The loneliest people (and places) in America

Washington Post

21-03-2025

America's purported loneliness epidemic, with its fuzzy definitions and clashing claims, is the type of gnarly challenge that's guaranteed to both attract and destroy data journalists.
So we appreciated the simplicity of D.C. reader Omika Suryawanshi's question on the subject: How many American adults feel lonely?
We didn't have a great answer back in 2022 when Suryawanshi posed this question. But last month, we were rummaging around in the Census Household Pulse survey after the Trump administration briefly took it offline and axed its questions about sexual orientation and gender identity. And we discovered that recent Pulse surveys shed some light on loneliness.
In 2024, the Pulse asked more than half a million American adults how often they felt lonely. For most of us, the answer was rarely (34 percent) or never (26 percent), suggesting that a robust 60 percent of us either never feel lonely or take the occasional twinge of loneliness in stride.
Only 5 percent say they always feel lonely, while 8 percent usually feel that way.
In maps, people who are 'always' lonely tend to live in the Sun Belt, with a particular focus on the belt's defiant Deep South buckle. Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia lead the pack. As a rule, this extreme loneliness tends to be higher in states with higher poverty rates.
On the other side, the states where people are 'rarely' lonely tend to be in the northern half of the country, peaking in Minnesota, Vermont, Iowa and Utah — though if we include places that aren't states, D.C. tops the list. It relates strongly to other measures of community cohesion: These places also tend to have the highest rates of volunteering and organizational membership.
The states where folks are 'never' lonely follow a similar pattern, but a few oddballs come out on top — notably Florida.
Florida surprised us. We figured loneliness would increase by age, and because Florida has one of the nation's oldest populations, we expected loneliness to run high in the Sunshine State. After all, folks over age 65 are 2½ times as likely to live alone than folks ages 25 to 54. And living alone struck us — perhaps simplistically — as a logical cause of loneliness.
And indeed, our early explorations showed age predicted loneliness quite well. But not in the way we thought.
Among our youngest compatriots (ages 18 to 24), about 28 percent say they always or usually feel lonely. That's four times the rate of retirement-age folks! In fact, retirement-age Americans are about three times as likely to 'never' feel lonely as college-age folks.
Unfortunately, the Household Pulse, which was born from the pandemic, wasn't around when today's retirees were teens, so we can't say whether humans in general become less lonely as they age or — as might seem more likely — today's youngsters are growing up in a more alienating environment.
We also see enormous gaps by household income and education. The more you earn, the less alone you feel. People who don't earn at all are particularly likely to feel lonely — especially if they lost their jobs through layoffs or company closures, are sick or disabled, or can't work because they don't have access to transportation.
Marital status matters too. At any age, single people feel more lonely. And once you account for the fact that younger folks are lonelier, it doesn't seem to make a huge difference whether you're single because you never married, or because you're separated, divorced or widowed.
Looking at people who identify as LGBTQ, the data at first suggested that they tend to be lonelier. But it's largely because self-identified LGBTQ folks tend to be younger. Similarly, race and gender don't seem to have a huge impact — though we do find that men, especially older ones, are much more likely to report that they're never lonely, while women of all ages are more likely to say they're sometimes lonely.
Contrary to the headlines, we see little reason to single out the loneliness of young men. They look an awful lot like young women, except that they're 'never' or 'rarely' lonely at higher rates. Most of the biggest gender gaps actually open as we age.
Why are young people so much lonelier? Could it be related to how much time we spend alone?
Probably not!
The hours per day you spend alone increase steadily with age. (Though the gap isn't as wide as it used to be, as our frenemy John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times has reported.)
And the amount of time we spend alone has remained shockingly constant for as long as the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been tracking it in its modern format. In 2003, the average working-age adult (age 25 to 64) spent 4.4 free hours a day by themselves. By 2023, after two decades of reports of epidemic loneliness and solo bowling, that number had inched up to 4.6 hours.
To be sure, you'll notice some verbal asterisks in that previous paragraph.
First, we specify free time. That's because there's one area of our lives in which our time alone has changed substantially: work.
In just a decade, we've gone from spending an average of 1.8 hours alone at work to spending 3.5 hours alone at work. Most of the increase came amid the pandemic-driven remote-work revolution. (If you see reports that Americans are spending more time alone since the pandemic, it's really about remote work.)
Next, we specify working age. That's because younger men have started spending so much time alone, engaged in a single activity, that it throws the numbers off for everybody. That activity is, of course, gaming.
No matter how much time you think young men devote to video games, you're probably underestimating it. Two decades ago, high-school- and college-age males (ages 15 to 24) spent about a quarter of an hour a day alone playing games. Now, that figure has more than quintupled to 1.4 hours a day.
(You may be pondering the political implications of gaming, given young men's rightward shift. But, for the record, YouGov's David Montgomery tells us a poll just last month found that 'Democrats and Republicans show very similar rates of gaming.')
With both activities — gaming and remote working — you can quibble about whether folks are really alone. Many of the work-from-homers are mumbling into Zoom mics while their gamer sons (and, more rarely, gamer daughters) holler into headsets.
But regardless how many digital friends are present, humans are awful at keeping themselves company. We're less happy when we're alone than when we're with almost anyone else. The one exception? Hanging out with work people (including colleagues, bosses, employees and customers) outside of work.
The best company is child relatives who aren't descended from you — e.g., nieces and nephews or younger cousins — followed by hanging out with your partner and children together. (We're happier with both than when we're alone with either a spouse or a child separately.)
Playing games scores okay on happiness. People say it makes them about as happy as cooking or (non-grocery) shopping, a bit happier than yard work and reading and significantly less happy than physical activity, child care or socializing.
However, out of 26 activities for which we have sufficient data over the past two decades, gamers rate gaming as the least meaningful thing they can do with their time. It's not hard to connect a dot or two, then, and assume spending time alone, glaring into a screen, might makes us lonelier.
But in general, loneliness doesn't seem to correlate with time spent alone. People of any age rate alone time similarly on the happiness scale, with the slight exception of retirement-age folks, who are happier than average when alone. (People who have 'achieved' retirement are also less lonely than people with any other employment status, including working, unemployed or disabled.)
Instead, loneliness seems to go hand in hand with a lack of social, economic and community strength. As another Pulse question shows, retirement-age Americans are twice as likely as their young friends to say they always 'get the social and emotional support' they need.
Across the data, nothing we tested relates more strongly to loneliness than a lack of social support. When you ask who's 'always' lonely, more than half of the people who say they never get social support raise their hands.
Hi! The Department of Data still needs good old-fashioned queries! Why are older women much more likely to live with their siblings than are older men? Why are fentanyl deaths suddenly falling? What time of day do kids usually wake up? What are you curious about? Just ask!
If your question appears in a column, we'll send you an official Department of Data button and ID card. This week, we owe one to Omika and to Therese Beauclair in Monterey, California, who asked about maps and demographic breakdowns.