FIELD NOTES · RESEARCH

Dating app fatigue: the burnout data, the falling subscriber numbers and the rise of the run club

Most app daters say swiping wears them out, the paying customers are drifting away and the industry is now selling ceramics classes. What the evidence actually shows.

By The On Dating Journal Editors Published 11 October 2026Updated 19 October 202611 min read

Couple talking across a table in a sunlit café

Tinder's reach among UK online adults, May of each year (%)

20235%

20244%

20253%

This year, during the Los Angeles pilot of Tinder’s new in-person Events feature, a 60-person candlelight ceramics class sold out within a day of the event partner promoting it. When the app that turned dating into a thumb exercise is nudging its members off their phones and into a pottery studio, something has shifted.

That something has a name. Dating app fatigue, or burnout, describes the weary, low-grade dread of opening an app you have used for years and expecting nothing. It now shows up in opinion polls, in peer-reviewed psychology and, most tellingly, in the quarterly accounts of the companies that built the apps. Here is the evidence, and its limits.

How many people have dating app burnout?

The most quoted figure comes from a Forbes Health survey conducted by OnePoll of 1,000 American adults who had used a dating app in the past year, carried out between 27 March and 1 April 2024. It is commissioned research by a media brand rather than an academic study, with a stated margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 points.

Seventy-eight per cent said dating apps left them emotionally, mentally or physically exhausted sometimes, often or always. By generation, the figure was 80 per cent for millennials, 79 per cent for Gen Z, 78 per cent for Gen X and 70 per cent for baby boomers. Women (80 per cent) reported it more than men (74 per cent).

One caveat: “sometimes” is doing a lot of work in that 78 per cent. A survey that counted only “often” or “always” would produce a smaller, if still striking, number.

What Match’s own research says

Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge and Match, funds the annual Singles in America study, run with the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. The 14th edition, released in June 2025, surveyed 5,001 American singles with data collected by Dynata. Nearly half (47 per cent) said they felt burned out by dating, and 54 per cent said modern dating left them drained.

The 15th edition, released in September 2026, surveyed 4,952 single adults in March and April 2026. It found that 48 per cent had been on no in-person dates at all in the previous year, and only 16.3 per cent were actively seeking a committed relationship. Another 44.7 per cent were not looking but would be open to the right person. That is less burnout than withdrawal: a large share of singles have simply stopped trying very hard.

The Pew view: overwhelmed women, insecure men

The independent benchmark remains the Pew Research Center’s 2022 survey of 6,034 American adults. Among people who had used apps in the past year, 54 per cent of women said they had felt overwhelmed by the number of messages they received, against 25 per cent of men. Meanwhile 64 per cent of men had felt insecure about how few messages they got, against 40 per cent of women.

That asymmetry is the engine of a lot of fatigue: one group drowning, the other starved. Overall, 46 per cent of users described their experience as negative, and 37 per cent of those asked said online dating offered too many options.

Swipe fatigue and mental health: what the studies show

Polls tell you how people feel. Academic work is beginning to test what predicts burnout and how it relates to wellbeing.

Burnout builds over time

Liesel Sharabi of Arizona State University and colleagues followed active single app users over 12 weeks for a paper titled “Burnt out and still single”, published in New Media and Society in January 2026. They recruited 493 users and surveyed them in four waves; 190 completed the study. Emotional exhaustion and a sense of inefficacy both increased over the period. Depression, anxiety and loneliness predicted more exhaustion, as did problematic, compulsive use of the apps.

The authors’ reading is that apps may compound existing difficulties for vulnerable users rather than create them from scratch. It is a small sample, but it is one of the few studies to track the same people over time.

Two meta-analyses, one pattern

Larger reviews point the same way. A meta-analysis led by Sharabi in Computers in Human Behavior, reported by Psychology Today in December 2025, pooled 23 studies covering more than 26,000 people. App users showed worse mental health than non-users, including more depression, loneliness and anxiety. Intriguingly, the effect held for app users but not for users of dating websites, and for single users but not for those already in relationships.

A second review, by H. Cela and G. Wood in Communications Psychology, covered by News-Medical in July 2026, analysed 27 studies and 21,263 adults with an average age of 23. The overall association with poorer mental health was small to moderate. The strongest link (an effect size of 0.44) was with what the authors call behavioural dysregulation: compulsive use and loss of control. Body dissatisfaction came next.

Neither review establishes cause and effect, and most of the underlying studies are snapshots. Unhappy people may simply swipe more. But the compulsive-use finding is notable because it matches what users describe as swipe fatigue: the habit outlasting the hope.

Are people quitting dating apps? The user numbers

Here the evidence is hardest, because it comes from companies obliged to report it.

The UK: the first fall

Ofcom’s 2024 Online Nation report recorded the first decline in UK dating app use: one in ten adults, or 4.9 million people, used an online dating service, and Tinder lost 600,000 UK users over the year, according to Ofcom. The regulator’s Online Nation 2025 report, published in December 2025 using Ipsos iris audience data, showed Tinder’s reach among UK online adults sliding from 5 per cent in May 2023 to 4 per cent in 2024 and 3 per cent in 2025.

Tinder: fewer payers, slowing decline

Match Group’s fourth-quarter 2025 shareholder letter, filed in February 2026, reported 8.8 million Tinder payers, down 8 per cent year on year, with monthly active users down 9 per cent. Tinder’s direct revenue for 2025 was $1.9 billion, down 4 per cent. The company said its 2026 roadmap targets young users’ pain points, dating fatigue among them.

By the second quarter of 2026, Match Group reported 13.25 million paying users across all its apps, down 6 per cent, in its August results. Tinder’s daily active users were down 4 per cent, which the company called its best result in ten quarters, and its quarterly filing showed Tinder direct revenue almost flat, at $457.5 million against $461.2 million a year earlier.

Bumble: a deliberate shrink

Bumble’s numbers are starker. In June 2025 the company cut about 240 jobs, 30 per cent of its global workforce, as KTVU reported; its 2025 annual report lists about 580 full-time staff at the end of that year. Its second-quarter 2026 results showed total paying users down 16.4 per cent to 3.2 million and revenue down 15.2 per cent to $210.5 million. Average revenue per paying user edged up 1.2 per cent, consistent with a smaller, more committed base. Founder and chief executive Whitney Wolfe Herd described the aim as a “healthier, more engaged member base”.

The exception: Hinge

Fatigue is not evenly spread. In the same February 2026 letter, Match reported 1.9 million Hinge payers, up 17 per cent, and Hinge revenue grew 22 per cent in the second quarter of 2026. Hinge’s growth suggests singles are tired of a certain kind of app rather than of apps altogether. Our Hinge review and Tinder review look at how differently the two are built.

From swiping to run clubs: the turn to in-person dating

If apps are the problem, real life is being sold as the cure, and the dating companies want a share of it.

Tinder Events. Launched in Los Angeles in March 2026, the in-app events feature expanded in July to New York, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, Phoenix, Berlin, Munich, Zurich and Geneva, with a target of 26 cities by the end of September. According to Tinder’s internal data from the pilot, which ran more than 60 events, 66 per cent of eligible active users engaged with the feature, rising to 71 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds. In September the app added Group Hangouts, letting groups of friends match with other groups.

Run clubs. Strava’s 2024 Year in Sport report recorded a 59 per cent rise in running clubs on the platform, and its accompanying survey of 5,068 active people found four times as many wanted to meet new people through a fitness group as at a bar, as GearJunkie reported. The 2025 edition, released in December and based on a survey of more than 30,000 people, said running clubs had grown 3.5 times; 46 per cent of respondents said “heck yes” to a workout as a first date, while 31 per cent gave it a hard pass. Strava’s data is company research, and run clubs are hardly a controlled experiment, but the direction is plain.

The cultural mood. Writing in the New Statesman in October 2025, Zoë Huxford described hobby groups and run clubs filling the gap left by the apps, and logged her own Hinge arithmetic: of 114 matches over 19 months, 66 never exchanged a message and ten became dates.

What dating app fatigue really tells us

Read together, the evidence supports a more precise claim than “everyone hates dating apps”. Large majorities of users report at least occasional exhaustion. The people most at risk appear to be those who are already lonely or anxious, and those who use the apps compulsively. Paying customers are leaving the biggest swipe-led products, while an app built around prompts and slower conversation is growing.

The industry’s response, events, group dates, verification and AI matchmaking, amounts to an admission that the infinite stack of faces was never the product people wanted. For a look at the tools being sold as the fix, read our report on AI in dating, or compare options in our guide to the best dating apps.

Frequently asked questions

What is dating app fatigue?

It is the exhaustion, cynicism and sense of futility some people feel after prolonged use of dating apps. Researchers often measure it using burnout scales that track emotional exhaustion and a feeling that effort is not paying off.

How common is dating app burnout?

In a Forbes Health survey by OnePoll of 1,000 recent US app users in 2024, 78 per cent said apps exhausted them at least sometimes. Match’s Singles in America study in 2025 found 47 per cent of US singles felt burned out by dating.

Are people leaving dating apps?

Some are. Ofcom recorded the first fall in UK dating app use in 2024, Tinder’s payers fell 8 per cent in late 2025 and Bumble’s paying users fell 16.4 per cent in the year to June 2026. Hinge, by contrast, is still adding paying users.

Is dating app use bad for mental health?

Two recent meta-analyses link app use with somewhat poorer mental health, most strongly with compulsive use and body dissatisfaction. They cannot show that apps cause the problems, and the effects are small to moderate.

Are run clubs replacing dating apps?

Not replacing, but complementing. Strava reported running clubs growing 3.5 times on its platform in 2025, and dating apps themselves are now hosting in-person events, which suggests the two are converging.