300,000 Tinder Swipes In One Chart

Users End Up Talking To 1% Of The Profiles They Swipe On

By Katie Rizik and Oliver Gladfelter | May 10, 2020

2026 update / disclaimers:

Geezush, it’s been 6 years since we published this silly, dumb project and who would’ve guessed incel culture would be gaining so much traction these days. Therefore, a couple of caveats before we get started:

A 1% match rate is literally on par with or higher than real life.
Dating apps are harvesting your data for profit and have financial interest in keeping online dating inefficient. Consider that Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, match.com and more are all owned by the same multi-billion dollar company.
The best advice I can offer: get off the internet and go outside.

-Oliver

Most users on your run-of-the-mill dating app probably have at least one thing in common: they're quick to swipe. In fact, Tinder users take an average of 3-7 seconds to decide on a suitor and swipe left or right.¹On Tinder, swiping right on a profile means you "like" them and want to match with them. Swiping left means you are not interested in matching. This quick judgement is in part motivated by seemingly infinite options: not into the guy who refuses to look straight into the camera? Just swipe left and see who’s behind door #2!

With such, uh, efficient swiping, an average Tinder user is going to see thousands of potential matches, which will surely lead to finding love...right? When Oliver and I realized we could download our Tinder data, we immediately opened up Excel. So without further ado, here are the ones who got away (all 3,409 of them, to be exact):

Katie's Tinder Stats

9%	52%	46%
Right Swipes²Number of profiles Katie swiped right on / Number of profiles Katie swiped on	Match Rate³Number of matches / Number of right swipes	Of Matches Messaged⁴Number of matches Katie sent messages to / Number of Katie's matches

Instead of finding "the one," I was lucky enough to find 52%. That is, 52% of the guys I swiped right on also swiped right on me. Yet of those matches, I actually only ended up messaging about half of them. Of those, I sent an average of 4 messages before the spark fizzled out or we switched to texting. Did I find love? 🤷 Did I make a fun graph? ✔️✔️✔️

So how do these numbers compare to others in this swiping simulator? Am I getting more matches than my friends? How long do most conversations last before one realizes the other actually isn't “the world’s biggest The Office fan?”

In the name of science, Oliver and I somehow convinced our friends to send us their Tinder data. We managed to assemble a panel of six men and six women, totaling over 280,000 swipes.⁵In case it isn't obvious, we’re not planning on publishing these results in any scientific journals: our sample is both small and heavily biased (all participants are young, college educated, interested in the opposite sex, brave enough to trust us with their Tinder data, etc). In other words, our findings might not be representative of everyone's dating app experience, but does establish a baseline you can compare your own reality to.

286,477 Swipes From 12 Tinder Users

30%	30%	42%
Right Swipes	Match Rate	Of Matches Messaged

Of all the profiles someone sees, they will like, match with, and talk to astoundingly few. One of our friends swiped through nearly 23,000 profiles just to talk to about 1,000 of them. That's a rate of just 4%, which is actually the highest of all our friends - most spoke to less than 1% of the profiles they came across.

We also noticed some differences between the men and women:

Evidently men and women have very different approaches when it comes to using dating apps. While this is just a small survey of our friends, more rigorous studies have also found that men tend to cast wider nets into the dating pool, while women are more selective. Among our friends, the women have a much higher match rate than the men (54% vs 5%), although both groups have a similar rate of matches out of total profiles seen (4% for women, 2% for men).

Messaging rates, on the other hand, isn’t particularly gendered: men send at least one message to 44% of their matches, while women message about 39% of theirs. Put this all together, and we found that men messaged 1% of all profiles they ever see and women messaged 2%.

Tinder Conversations Don't Last Very Long

So a 20-something midwesterner sends that fateful "hey" and then...most Tinder conversations last around 10 messages over the course of a day or two. After that, either someone gets bored or the conversation moves to another medium. Regardless, you don’t have very long to make your impression.

1.2	3	74%
Days A Conversation Usually Lasts	Messages Sent Per Match, On Average	Of Matches Receive 10 Or Less Messages

Conclusion

While writing this, I’m sitting alone on my couch and finishing off a jar of salsa. Five months on Tinder didn't get me what the app promises, but it provided plenty of entertainment and data.

Dating is never going to be easy, with or without technology, but Tinder does offer one advantage: it exposes you to hordes of people. Each of our friends swiped an average of 13,900 times, so even if they only chat with someone 2% of the time, that's still 300 people they probably wouldn’t have met otherwise.

As for me? Maybe my 152 matches ended up not working out, but hey, there's always Hinge.