UK Online Dating Statistics 2026: 50+ Figures on Usage, Apps and Safety

In May 2025, 11% of UK online adults — around five million people — visited an online dating service, a level that has held steady for four years running (Ofcom, Online Nation 2025). Nearly a third of Britons (32%) have used a dating app at some point in their lives (YouGov, June 2025), the UK dating-services market is worth £357.6m (IBISWorld, 2026), and roughly a third of couples who married recently first met online (Marriage Foundation, 2021). Online dating is now mainstream — but the numbers also reveal a market that is maturing, a user base that is increasingly frustrated, and a rising fraud problem that costs victims more than £100m a year.

We have brought together data from the Office for National Statistics, Ofcom, YouGov, Pew Research Center and dozens of other primary sources into one reference page. Every figure below is attributed to the organisation and report it came from, so you can cite it with confidence.

Key figures at a glance

• 11% of UK online adults visited an online dating service in May 2025 — unchanged from 10–11% across the previous three years (Ofcom, Online Nation 2025).
• 32% of Britons have ever used a dating app; 5% are using one right now (YouGov, June 2025).
• Dating-service visitors are 68% male and 32% female, and the gap is widening (Ofcom, May 2025).
• Tinder’s reach among UK online adults fell from 5.2% to 3.1% in two years (Ofcom, 2023–2025).
• The UK dating-services market is worth £357.6m in 2026 and has shrunk by about 1% a year since 2021 (IBISWorld, 2026).
• 32% of couples who married in the last two years met online, up from just 1% in the 1990s (Marriage Foundation, 2021).
• 36.8% of people aged 16+ in England and Wales have never married or entered a civil partnership (ONS, 2024).
• The median age at first marriage is 32.7 for men and 31.2 for women (ONS, 2022).
• 46% of dating-app users say their experience has been bad; only 29% say it has been good (YouGov, 2023).
• £102m was lost to romance fraud in 2025 across 10,784 reports, up 29% year on year (City of London Police, 2026).
• For comparison, 30% of US adults have ever used a dating site or app (Pew Research Center, 2023).

1. How many people use online dating in the UK

The headline number depends entirely on how you count. Ofcom’s monthly measurement — how many people actually opened a dating service in a given month — has sat at 10–11% of online adults every year since 2022, which works out at roughly five million UK adults in May 2025. YouGov, by contrast, asks whether people have ever used a dating app, and gets a much higher 32%. Both are correct; they answer different questions. The gap between them (a third of adults have tried online dating, but only around one in nine is active in any given month) is the single most misquoted fact in this field, and it tells you that a large share of Britons try dating apps and then drift away. Part of that churn reflects intent: not everyone is looking for a relationship, and the figures for short-term and no-strings dating are collected separately in our casual dating and hookup statistics roundup.

Time spent is falling too: the average visitor spent almost four hours a month on dating services in May 2023, but only around three hours by May 2025 (Ofcom, Online Nation 2025) — an early sign of the fatigue explored in section 5. If you want to see how this plays out region by region, our guide to online dating in the UK breaks down where the most active communities are.

2. The apps and the market

The UK dating market is top-heavy and shrinking. Tinder is still the most-visited service, but its reach has slid from 5.2% of online adults in May 2023 to 3.1% in May 2025 — leaving it only fractionally ahead of Hinge, which has quietly grown. Almost all of Tinder’s decline has come from women leaving: its female audience nearly halved from 735,000 to 384,000 in a single year, so that men now outnumber women on the app three to one (Ofcom, Online Nation 2025). That imbalance shapes the experience on every large swipe-based platform.

The commercial picture matches the usage decline. According to IBISWorld, the UK dating-services market is worth £357.6m in 2026, down 3.9% on the year and down about 1% a year on average since 2021. The two biggest operators tell the same story: Bumble’s app revenue fell to $783.0m in 2025 as its paying users dropped 13.3% to 2.4 million, while Tinder-owner Match Group reported around 14.1 million paying users in mid-2025, down 5% year on year.

3. How couples meet — and whether it lasts

Online dating has gone from a fringe activity to the single most common way British couples meet. Marriage Foundation research found that 32% of people who married in the two years before its study met their spouse online, up from 7% in the 2000s and just 1% in the 1990s. That makes “met online” more common than meeting through friends, work or family.

The evidence on whether these relationships last is more nuanced. The Marriage Foundation’s 2021 study (using Savanta ComRes data) found that couples who met online had a 12% chance of divorcing in the first three years of marriage, against 2% for those who met through family or friends — six times higher after controlling for age, gender and occupation. But that gap closes completely with time: by the ten-year mark it is couples who met at work who divorce most (24%), with online couples (20%) no worse than those who met in a bar (19%). The early-years risk, the researchers argue, reflects a lack of shared social networks rather than anything about online dating itself.

4. The demographics of single Britain

Behind the dating market is a structural shift: Britain is marrying later and less. For the first time in generations, fewer than half of adults are married. The number of people who have never married keeps climbing, and couples are forming later in life — which means more adults spend more of their lives single and looking. That is the real engine of demand for online dating.

Only a quarter of people aged 16 to 29 live as part of a couple (ONS, 2024), and the median first marriage now happens in a person’s early thirties (ONS, 2022) — a decade later than a generation ago. The rising share of younger adults identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual (8.0% of 16–24s, against under 1% of over-65s) also helps explain why niche and inclusive platforms have grown alongside the mainstream apps.

5. Behaviour, experience and app fatigue

This is the paradox at the heart of UK online dating: it is more popular than ever, and users are more fed up than ever. Nearly half of dating-app users rate their experience as bad, most say they routinely run into profiles they think are fake, and a clear majority would still rather not approach someone in person. The result is a slow drift away from high-volume swiping — the same drift visible in Ofcom’s falling reach and time-spent numbers.

Fake profiles are the clearest dividing line: 71% of men say they frequently encounter accounts they suspect are fake, against 47% of women (YouGov, 2023). Dissatisfaction like this is exactly why interest in slower, more deliberate formats — including contact-ad platforms like Dating Contact — has held up while the big swipe apps have shrunk. If you are new to it, our guide to women seeking men is a good place to see how a more considered approach reads in practice.

6. Online dating safety and romance fraud

The fastest-growing dating statistic in the UK is a grim one. Romance fraud — where a criminal builds a fake relationship to extract money — cost UK victims £102m in 2025, across 10,784 reports to Report Fraud, a 29% jump on the previous year (City of London Police, 2026). That is almost £280,000 lost every day, with an average of £9,500 per victim and individual losses reaching as high as £1m.

Older adults are hit hardest — people aged 55 to 74 account for nearly half of all losses — and while men file more reports, women lose more money overall (City of London Police, 2026). Banking-industry figures point the same way: UK Finance recorded £20.5m in romance-scam losses in the first half of 2025 alone, up 35% year on year. None of this should put anyone off online dating, but it does make basic caution essential: keep conversations on-platform, never send money to someone you have not met, and read the Suzy Lamplugh Trust’s personal-safety advice before a first date. Our own guide to safe dating covers the practical habits that matter most.

The UK online dating landscape in numbers

Wherever you are in the country, you can browse UK singles by region to see how active the community is near you.

Methodology and sources

This page aggregates published statistics from primary UK sources. Where a figure originates from a survey or dataset, we cite the organisation and report directly rather than relying on secondary coverage. US data from Pew Research Center is included only for international comparison and is clearly marked as such; it is not a UK figure. Market-size figures reflect IBISWorld’s UK dating-services estimates, which differ from global growth forecasts that use a wider definition and different currency.

Sources used on this page:

• Office for National Statistics (ONS) — Population estimates by marital status and living arrangements, England and Wales: 2024; Sexual orientation, UK: 2024; Marriages in England and Wales: 2021 and 2022.
• Ofcom — Online Nation 2025 (audience data from Ipsos iris), plus Ofcom online-dating reporting for May 2024.
• YouGov — dating-app surveys, June 2025 and December 2023, and the How Britons meet their partners tracker.
• Marriage Foundation — Relative Strangers (2021), using Savanta ComRes data.
• City of London Police / Report Fraud — national romance-fraud figures for 2025 (published 2026).
• UK Finance — Half-Year Fraud Report 2025.
• IBISWorld — Dating Services in the UK market size, 2026.
• Bumble Inc. and Match Group — 2025 investor reporting.
• Pew Research Center — Key findings about online dating in the U.S. (2023), for comparison only.

Last updated: July 2026. We review and refresh this page every quarter as new ONS, Ofcom and industry data is published.