In Pew’s 2022 survey, 53% of people who had tried online dating gave it a positive rating, and 46% gave it a negative rating.
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What an overall rating counted
Pew Research Center asked U.S. adults who had ever tried a dating site or app to rate their overall experience in July 2022. A little over half, 53%, called it very or somewhat positive; 46% called it very or somewhat negative. The denominator is past users, including people whose last date through an app may have been years earlier. This is a broad report of how their time on the services felt to them. It does not count matches, dates, relationships, or current subscribers. The response also combines people with very different amounts of time on an app.
Only 14% of past users called their experience very positive, a narrower category inside the 53% positive total. The distinction matters if a headline turns a majority positive rating into a claim of strong satisfaction. A somewhat positive response may reflect a mixed experience that the person still placed on the positive side. Pew did not ask the reader to weigh each event equally, and we cannot reconstruct that choice from a single percentage. If you are comparing the survey with a personal story, the story may be real while the survey still describes how a much larger crowd answered one overall question.
Compare the experience ratings
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| Group of past users | Positive rating | What to compare |
|---|---|---|
| All past users | 53% | 46% gave a negative rating |
| Men / women | 57% / 48% | Same overall-rating question |
| Lesbian, gay, or bisexual / straight | 61% / 53% | Same overall-rating question |
Who got counted: Each percentage uses the named group of adults who had tried a dating site or app, not all U.S. adults.
How to read it: The gender and sexual-orientation rows overlap. Do not add them or treat a positive rating as a relationship success rate.
Download the table (CSV) ↓Who rated the experience differently
Among male past users in Pew's 2022 survey, 57% gave a positive overall rating, compared with 48% of female past users. Among lesbian, gay, or bisexual past users, 61% rated the experience positively, compared with 53% of straight past users. Each share is calculated within its named group. The groups overlap: a woman can also be in the lesbian, gay, or bisexual group. Adding the percentages, or treating the two comparisons as a ranking of app users, would lose that structure. Pew did not assign people to different apps to learn whether an app caused the gap.
A group difference can invite a story about why it exists. The overall-rating question alone cannot supply that story. Respondents may have used different services, at different times, with different goals and local choices. Those are possible sources of variation; the rating comparison does not test them. The more grounded reading is that the surveyed groups reported different rates of positive experience in 2022. If a new source claims that one feature improved women's experiences, it would need a question or study designed to test that feature, beyond this broad rating split.
A positive rating and an unwanted event can coexist
Pew asked past users about specific unwanted conduct in separate questions. In the same 2022 survey, 48% said they had experienced at least one of four listed behaviors, including unwanted sexual messages, contact after saying they were not interested, offensive names, or physical threats. That 48% is not the negative-rating share. A respondent could have reported an unwanted event and still described the overall experience as positive, or could have rated it negatively without reporting any of the four listed events. The published percentages do not tell us how many people fell into each overlap.
The two measures can guide different decisions. An overall rating tells you how a respondent summed up their time with online dating. The unwanted-behavior questions tell you whether specific incidents happened at least once. Neither answer identifies the service involved, how often an incident happened, or whether a platform response helped. For a question about harassment, start with the behavior figures. For a question about how users judged their experience, start with the rating. Keeping the questions separate avoids turning a feeling into an incident count or an incident count into a satisfaction score.
Experience is a different question from results
A good rating does not mean the respondent found a partner. Pew separately asked partnered adults how they met their current partner, while SSRS in January 2026 asked past users whether they had ever been in a committed relationship with someone met online. Those questions start with different groups and end at different points in a dating history. Someone may value conversations or meeting new people without forming a long-term relationship; another person may meet a partner after a difficult period on the app. The rating question did not assign an outcome to either experience.
If you want a relationship measure, choose one that names the relationship and time frame. Pew's current-partner measure starts with adults who are married, cohabiting, or in a committed relationship and asks about that partner's meeting place. SSRS's ever-relationship measure starts with everyone who tried online dating and asks whether any committed relationship followed at any time. Neither is a replacement for a respondent's overall rating. The three measures can stand together because each answers a distinct, reasonable question. A claim that blends them usually sounds more decisive than the underlying surveys allow.
SSRS asked past online-dating users another outcome-adjacent question in January 2026: what effect sites or apps had on their dating and relationships. Forty-seven percent said neither positive nor negative, 33% mostly positive, and 20% mostly negative. That is a judgment about impact, not Pew's 2022 overall rating of the experience. A person can find an app easy to use while believing it changed little about their relationships, or feel the reverse. The two surveys do not follow the same respondents, so their percentages cannot be combined into a single satisfaction scale. Name the question before using the answer.
How much the survey can say about today
Pew conducted the experience survey among 6,034 U.S. adults in July 2022. Its report says the overall positive and negative shares had not changed from its 2019 survey, although some group results moved. That is a comparison between survey snapshots, not an account of every year between them. Services, prices, policies, and the people using an individual app may have changed since the interviews. The 2022 figures remain a useful national reference for the question Pew asked; they should carry their year when they are quoted in a current discussion.
Pew used a national panel and weighted responses to represent U.S. adults. Smaller groups have less precision than the full sample, so a few points between subgroup estimates deserve care. Its overall-rating question also combines all dating sites and apps. A figure from one platform's own customer poll may count a very different group, especially if only active or paying members could respond. Check the question, the year, and who was invited before comparing the two. Those checks are more useful than trying to force every experience into one national verdict.
Use the rating for the question it can answer
The comparison table keeps the all-user, gender, and sexual-orientation results in their own rows. Read each row as the share of that named group of people with past online-dating experience who gave a positive overall rating. Then ask whether the claim you are testing is about a feeling, a specific safety event, or a relationship. If it is about a feeling, Pew's 53% and 46% are the direct answer for 2022. If it is about an event or an outcome, follow the corresponding measure instead of stretching the rating to cover it.
That approach also leaves room for your own experience without asking a national percentage to certify it. A survey can show that both positive and negative judgments were common among the people it asked. It cannot decide which service, if any, will suit a particular person in a particular place. The linked safety findings describe reported behavior; keep the overall rating as a description of the crowd's answer to its own question.
