships were associated with higher risk of coronary heart disease and stroke.

Source: Valtorta et al., Heart (BMJ), 2016

Social isolation in later life is linked to about 60% higher risk of developing dementia.

The Lancet Commission on dementia prevention (2020) identified social isolation as one of 12 modifiable risk factors for dementia, with a relative risk of about 1.6, accounting for roughly 4% of dementia cases worldwide.

Source: Livingston et al., The Lancet, 2020

Loneliness impairs immune function and sleep quality.

A review by Louise Hawkley and John Cacioppo brings together evidence that loneliness is linked to poorer and more fragmented sleep, higher blood pressure, and changes in immune and inflammatory function.

Source: Hawkley & Cacioppo, Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 2010

Chronic loneliness is self-reinforcing without intervention.

Cacioppo's evolutionary framework found that loneliness creates hypervigilance toward social threat: lonely people become more likely to perceive ambiguous social signals as hostile, leading to avoidance that deepens their isolation. This loop explains why loneliness tends to worsen without active disruption.

Source: Cacioppo & Patrick, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, 2008

The share of Americans with no close friends quadrupled between 1990 and 2021.

Tracking data from the Survey Center on American Life shows 12% of Americans reported having no close friends in 2021, compared to just 3% in 1990. Among men, the share rose from 3% to 15%.

Source: Survey Center on American Life, 2021

Americans with ten or more close friends fell from 33% in 1990 to 13% in 2021, and the share with a best friend dropped from 75% to 59%.

Beyond the percentage with no friends at all, the entire friendship distribution has shifted toward smaller networks. In 1990 a third of Americans had a large circle of close friends; today roughly half the country reports three close friends or fewer. Four in ten Americans no longer have anyone they would call a best friend.

Source: Cox, D. A., "The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss," Survey Center on American Life, 2021

Civic participation (clubs, religious groups, community organizations) fell by 25 to 50% from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Robert Putnam's landmark study "Bowling Alone" (2000) documented the collapse of social capital across American life over four decades. Institutions that once provided structured social contact, from bowling leagues to PTA meetings, saw steep declines.

Source: Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, 2000

Only 26% of Americans say they know all or most of their neighbors.

Pew Research Center found the share fell from 31% in 2018 to 26% in 2025. Neighborhood connection, once a cornerstone of social life, is thinning.

Source: Pew Research Center, How connected do Americans feel to their neighbors?, 2025

Young adults who used social media most often had about 3× the odds of feeling socially isolated.

A 2017 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine surveyed 1,787 US adults aged 19 to 32. Those in the top quarter for how often they used social media had 3.4 times the odds of perceived social isolation compared with the lightest users. The survey was a snapshot, so it cannot show which came first.

Source: Primack et al., American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2017

64% of Americans say social media has a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in the country.

In a July 2020 Pew Research Center survey, only one in ten Americans said social media had a mostly positive effect. People with negative views most often mentioned misinformation, hate and harassment. Despite this, usage remains high.

Source: Pew Research Center, October 2020

Seeing the other side online does not automatically bring people together.

In a 2018 field experiment, Christopher Bail and colleagues paid Republican and Democratic Twitter users to follow a bot that retweeted the other side for a month. Republicans became significantly more conservative. Democrats became slightly more liberal, though that change was not statistically significant.

Source: Bail et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 2018

Time Americans spend with friends fell from 60 minutes a day in 2003 to 20 minutes in 2020.

The American Time Use Survey asks people to log their days in diary form. Analysed by Kannan and Veazie and cited in the Surgeon General's advisory, it shows in-person time with friends shrinking by two thirds across those seventeen years.

Source: Kannan & Veazie, SSM - Population Health, 2023; US Surgeon General Advisory, 2023

Time spent alone rose from 285 minutes a day in 2003 to 333 minutes in 2020.

That is 48 more minutes alone every day, which adds up to roughly one extra full day spent alone every month compared with 2003. The figure was already 309 minutes in 2019, so the rise began well before the pandemic.

Source: Kannan & Veazie, SSM - Population Health, 2023 (American Time Use Survey)

Americans aged 15 to 24 lost nearly 70% of their in-person time with friends.

Over the same period, daily time with friends for this age group fell from roughly 150 minutes to 40. The steepest drop belongs to the group that also reports the highest loneliness.

Source: US Surgeon General Advisory, 2023 (American Time Use Survey)

The share of American men with six or more close friends halved, from 55% in 1990 to 27% in 2021.

The friendship recession is deepest for men. It reaches the inner circle too: the share of Americans who say they have a best friend fell from 75% to 59% over the same period.

Source: Cox, D. A., "The State of American Friendship," Survey Center on American Life, 2021 (trend vs Gallup, 1990)