Age Check
Everything on this page is computed live in your browser from published data. There are three calculations, and each one is a simple, inspectable combination of real numbers. No AI, no black box, no server.
For every age of the opposite sex, we ask two questions: how many single, actively looking people are there at that age where you date, and does their typical dating app age filter include your age? The number of singles comes from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey (2024, table B12002: never married, widowed, and divorced, by sex and age), reduced twice, both times using Pew Research Center measurements. First by the share of singles actively looking to date (57% under 50, 36% at 50 to 64, 16% at 65 and up, with men looking more than women), then by the share of those who actually use dating apps (53% under 50, 26% at 50 and over). The second step matters: a filter is an app feature, so counting people who have never opened one and crediting them with a stated search range would roughly double the pool on screen. The typical filter windows come from the largest published dataset of real dating app age settings: OkCupid's median search ranges by age and gender. A median 31 year old man sets 22 to 35. A median 42 year old man accepts a woman up to 15 years younger but no more than 3 years older. Women set windows roughly centered a little above their own age at every age. Filter edges are treated as soft (a couple of years of tolerance), because research shows people regularly date just outside their stated ranges.
American Community Survey microdata (2018 to 2022, via IPUMS, as computed for FlowingData's "Ages of the People We Marry" project) gives the full distribution of spouse ages for each age, sex, and marriage number. We blend the first marriage and remarriage curves as you age, since a third of American newlywed couples are remarriages and the blend point matters most after 40. To connect swiping today with marrying later, we add the typical American runway from meeting to wedding: about 3.3 years of dating before the proposal plus a 15 month engagement, shortened a little because couples who meet through online dating marry measurably faster. The runway varies mildly with your age, following the only government data that speaks to it: CDC survey data shows couples who start living together at 25 to 29 convert to marriage fastest (17 month median cohabitation, 58% married within 3 years), the youngest couples slowest (25 months, 31%), with 30 to 44 in between, and Stanford's relationship hazard models peak in the early 30s. So the calculator uses about 5 years if you match at 20, about 3.5 at 36, drifting back toward 4 at older ages. No study publishes this curve directly; ours is a disclosed blend of those sources, and the results barely depend on it. The age gap between you and a future spouse does not change over those years, which is what lets the math work backward to "the age they are today." One correction is applied to that distribution. The published percentiles are whole years, so the per year density they imply is a staircase that steps at each percentile and spikes wherever two of them round to adjacent years. For a man marrying near 36 the median and the 75th percentile are one year apart, which packed a quarter of all outcomes into a single year and made the years either side look far weaker than they are. We smooth the distribution at one year, the resolution the source actually supports. Across every case tested this shifts the quartiles by less than 0.7 years, so it corrects the shape without moving the distribution, and the middle half printed on the page is still read straight off the published percentiles.
Every age from 18 to 80 gets a score that multiplies three things: singles supply at that age, the probability their filter points back at your age, and how often marriages like yours involve that age gap. Scores are shown relative to your best possible age (100). Strong fit is at least 55 of 100, possible is 18 to 54, lower odds is below 18. The coverage percentage is the share of your total realistic match weight that falls inside your chosen range, and the suggested window is the same width as yours, just placed where the weight actually is.
The headline score is range efficiency, and it answers one question: how much of the marriage potential available to you does your range actually capture. It is the harmonic mean of two numbers that pull against each other. The first is quality, your range's score per available single measured against the best three year window, which falls as a range widens. The second is coverage, the share of your realistic matches that sits inside the range, which rises as a range widens. Combining them is what stops either mistake from scoring well.
An earlier version scored quality alone, and it was wrong in a way worth naming. Because quality is measured per swipe, any range narrow enough to sit on the peak scored 100%, so a 35 year old man swiping three ages was told his aim was perfect. It was perfect, and it was also close to useless, because those three ages held barely a third of his real chances. Balancing quality against coverage fixes it: that same three age range now scores in the fifties, a single age scores in the twenties, and the best scoring ranges are the realistic ones.
These are patterns, not predictions: the age gap data tells us how often marriages like yours have landed on each age, not that any one relationship failed because of the gap, and part of that pattern reflects who was available rather than who was chosen.
The research is unusually consistent on one point: stated filters are habits, not destiny. In a 2025 study of 4,542 real blind dates (published in PNAS), people's stated maximum partner age had no measurable effect on how attracted they were on the actual date. Men's messaging on OkCupid concentrated at the bottom of their stated range and below it, yet the marriages that actually happen cluster within a few years of the couple's own ages: 35% of American married couples are within one year of each other, and just over half of husbands are two or more years older. The filter you set decides who you can ever meet. The data says most people aim it somewhere other than where their real matches are.
Choosing a city replaces the national singles supply with the same Census table pulled for that metropolitan statistical area (ACS 2024 1-year, table B12002), so both the counts and the local balance of single men to single women are that city's own. The fifteen metros available are Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas and Fort Worth, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, the San Francisco Bay Area (the San Francisco and San Jose metros combined), Seattle, and Washington DC.
The differences between them are real and they change the answer. Counting singles aged 25 to 34, Seattle has about 129 single men per 100 single women, Denver 125, Phoenix 123, the Bay Area 121, Los Angeles 112, and New York and Philadelphia only 106. That is a 23 point spread between the tightest and the loosest market for the same person at the same age. Every metro then flips the other way in later life, to a large surplus of single women past 60, because women live longer and remarry less. The city you are in is a real input, not decoration.
Two things deliberately stay national: the dating app search window curves and the marriage age gap curves. No metro level source for either exists, and inventing one would be guessing. So a city changes who is available around you, not how people in that city set their filters or how much older or younger they marry.
Vintages vary because no single modern source covers stated filters, behavior, and marriage outcomes together. Where sources conflict, the calculator uses stated search filters for "who is searching," population data for supply, and marriage records for outcomes, and says so above.
Wide enough to have options, narrow enough that the options are good. Age Check scores your range on two things at once: how strong the average swipe inside it is, and how much of your real opportunity the range can see. Neither alone is enough, because a single age scores perfectly on quality and reaches almost nobody, while an eighteen to sixty range reaches everybody and converts on almost none of it. Across every age and both genders the best scoring ranges run about four to sixteen years wide.
No. The claim that a ten year gap brings 39% more divorce traces back to a chart its own author withdrew after the study's authors objected. The raw association is not statistically significant, and the best US national probability sample finds no independent effect of age gap on divorce. Age Check applies no age gap penalty anywhere in its scoring, because there is nothing solid to apply.
No. In the NCHS data, divorce risk by age at marriage is monotonic. Marrying later goes with lower risk, and there is no upturn in the thirties. The popular claim that risk climbs about 5% per year after 32 comes from a right-censored survey that stopped interviewing people at 44, was never replicated after 2013, and had its fitted breakpoint at 28 rather than 32. Five sources including Census and NCHS find no upturn.
More matches, worse odds on each one. Range efficiency balances the strength of your average swipe against how much of your real opportunity you can see, so widening past a point pulls the score down even as your raw match count climbs. Age Check reports wasted for the same reason, the share of people inside your range sitting on weak ages. A wider net buys more conversations and a smaller share of them worth having.
Later than most people assume, and later every year. Dating starts well before the wedding: courtship runs about 3.3 years of dating plus about 15 months engaged, so the age you date at sits roughly four and a half years before the age you would marry. Age Check works that gap out for your age, then reads the marriage records to show which ages you would realistically marry, rather than a single national average.
OkCupid's medians are the largest published dataset of real dating app age filters. A median 31 year old man sets his range at 22 to 35. A median 42 year old man will accept someone 15 years younger but only 3 years older. Age Check uses these curves to work out who is searching your age. They date from 2010, which makes them the weakest input in the tool, and they hold up against a 2024 study of 35,996 European couples and a private matchmaking intake sample of 211 US professionals.
Pew Research put it at 57% of single adults under 50 in 2022, 36% among 50 to 64 year olds, and 16% at 65 and older, with men looking more than women. Of those single and looking, 45% had used a dating app in the past year, 53% under 50 and 26% at 50 and over. Census ACS 2024 table B12002 supplies the count of singles by sex and age. Age Check applies both Pew rates to the Census counts, so the pool on screen is people who are single, looking, and reachable on an app, not everyone unmarried.
Age Check will not answer that. It gives no fertility prognosis, no IVF success rates and no per cycle conception odds, and it shows no fertility figures at all. For context rather than prediction, the Census Bureau's June 2024 fertility survey found 19% of American women aged 42 had not had a child. Anything about your own fertility belongs with a doctor, not a calculator.
Yes, because the age mix of singles differs by city and that moves which window wins. Age Check covers a national view plus 15 metros: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, SF Bay, Seattle and Washington DC. Counts come from Census ACS 2024 table B12002 computed for each metro, not scaled down from the national number.
Nothing leaves your browser. Age Check runs on your device, with no account, no upload and no stored record of anything you enter. Your gender, age, range and city produce the four numbers on screen and disappear when you close the tab. The Census, Pew, NCHS, IPUMS and CPS figures behind the results ship with the page, so the page never calls out for data.
No range to aim, no swiping, and no cost to be introduced.
Tell me who you’re looking for