Who looks for new friends online? Age data from a sample of 152 Vairi members
Vairi Research. Published 23 September 2026. Sample: 152 people, 18 November 2025 to 22 September 2026.
How old are the people who sign up to a friendship app? In a sample of 152 Vairi members who joined between November 2025 and September 2026, half were 31 or older, and one in four was 40 or older.
Key findings
- Median age at sign-up: 31.
- 78% (118 of 152) were 25 or older when they joined.
- 24% (37 of 152) were 40 or older, and 15% (23) were 45 or older.
- The largest single age band was 18-24, at 22%.
Age at sign-up
Vairi asks for a date of birth when someone joins, and you have to be 18 or over. Here is how the 152 members in the sample spread across age bands.
| Age at sign-up | People | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 18-24 | 34 | 22% |
| 25-29 | 28 | 18% |
| 30-34 | 31 | 20% |
| 35-39 | 22 | 14% |
| 40-44 | 14 | 9% |
| 45 and over | 23 | 15% |
Shares are rounded to whole numbers, so they add up to 98%.
No band dominates. 18-24 is the biggest at 22%, and each of the four bands between 18 and 39 holds between 14% and 22% of members. After 40 the numbers thin out without stopping: 37 people were 40 or older when they joined.
Members over 40 come for different reasons
We also ask new members what brings them to Vairi. Under 40, about half said they wanted to meet people in a new city. Among members aged 40 and over it was a quarter, and more of them picked ‘Unexpected encounters’. The over-40 group in that split is 24 people, so the size of the gap is uncertain. The full figures are in why adults look for new friends.
How we counted
- Sample: 152 members who created a Vairi account between 18 November 2025 and 22 September 2026 and gave a date of birth. Staff and test accounts are excluded, and each person is counted once.
- Age: worked out from the date of birth typed in at sign-up, which we do not verify. It means age on the day the person joined, not today.
- Data quality: 7 people gave 1 January as their birthday, which is sometimes a placeholder. Leaving them out does not change the median (still 31) and moves the 40-and-over share from 24% to 25%.
- Limits: these are people who chose to try a friendship app, so the figures describe Vairi members and not adults in general. We do not hold reliable location data for most of them, so the figures are not split by city.
- Privacy: every figure is a count across a group of at least 10 people. Nothing here is linked to a name or taken from anyone’s conversations.