Most statistics pages on this subject quote a growing industry. The filings say something different, and once you read them next to the survey data the picture is fairly clear: fewer people are paying, and the ones who stay are paying more.
Everything below is sourced to the organisation that collected it. Where I only have a figure secondhand, I say so.
Nine numbers that cover most of it
- 37%of US adults have ever used a dating site or appSSRS, January 2026
- 6%are using one right nowSSRS, January 2026
- $3.5bnMatch Group revenue in 2025, flat year on yearMatch Group full-year results
- $966mBumble revenue in 2025, down 10%Bumble full-year results
- 13.8mMatch Group paying users, down 5%Q4 2025
- 3.3mBumble paying users, down 20.5%Q4 2025
- 8.8mTinder paying users, down 8%Q4 2025
- +26%Hinge direct revenue growthQ4 2025
- $1.16bnreported lost to romance scams in nine months of 2025FTC Consumer Sentinel Network
If what you want is how many people actually find a partner this way, that's a different question with a different set of numbers, and I've put it in a separate piece.
How many people use online dating
The user base is not growing the way most coverage of this industry suggests.
37% of US adults have ever used a dating site or app
Source: SSRS Opinion Panel Omnibus, 2,012 US adults, January 2026, margin of error ±2.5 points
This is the most current nationally representative figure available. It sits above Pew's 30% from a July 2022 survey, which is consistent with continued adoption over that period.
Only 6% are using one right now
Source: SSRS, January 2026
The distance between 37% ever and 6% now is the most underreported number in this whole category. The overwhelming majority of people who have tried online dating are not doing it today, either because it worked or because they gave up.
Both figures slipped between 2025 and 2026
Source: SSRS, January 2025 and January 2026
The same poll a year earlier found 39% ever used and 7% currently using. Both moved down. The change sits inside the margin of error on its own, so I would not call it a finding, but it points in the same direction as everything in the next section.
What the industry is worth
This is where the story is, and it is not the story most pages tell. Both listed dating companies published full-year 2025 results in early 2026, and they show the same pattern independently: paying users falling, revenue per user rising, total revenue flat or down.
Match Group's revenue was flat at $3.5 billion in 2025
Source: Match Group fourth quarter and full-year 2025 results
Full-year revenue flat, full-year adjusted EBITDA down 1% to $1.2 billion. Q4 revenue was $878 million, up 2% and flat on a currency-neutral basis.
Bumble's revenue fell 10% to $966 million
Source: Bumble Inc. fourth quarter and full-year 2025 results, published March 2026
Q4 revenue dropped 14.3% to $224.2 million. The company reported a net loss of $611.1 million for the quarter, though $630.5 million of that was non-cash impairment charges rather than operating losses.
Match Group's paying users fell 5%, Bumble's fell 20.5%
Source: both companies' Q4 2025 results
Match Group ended the quarter with 13.8 million payers. Bumble ended with 3.3 million, down from 4.2 million a year earlier.
Revenue per paying user rose at both companies
Source: both companies' Q4 2025 results
Match Group's revenue per payer rose 7% to $20.72. Bumble's average revenue per paying user rose 7.9% to $22.20. Two separate companies, two separate reporting periods, the same shape.
Fewer people paying, each paying more
Year-on-year change in paying users and in revenue per paying user, Q4 2025.
Sources: Match Group and Bumble Inc. fourth quarter 2025 results. Part of Bumble's decline was deliberate, see the note below.
Match Group guided below expectations for 2026
Source: Match Group guidance, reported by CNBC
The company forecast between $3.41 billion and $3.54 billion for 2026, against a FactSet consensus of $3.59 billion.
The biggest apps by the numbers
Inside Match Group's portfolio the two largest brands are moving in opposite directions, which is the clearest signal in the data about what people currently want.
Tinder's paying users fell 8% to 8.8 million
Source: Match Group Q4 2025 results
Tinder's Q4 direct revenue was $464 million, down 3%. Across the full year it delivered $1.9 billion, down 4%. It remains by far the largest single brand in the industry and it is shrinking.
Hinge grew direct revenue 26% year on year
Source: Match Group Q4 2025 results
Hinge reached $186.5 million in Q4 direct revenue, with payers up 17% to 1.89 million. It is growing at a rate nothing else in the portfolio is close to.
Hinge users pay nearly twice what Tinder users pay
Source: Match Group Q4 2025 results
Revenue per payer was $32.96 at Hinge against $17.63 at Tinder. That gap is the business case for the whole "intentional dating" positioning, and it explains where Match Group's attention is going.
What each app earns per paying user
Revenue per payer, Q4 2025.
Source: Match Group fourth quarter 2025 results.
Hinge also leads among couples who go on to marry
Source: The Knot Real Weddings Study
Among newlyweds who met on an app, Hinge accounted for 36%, Tinder 25% and Bumble 20%. Worth knowing that this is a survey of The Knot and WeddingWire's own membership rather than a national sample.
Who uses dating apps
Usage is concentrated tightly by age and by sexual orientation, and both breakdowns come from the same January 2026 poll.
Around half of adults under 50 have used one
Source: SSRS, January 2026
51% of adults aged 18 to 29 and 53% of those aged 30 to 49, against 20% of those aged 50 and over. Current usage follows the same shape: 10%, 8% and 2% respectively.
63% of LGBTQIA+ adults have used a dating app
Source: SSRS, January 2026
Against 34% of everyone else, and 14% are current users against 4%. This is the widest demographic gap in the data by some distance.
What using them is actually like
The satisfaction data has always been weaker than the growth data, and it is worth reading next to the falling payer counts above.
Users are split roughly down the middle on whether it was worth it
Source: Pew Research Center, July 2022
Among people who have ever used a dating site or app, 53% describe their experience as very or somewhat positive and 46% as negative. That is a remarkably even split for a consumer product.
Men and women report different experiences
Source: Pew Research Center, July 2022
57% of men who have dated online call the experience positive. Women are close to evenly divided, at 48% positive and 51% negative.
More than half of recent users felt insecure about their message volume
Source: Pew Research Center, July 2022
55% of people who had used an app in the past year said they often or sometimes felt insecure about how many messages they were getting, and 36% said they felt overwhelmed. Large majorities reported feeling both excited and disappointed by the people they saw.
People are not mostly there for casual sex
Source: Pew Research Center, July 2022
Asked why they had used a dating app in the past year, 44% said a major reason was to meet a long-term partner and 40% said to date casually. Smaller shares said casual sex (24%) or making new friends (22%).
Americans are evenly split on whether apps are safe
Source: Pew Research Center, July 2022
48% say dating sites and apps are a very or somewhat safe way to meet people. 49% say they are not too safe or not safe at all. Older adults are considerably more sceptical, and 56% of women under 50 who have used these platforms say they have been sent an unsolicited sexually explicit message or image.
Romance scams and safety
This is the best-documented section on the page, because the FTC publishes the underlying data rather than a press release about it. It is also the part where the numbers have moved most.
Americans reported losing $1.16 billion to romance scams in nine months of 2025
Source: FTC Consumer Sentinel Network, reported by the Detroit Free Press
Across 55,604 reports through 30 September 2025, up 22% on the same period in 2024. The median reported loss in the third quarter was $2,218.
Reported losses have roughly tripled since 2019
Source: FTC data spotlights
Reported romance scam losses across all Sentinel sources ran $493 million in 2019, $730 million in 2020, and $1.3 billion in both 2021 and 2022. The 2023 Consumer Sentinel Data Book recorded $1.14 billion across 64,003 reports.
Reported romance scam losses
US consumer reports to the FTC, in millions of dollars.
Sources: FTC data spotlights for 2019 to 2022, FTC Consumer Sentinel Data Book for 2023, and Consumer Sentinel data through September 2025. The 2025 bar covers nine months, so the full year is likely higher. Definitions shifted slightly across these releases, so treat the series as a trend rather than a like-for-like table.
Romance scams carry the highest median loss of any imposter scam
Source: FTC Consumer Sentinel Data Book, 2023
The FTC received far more reports about business and government impersonation, 474,731 and 228,282 respectively, than about romance scams. But romance scams produced the highest reported losses of any imposter category, with a median loss of $2,000 per person.
Nearly 60% of romance scam losses now start on social media
Source: FTC, April 2026
This is the most under-reported finding I came across while researching this page. In 2025, nearly 30% of everyone who reported losing money to any scam said it started on social media, with reported losses of $2.1 billion, and nearly 60% of people who lost money to romance scams specifically said it began there.
Which means the safety conversation about dating apps is partly aimed at the wrong platform. If you are worried about being scammed by someone who says they are interested in you, the higher-risk surface is your social feed, not your dating app.
Every number above is a floor
Source: FTC, citing Anderson (2021)
The FTC's own footnotes point to research finding that only about 4.8% of people who experienced mass-market consumer fraud complained to a government body or the Better Business Bureau. The reported figures are a small fraction of the real harm, and the FTC says so directly.
What is changing
Three things worth watching over the next year or two.
The money is moving from swiping to intention
Tinder shrinking while Hinge grows 26% is not a rounding error, and the revenue per payer gap between them suggests users will pay roughly double for a product that positions itself around relationships rather than volume.
Verification is becoming a product feature
Source: Match Group results commentary
Tinder has been expanding face photo requirements and using biometrics to validate users, and reports early reductions in interactions with bad actors. Given the fraud data above, expect more of this rather than less.
AI is moving into matching
Both companies now describe AI-driven discovery and recommendation work in their results commentary. Whether it changes outcomes is an open question, and there is no independent data on it yet.
AI is also becoming an alternative, not just a feature
The dating companies are using AI to improve matching. Separately, an entire category of AI companion apps has grown up next to them, aimed at people who want the conversation without the logistics of a date. None of the surveys on this page ask about that yet, which is worth holding in mind when you read the falling engagement figures above.
I've tested twelve of them if you want to see what that category actually looks like from the inside.
Does any of it actually work?
That is a genuinely different question and it has a much better answer than this page might suggest. Somewhere between 10% and 60% of couples met online depending on which population you count, and the research finds that how a couple met does not predict whether the relationship lasts.
I've set all of that out separately in what percentage of people find their partner online, with the same sourcing rules.
Sources
- SSRS: The Public and Online Dating 2026, 2,012 US adults surveyed January 2026. ssrs.com
- SSRS: The Public and Online Dating in 2025, the comparison year. ssrs.com
- Match Group: fourth quarter and full-year 2025 results, revenue, payers and revenue per payer by brand. prnewswire.com
- Bumble Inc.: fourth quarter and full-year 2025 results, published March 2026. ir.bumble.com
- CNBC: Match Group Q4 2025 earnings and 2026 guidance against analyst consensus. cnbc.com
- Pew Research Center: From Looking for Love to Swiping the Field, 6,034 US adults surveyed July 2022. pewresearch.org
- Pew Research Center: key findings about online dating, experience and demographic breakdowns. pewresearch.org
- Federal Trade Commission: romance scammers' favourite lies exposed, loss series by year. ftc.gov
- Federal Trade Commission: 2023 Consumer Sentinel Data Book figures on romance scam reports and median losses. ftc.gov
- Federal Trade Commission: new data on social media scams, published April 2026. ftc.gov
- Federal Trade Commission: romance scams rank number one on total reported losses, earlier baseline data. ftc.gov
- Detroit Free Press: reporting on FTC Consumer Sentinel data through September 2025. centraloregondaily.com
- The Knot: Real Weddings Study, 16,956 US couples married in 2024. theknot.com
- Forbes Health: compilation of Pew figures on safety perceptions and unwanted contact. forbes.com
Figures reflect the most recent public data available as of the update date above. Company figures come from the companies' own results releases. Fraud figures come from the FTC's Consumer Sentinel Network, which the FTC notes captures only a small share of actual fraud. Sources occasionally differ by a few points depending on the survey, the population and the year.