Britons aged 55 to 64 are among the least likely adults to use a dating service: only 6 per cent visited one in Ofcom’s 2024 figures. Yet those who did spent an average of 5 hours and 43 minutes on them, longer than any other age group, according to the regulator. Older daters are few, but they are thorough.
Fraudsters have noticed. Romance fraud cost UK victims more than £102 million in 2025, and people aged 55 to 74 suffered the greatest losses, almost half the total, City of London Police reported in May 2026. So this guide does two jobs. It sets out the dating sites and apps that serve people over 50 best in 2026, with verified prices and ratings, and it explains how to use them without becoming a statistic.
Quick picks: the top over-50s dating sites at a glance
- Best overall for over-50s: Match (8.7), for its search filters, events and a membership that skews older
- Best for a lasting relationship: eharmony (8.6), which matches you through a compatibility questionnaire
- Best site exclusively for the over-50s: Ourtime (7.6)
- Best mainstream app with older members: Hinge (9.3)
- Best free option: Facebook Dating (7.6), which has no paid tier
- Best for friendship and companionship: Stitch (7.5)
Over-50s dating sites compared: scores, ratings and prices
| App | Best for | Our score | Store rating (store, country, date) | Free version | Paid from |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Match | Searching, filters, events | 8.7 | 3.8 (App Store, UK, 19 Oct 2026) | Yes | £19.99/week |
| eharmony | Long-term compatibility | 8.6 | 2.9 (Google Play, UK, 19 Oct 2026) | Yes (Basic) | Prices shown after sign-up |
| Ourtime | 50-plus only pool | 7.6 | 3.9 (App Store, UK, 19 Oct 2026) | Yes | £19.99/week |
| Hinge | Conversation-led dating | 9.3 | 4.3 (App Store, UK, 19 Oct 2026) | Yes | Hinge+ from £12.99 |
| Plenty of Fish | Large free pool | 7.9 | 4.1 (App Store, UK, 19 Oct 2026) | Yes | £19.99/week |
| Facebook Dating | Free, no new app | 7.6 | Not rated separately | Yes | No paid tier |
| Stitch | Companionship and activities | 7.5 | 4.4 (App Store, UK, 19 Oct 2026; 14 ratings) | Yes (Limited) | £4/month |
| SilverSingles | Personality-test matching | 6.8 | Not verified | Yes | Not published |
Prices are those listed on the UK App Store or the company’s own site on 19 October 2026. Store listings rarely say which price maps to which plan, so check the subscription screen before you pay.
Match: the best dating site for over-50s who like to search
Pew Research Center’s survey of American online daters found that half of users aged 50 and over had used Match, against 24 per cent of those under 50, according to its 2023 analysis. No other major service skews so clearly towards older members, and the product reflects it.
Match in the UK is part of Match Group’s Meetic network. It asks for a fuller profile than the swipe apps, lets you highlight Core Values, and offers Zen Mode, which lets only members who meet your criteria contact you, plus Incognito Mode for browsing unseen. Match says every profile picture and description is moderated, and the UK App Store listing puts that check at within 24 hours. With your consent, your profile can also appear on related network sites, including services for over-50s.
The offline side suits people who would rather meet in a room than in an inbox. Match runs paid Speak-easy evenings at venues in select UK locations, with conversation guides provided.
The UK Passes come in three tiers. Essential opens up unlimited browsing and lets you see who liked you; Premium adds unlimited messages, advanced filters and read receipts; Prestige adds a daily automatic Boost. On 19 October 2026 the UK App Store listed a one-week Pass at £19.99, one month at £39.99 and six months at £79.99. Match held 3.8 out of 5 from about 41,000 UK App Store ratings. Our Match review covers the 2025 FTC settlement over its past cancellation practices, which is a good reason to read the renewal terms.
eharmony: compatibility matching for later-life relationships
eharmony has been running its questionnaire since 2000, and it remains the most structured service here. Before you see anyone, you complete a Compatibility Quiz that builds a Personality Profile; every suggested match then carries a compatibility score. The UK site says more than two million people have found love through eharmony, a company figure, and offers dating filters for communities including Muslim, Asian, Black, gay and lesbian singles.
That method has particular appeal for people returning to dating after a long marriage, who may not want to browse at all. Free Basic members can take the quiz, view profiles and exchange first messages. Premium adds unlimited messaging, all members’ photos and changeable search settings such as age and distance. eharmony does not publish prices on its UK cost page; you see them after logging in.
eharmony is owned by ParshipMeet Group, the dating arm of the German broadcaster ProSiebenSat.1. Its weak spot is the app: on 19 October 2026 it held 2.9 out of 5 from about 66,900 reviews on Google Play in the UK, with recurring complaints about cancellation. It also says little in public about how it verifies members. Our eharmony review has the full detail.
Ourtime: a dating site built only for the over-50s
Ourtime solves the most common complaint older daters make about mainstream apps: wading through people half their age. Its UK site is aimed at people over 50, with age filters running from 50 to 100, and it covers mature gay and lesbian dating as well as straight. It describes itself as a Meetic network website, which puts it in the same Match Group family as Match UK; in the US, ourtime.com is run by People Media, also part of Match Group.
The feature set borrows from Match. According to the UK App Store listing, you pick three core values to highlight, answer written prompts, and can chat free once two members have liked each other. Photos and descriptions are reviewed within 24 hours, and a private mode keeps you out of search results. The site also mentions video conversations and local in-person activities.
The Passes mirror Match’s Essential, Premium and Prestige tiers. On 19 October 2026 the UK App Store listed one week at £19.99, one month at £39.99, three months at £74.99 and six months at £119.99, plus Incognito Mode at £9.99 a month. Ourtime held 3.9 from about 9,200 UK App Store ratings. It loses marks because the site gives only vague member numbers (“thousands”) and the pool is inevitably smaller than Match’s, but for people who want a site where everyone is over 50, it is the strongest choice.
Hinge: the mainstream app for older daters who want conversation
Hinge is our top-rated dating app overall, but it is not built for older users: Gen Z makes up more than half of its user base, Fast Company reported. Even so, Pew found no significant age difference in Hinge use among American online daters, so older people use it more than its youthful branding implies.
What makes Hinge good for anyone is its insistence on substance. Profiles combine photos with written Prompts, and you like or comment on a specific part of someone’s profile, which tends to produce better openers than “hi”. According to Hinge’s help centre, free members get a limited number of daily likes and see one incoming like at a time. Hinge+ adds unlimited likes and advanced filters, including for children and family plans, which matter more than usual if you are dating after divorce or with grown-up children.
On the UK App Store on 19 October 2026, Hinge+ items were listed from £12.99, and Hinge held 4.3 from about 197,000 ratings. The catch for over-50s is simple arithmetic: outside cities, the pool of people in your age range may be thin. Our Hinge review explains Face Check and the paid tiers.
Plenty of Fish: a big free pool for mature singles
Plenty of Fish has been around since 2003, and its scale is its argument. It has passed 50 million downloads on Google Play, and on 19 October 2026 it held 4.1 from about 275,000 ratings on the UK App Store. Match Group now classes it among its “Evergreen” brands, alongside Match.com.
The free tier lets you browse, match and message, and First Contacts let you message someone before you have matched. For older daters, though, POF’s best feature is its safety kit. The Safety Toolbox gathers Selfie Verification, reporting and blocking in one place, and Share My Date lets you send a trusted contact the location, time and details of a planned meeting. Face Check, a video selfie matched against your profile photos, is being rolled out in phases where local rules allow, according to POF’s Face Check FAQ.
The downsides are cost and noise. Seeing who has liked you needs POF Premium, the middle tier, and the UK App Store listed a one-week subscription at £19.99 and one month at £29.99. A large pool also means more filtering. Read our Plenty of Fish review for the tiers in full.
Facebook Dating: free senior dating inside an app you already use
Facebook Dating has a feature no rival can match: it costs nothing. Meta describes it as a free experience within the Facebook app with nothing you have to pay for, according to its September 2025 announcement. For the curious but cautious, that is a sensible place to start.
It launched in the UK in October 2020 as part of a roll-out to 32 European markets, Engadget reported. Your dating profile is separate from your main one: it does not appear in your News Feed, and friends are not suggested as matches. The exception is Secret Crush, which lets you list up to nine Facebook friends or Instagram followers and matches you only if they have listed you too. You can add groups and events to your profile, and video chat with a match inside the app.
Meta’s latest additions are an AI dating assistant, rolling out gradually in the US and Canada, and Meet Cute, a weekly surprise match. Meta’s own marketing now focuses on 18 to 29-year-olds, so expect a mixed-age pool. We mark it down for offering less verification detail than the specialist services and for tying your dating life to an account that already holds a great deal of personal data.
Stitch: companionship, friendship and activities for the 50-plus
Not everyone over 50 is looking for a date. Some want a walking partner or a dinner companion. Stitch, founded in Sydney, is built for that. It describes itself as a social enterprise with a non-profit arm registered in Australia and the US, claims more than 400,000 members, and lists communities in cities including London, Edinburgh and New York, alongside virtual events for people in remote areas.
Members must complete a verification check before messaging, which Stitch says confirms they are over 50 and screens out scammers, though the site does not say whether ID documents are involved. Romance is possible but not the point.
A free Limited account lets you attend public events, join public groups and reply to messages. The pricing page says Full membership starts from £4 a month, while the UK App Store lists Community Membership at £59.99 and Premium at £129.99 without stating durations. The app held 4.4, but from just 14 UK ratings, too few to mean much.
SilverSingles: a well-known 50+ brand with an uncertain owner
SilverSingles is one of the most searched-for names in senior dating, and its US site is active, aimed at people over 50 and promising that “every profile you see is verified”. The same footer notes that the site does not conduct background checks, and credits “SilverSingles.com / SuccessfulMatch.com, Inc.” Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, in its guide to the service, says the free membership includes a personality test and limited messaging, with unlimited messaging and read receipts behind a subscription.
The difficulty is the corporate picture. SilverSingles was a brand of Spark Networks, which passed to its lender MGG Investment Group in a 2024 restructuring, according to Wikipedia’s account. In January 2026 a Berlin court placed Spark Networks Services GmbH under preliminary insolvency administration, Global Dating Insights reported, and sister site EliteSingles shut down on 30 April 2026. We could not establish who now runs SilverSingles in each market or verify current prices, so we would not commit to a long subscription here until that is clearer.
What research says about online dating after 50
The best data comes from the US. Pew found that 17 per cent of Americans aged 50 and over had ever used a dating site or app: 23 per cent of people in their fifties, 14 per cent in their sixties and 12 per cent of those 70 and older. About half of recent older users said they were looking for a long-term partner or spouse. Experiences divide sharply by sex: 57 per cent of women over 50 described theirs as negative, against 38 per cent of men.
A 2026 study in the journal Psychology and Aging by Rong Liang and Phoebe E. Bailey, which surveyed 301 app users aged 18 to 86, adds nuance. Socialising became more important as a motive with age, while finding a relationship, sex and social approval became less so, PsyPost reported. Among older users, seeking approval was linked with greater loneliness, though the study cannot show which causes which. That finding helps explain the appeal of companionship services such as Stitch.
How we ranked these mature dating sites
Our scores are the same across the site, so Hinge carries its 9.3 here even though it is not the best fit for every over-50. The order on this page reflects how well each service serves older daters, which is why Match comes first. Each score weighs match quality (35 per cent), features (25 per cent), safety and verification (25 per cent) and value (15 per cent), using published facts, store ratings and official data rather than invented testing. The full method is on our how we review page, and our overall ranking is in the best dating apps guide.
How to choose a dating site in your fifties, sixties and beyond
- Decide what you want first. Pew’s figures show older daters split between relationships, casual dating and friendship. eharmony suits the first, Stitch the last.
- Check the age mix. Ourtime and SilverSingles are over-50s only; Match skews older; Hinge and POF are mixed.
- Test the free tier. Every service here has one. Use it for a fortnight before buying anything longer than a month.
- Read renewal terms. Longer Passes cost less per month, but they renew automatically.
- Prefer visible verification. Selfie checks, moderated photos and verification badges make fake profiles harder to run.
One name you may still see recommended is Lumen, an over-50s app launched in 2018. It closed in 2020, and its old web address now redirects to Bumble.
Romance fraud and the over-50s: how to protect yourself
The pattern in the official figures is consistent. In the UK, people aged 55 to 74 accounted for almost half of the £102 million lost to romance fraud in 2025. In the US, people aged 60 and over reported $7.748 billion in losses to all types of internet crime in 2025, a 59 per cent rise on 2024, according to the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report. A survey for AARP found that nearly one in ten adults over 50 had an online romantic approach that led to a request for money or a push to invest in cryptocurrency, and that dating apps were where such scams most often began, cited by 63 per cent, according to AARP. More than half of these incidents were never reported.
Scammers are patient. City of London Police says offenders spend weeks or months building trust before asking for money, and increasingly use AI-generated images and messages. The warning signs, drawn from the police and Age UK’s guidance:
- Love arrives early. Declarations of strong feelings after days or weeks.
- They want to leave the app. A quick push to move to text, email or a messaging service.
- They never quite meet. Excuses to avoid meeting in person or holding a live video call.
- The story needs money. A medical emergency, travel costs to visit you, or an “investment” opportunity, often in cryptocurrency.
- They want secrecy. Requests to keep the relationship from friends and family.
- Details don’t check out. Photos that don’t match, or a name you can’t find anywhere.
The rules are short. Never send money, cryptocurrency or gift cards to someone you have not met face to face. Search their name, photos or repeated phrases alongside the words “dating scam”. Talk to a trusted friend if anything feels pressured. If you meet, choose a public place and tell someone where you will be.
If you think you have been targeted, contact your bank immediately if money has gone, then report it to Report Fraud at reportfraud.police.uk or on 0300 123 2040 (in Scotland, Police Scotland on 101), and report the profile to the site. Age UK’s Advice Line is on 0800 678 1602. Our romance scam statistics go into the figures in more depth.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best dating site for over 50s?
For most people, Match: it has an older membership than the swipe apps, strong search filters and in-person events. If you want a pool made up only of over-50s, try Ourtime; if you want compatibility matching for a long-term relationship, eharmony.
Is there a free dating site for over 50s?
Facebook Dating is free with no paid tier. Match, eharmony, Ourtime, Hinge, Plenty of Fish and Stitch all have free versions, though messaging and filters are limited without paying.
Are dating sites for over 50s safe?
They are as safe as the precautions you take. Choose services with moderated photos or selfie verification, keep conversations on the platform at first, and never send money to someone you have not met. People aged 55 to 74 suffered the greatest romance fraud losses in the UK in 2025.
Is Ourtime the same as Match?
Not quite, but they are related. Ourtime UK is part of the same Meetic network as Match UK, both owned by Match Group, and uses similar features and Passes. The difference is that Ourtime is restricted to people over 50.
Is SilverSingles still running?
Its US site was active in October 2026. Its former parent, Spark Networks, has been through restructuring and insolvency proceedings, and sister site EliteSingles closed in April 2026, so check the operator and terms before buying a long subscription.