The phrase “friendship recession” gives a name to a change many people have felt without being able to measure it. Friendship circles seem smaller, more geographically scattered and harder to maintain. The recent numbers suggest that this is more than nostalgia, although they are not quite as simple as a line drawn from 1990 to today.
In September 2024, Pew Research Center found that 18 percent of US adults had no close friend outside their family. A widely cited comparison from a 1990 Gallup poll puts the earlier figure at 3 percent. Read literally, that looks like a sixfold increase.
The responsible reading is slightly narrower. Several national surveys now find that roughly one in six to one in five adults lacks a close non-family friend, compared with a very small share in 1990. But this is not one survey following the same people for 34 years. The comparison combines different samples, modes and, in some cases, slightly different ways of counting friendship.
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What Pew actually asked in 2024
Pew’s Men, Women and Social Connections report was published in January 2025 using data collected from September 3 to 15, 2024. It included 6,204 adults from two probability-based panels and was weighted to represent the US adult population. The overall margin of sampling error was plus or minus 1.5 percentage points.
The family exclusion is central. Respondents were asked about close friends “not counting their family members.” Eighty-one percent said they had at least one, 64 percent had more than one, and 18 percent had none.
That same survey complicates any picture of total disconnection. Among adults who did have a close friend, 74 percent communicated with one at least a few times a week through text, social media, phone, video or an in-person meeting. Texting was the most common channel, used that often by 61 percent. Twenty-nine percent saw a close friend in person at least a few times a week.
The 18 percent figure therefore measures the absence of a relationship people call close outside the family. It does not mean 18 percent never talk to a neighbor, colleague or acquaintance. It also does not reveal whether a respondent wants more friends, feels lonely or receives practical support from relatives.
The famous 1990 baseline comes with a footnote
The 3 percent figure is not invented. It appears in the Survey Center on American Life’s 2021 report on American friendship, which compared a new national survey with Gallup’s January 1990 poll. It reported that 3 percent had no close friends in 1990, rising to 12 percent in 2021. The question excluded relatives.
Yet Gallup’s own later published table of the 1990 results presents the bottom category differently. It lists 1 percent answering “none” and 2 percent giving no answer. Later researchers commonly quote 3 percent as the no-friend baseline, but Gallup’s table shows that the starting number depends on how that small group was coded.
This wrinkle should be visible, not buried. It does not erase the much larger modern figures of 17 or 18 percent. It does mean the apparent sixfold increase should not be treated like a laboratory measurement with a perfectly fixed zero point.
Survey mode creates another limit. Gallup used telephone interviews with a live interviewer in 1990. Pew’s 2024 data came mainly from self-administered online surveys, with some live telephone interviews. A person may be less willing to tell another person aloud that they have no friends, or may round their answer upward. The Survey Center explicitly notes this possible social desirability bias.
The larger pattern appears across independent surveys
The strongest reason to take the friendship recession seriously is that it does not depend on one comparison. The 2024 American Social Capital Survey reached a closely matching result. Its Disconnected report, based on 6,597 US adults, found 17 percent had no close friends, again excluding close relatives.
That study also found the decline was not evenly distributed. Twenty-four percent of adults with a high school education or less reported no close friends, compared with 10 percent of college graduates. College graduates were twice as likely to report at least six close friends, 33 percent versus 17 percent.
Those differences are associations, not proof that education creates friendship. Education overlaps with income, job control, neighborhood stability, health and access to gathering places. The same report found that people with no access to public or commercial places where neighbors gather were more than three times as likely to report no close friends as those with extensive access, 32 percent versus 9 percent. That finding is consistent with place mattering, but it cannot isolate place from every other difference between the groups.
Time-use data provide another angle. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that Americans spent an average of 35 minutes a day socializing and communicating in 2024, down from 43 minutes in 2014. The share doing any socializing and communicating on an average day fell from 38 to 30 percent over the decade. This activity category is broader than close friendship, but it shows less ordinary time being devoted to direct social contact.
Why one small wording change can move the number
Pew itself offers the clearest warning against treating every friendship percentage as interchangeable. In a July 2023 survey of 5,057 adults, only 8 percent said they had no close friends. The following year’s 18 percent is not evidence that friendlessness doubled in 14 months. The two items were framed differently, most importantly because the 2024 question explicitly excluded family.
A spouse, sibling, cousin or adult child may be the person someone trusts most and may also be described as a close friend in ordinary conversation. Count that person and the respondent has a friend. Ask only about non-family friendship and the same person may correctly answer none.
Definitions matter in another way. Surveys do not hand respondents a clinical test for closeness. People decide for themselves who qualifies. One may reserve “close friend” for a person they could call at 2 am; another may include the friends they see at a weekly activity. Changes in how people understand the label can alter the number even if their actual relationships have changed less.
“Friendship recession” is therefore a descriptive phrase, not an official index with a single accepted formula. It captures converging evidence of smaller non-family networks, fewer people with many friends and less time spent socializing. It does not identify one cause. Pandemic disruption, moving, work schedules, delayed marriage, digital communication, weaker civic organizations and unequal access to gathering places may overlap.
The number matters without becoming a diagnosis
Having no close friends, being socially isolated and feeling lonely are related, but they are not the same state. A person can have a small circle by choice and feel well supported. Someone else can be surrounded by relatives and colleagues while feeling unseen. The survey total cannot tell us which experience sits behind an individual’s answer.
The health concern is broader than one poll. The US Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on social connection synthesized decades of research linking isolation and loneliness with poorer health and higher mortality risk. Much of this evidence is observational, so it should not be converted into a personal prediction or a claim that a certain friend count guarantees protection.
Nor does the data imply that the only answer is meeting strangers. The Artful Age has previously covered research showing that many adults already have an old friend they want to contact and still do not send the message. Existing ties can become dormant without becoming meaningless.
The soundest conclusion is the narrow one. Depending on the survey and wording, roughly one in six to one in five American adults now reports having no close friend outside the family. The 1990 baseline has a coding ambiguity, and no single survey ran unchanged across the full period. Even with those limits, independent datasets tell a consistent story: close non-family connection has become less common and more unequal.
“Friendship recession” is not a verdict on people with small social lives. It is a name for a population-level shift, and a reminder that friendship depends not only on individual effort but also on time, place, stability and the ordinary institutions that make repeated contact possible.