The average American adult has sex about 54 to 60 times per year, which works out to roughly once a week. But that number has been dropping steadily, and the story behind it reveals a lot about how relationships, age, and generational shifts shape Americans’ sex lives.
The National Average Over Time
The General Social Survey, one of the longest-running studies of American behavior, has tracked sexual frequency for decades. Earlier data put the average at about 62 times per year. By the 2010-2014 period, married adults averaged 56 times per year, down from 67 times between 1989 and 1994. That’s a drop of roughly once a month over two decades.
Unmarried adults, meanwhile, barely budged, going from 50 to 51 times per year during those same decades. The overall national decline is driven partly by falling marriage rates (since married people generally have more sex) and partly by married couples simply having less sex than they used to.
Who’s Having More and Who’s Having Less
Relationship status is the single biggest predictor of how often someone has sex. Married and cohabiting couples consistently report higher frequencies than single adults, though the gap has narrowed as married couples’ numbers have declined.
Age matters in the way you’d expect: younger adults in relationships tend to report higher monthly frequency. A recent survey of 2,000 Americans in relationships found Gen Z adults averaged 5.3 times per month, with millennials close behind at 5.1. Work hours, surprisingly, don’t drag down sexual frequency. Research from San Diego State University found that people who worked more hours actually had sex more often. The assumption that busy schedules are to blame doesn’t hold up in the data.
The Rise of Sexual Inactivity
Perhaps the most striking trend isn’t about how often sexually active people have sex. It’s about how many people aren’t having sex at all. A study from Indiana University tracking 18- to 44-year-olds from 2000 to 2018 found that sexual inactivity among men ages 18 to 24 jumped from 19 percent to 31 percent. Nearly one in three young men reported no sexual activity in the past year.
Men and women ages 25 to 34 also reported increases in sexual inactivity over the same period. Among adolescents, the shift was even more dramatic: the proportion of young men reporting no solo or partnered sexual behavior rose from 28 percent in 2009 to 43 percent in 2018. For young women, it went from 49 percent to 74 percent.
Researchers point to fewer young adults being in steady relationships as a major driver. The delay of marriage, the rise of dating apps that don’t always translate to in-person connection, and changing social norms around partnering up all play a role.
Once a Week Appears to Be the Sweet Spot
If you’re wondering whether more sex automatically means more happiness, the research draws a clear line. A large-scale analysis of more than 30,000 Americans surveyed over four decades found that happiness increases with sexual frequency, but only up to about once a week. Beyond that, the association between more sex and greater happiness disappears.
A separate study following more than 2,400 married couples over 14 years found the same pattern for relationship satisfaction specifically. Couples reported more satisfaction as frequency increased up to once a week, with no noticeable benefit from having sex more often than that. This doesn’t mean having sex twice a week makes you less happy. It just means the measurable boost levels off, suggesting that quality and connection matter more than hitting a high number.
Why the Numbers Keep Falling
The decline in sexual frequency across American adults isn’t explained by any single factor. Fewer people are partnered, and those who are partnered are having slightly less sex than previous generations did at the same life stage. The rise of smartphones, streaming entertainment, and social media has reshaped how people spend their evenings, though no study has definitively proven a causal link between screen time and less sex.
What the data does rule out is the “too busy” explanation. Working longer hours correlates with more sex, not less, likely because employment and social engagement overlap with the kinds of lifestyles that lead to partnerships. The real shifts appear to be structural: later marriage, more people living alone, and a growing comfort among younger adults with extended periods of sexual inactivity that previous generations simply didn’t experience at the same rates.