What Is the Ratio of Men to Women on Dating Apps?

Nobody outside the companies knows an exact ratio, and the companies do not publish one you can verify. Anyone who gives you a clean figure is guessing. What every man on the apps can see is the effect. Women get more attention than they can answer, and most men get far fewer matches and replies than the swipes and messages they put in. The useful question is what that does to you, and what you can change.

The ratio depends on which app, which city and which age group, and an app that counts accounts is not counting people who log in.

A city with more single women than single men looks very different from one with the reverse. a dating coach calls New York the best city he knows for online dating, partly because the ratio of women to men there leans in a man's favor, which is unusual. That is a statement about a city, though, not about every app everywhere. The same app can feel easy in one place and hopeless in the next.

Then there are the accounts nobody uses. A dormant account sits in the count and never answers anyone. A number that mixes active people with abandoned accounts says little about your actual odds.

A man cannot see the ratio, but he can see what it produces.

a dating coach once went through a Reddit post from a man closing a nine-year-old Tinder account after meeting the woman he wanted. The man had swiped right on about two out of every three women, and commenters worked out that roughly one in forty of those swipes became a match. My point was that this looks dismal and is still workable, because the man kept showing up. By My estimate that took less than half an hour a day.

coach also says women are ignoring far more men than they answer. A woman who looks like a fitness model can swipe all day and match with almost everyone she likes, so she has no reason to look hard at any one man.

Even a balanced room is not balanced in attention. In a survey of about 2,500 Americans, a minority of women ages 18 to 29 went on most of the first dates reported. That was 39 percent of the women and about 80 percent of the dates. The same survey found those women got only around 9 percent of their first dates from apps. They meet men everywhere.

So the women you are competing for attention with are not a quiet pool. Many of them are experienced at saying no, have several options at once, and are not waiting for you to write. It is a self-reported survey, so read it as a sign and not a measurement.

a dating coach describes the apps as being built to keep women happy, because happy women keep the men paying. His read is that a woman who is matching with attractive men and not being shown a long line of men she does not like is the user the app most wants to keep. This is his opinion from years of use, not a published policy.

It means you do not beat the ratio by sending more of the same. A woman receiving dozens of the same short opener has already learned to ignore it.

You cannot change the ratio. You can change how many of the steps you pass.

a dating coach treats online dating as a chain of ratios: matches per hour, attractive matches per match, replies per match, numbers per reply, dates per number. If one is weak, you fix that one. A man getting no matches should work on his photos before anything else. A man getting matches and no replies should work on his first message.

• Log in and use the app regularly. coach says that if you never swipe, message or open it, the site assumes you are no longer interested and has no reason to show you to anyone.
• Swipe selectively. coach says swiping right on everyone makes the app read you as unselective and can show you fewer attractive women.
• Make your first photo and your first message easy to respond to, because she is sorting through a pile.
• Aim for a plan within a few messages, so you are not still chatting after she has met someone else.

A ratio is a reason to be efficient, and it says nothing about you. The man in the Reddit post had a poor match rate and a long list of dates anyway, because he treated it as a numbers game and played it for years. Count what you control: the hours you put in and the changes you make, one at a time.