Search "what percentage of Americans ghost" and Google mostly answers a different question, about belief in actual ghosts. Fair enough, but the disappearing-on-people kind is far more common than the paranormal kind, and there's real survey data on it.
The short answer: 45% of American adults who date admit they've ghosted someone, 60% say they've been ghosted, and 76% have been on one side of it or the other. Ghosting means cutting off all contact without explanation, and it now stretches well past dating into friendships, family, and hiring.
So I pulled every credible number on ghosting into one page. One honesty note before the stats: these surveys measure different groups, all US adults, active daters, singles, online daters, or job seekers, so each stat below names exactly whose behavior it describes. No blending, no made-up precision.
Table of contents · 10 sections
Ghosting in America: Editor's Choice
- →45% of US daters admit they've ghosted someone; 60% have been ghosted; 76% have experienced one or the other. (Forbes Health / OnePoll)
- →84% of Gen Z and millennials have been ghosted. (Thriving Center of Psychology)
- →1 in 2 Americans have been ghosted by a close friend. (Thriving Center of Psychology)
- →53% of job seekers were ghosted by an employer in the past year, a three-year high. (Criteria)
- →63% of US job candidates were ghosted after a job interview. (Greenhouse)
- →Only 35% of US singles would tell someone face-to-face that they're not interested. (Match / Kinsey Institute)
- →70% of US job seekers say ghosting an employer back feels fair. (Indeed)
- →85% of Americans dodged at least one difficult conversation in a single month. (Quantum Connections)
- →The most common reason for ghosting a date: 54% simply lost interest. (NumberBarn)
- →Adults under 30 are the most committed to dating apps: 69.6% would pick them over an AI partner. (AI Girlfriend Coach survey)
What percentage of Americans ghost?
The headline numbers come from dating, where ghosting was born. Here's what the biggest surveys agree on:
1. 45% of American daters admit to ghosting someone they were dating.
The number the whole question hangs on, from a 5,000-person survey of US adults who dated in the past five years (it's also the figure Statista republishes). Nearly half of the people dating right now have done the disappearing themselves.
2. 60% of daters have been ghosted, and 76% have been on one side of ghosting or the other.
More people report receiving it than admit doing it, which either means a few prolific ghosts are doing heavy lifting, or some respondents have selective memories. Probably both.
3. Among singles specifically, 75% have been ghosted and 50% admit to ghosting.
A January 2025 survey of 1,510 residents of the 30 largest US metros, so this is the fresher, city-dwelling read of the same behavior. The rates climbed compared with the 2023 numbers above, not fallen.
4. Women admit to ghosting more (55% vs 46%); men report being ghosted more (77% vs 72%).
The gender split runs the same direction in every survey I found: women are likelier to do the ghosting in dating contexts, men are likelier to receive it.
5. 36% of US online daters say someone they were dating stopped responding without explanation.
Pew's stricter, dated-then-vanished definition lands lower than the broad surveys, and that's the point of naming populations: 'ghosting' spans everything from an unanswered app match to a partner of months going silent.
Who ghosts the most?
Short version: the younger the cohort, the more universal the experience.
6. 84% of Gen Z and millennials have been ghosted.
For adults under 45, being ghosted isn't an if, it's a when. The same survey found most think the behavior came bundled with the technology: 2 in 3 call ghosting a byproduct of online dating.
7. 82% of millennial women and 71% of millennial men have experienced ghosting on dating apps.
An app-focused millennial survey that matches the pattern above, near-universal exposure, with women experiencing it slightly more often on the apps even though women also admit to doing it more.
8. 27% of US online daters have gone on an actual date with someone who then vanished.
Not just matches going quiet: more than a quarter of online daters have sat across from a real person who later evaporated. The in-person meeting is no protection.
9. In a 30-metro survey, ghosting prevalence was high enough everywhere that cities were ranked by 12-month ghosting rates.
The interesting part isn't which city won; it's that a phone-number company could rank America's 30 biggest metros by ghosting the way others rank them by rent. The behavior is national, with local flavor.
When and why people ghost
The data here reads like a portrait of conflict avoidance, because that's mostly what it is.
10. 1 in 4 people have been ghosted after a first date or a couple of dates.
Most ghosting happens before a first date ever occurs, but a quarter of people got the vanishing act after showing up in person. It gets worse:
11. 1 in 10 have been ghosted after a couple of months of dating.
Months in, and the other person simply stops existing. This is the version that shows up in the mental-health data further down.
12. The top reason for ghosting a date: 54% say they lost interest.
Not fear, not safety, not anything dramatic. A slow shrug, executed in silence. Safety does appear in the reasons list, and it's the one genuinely defensible use of the block button, but plain lost interest leads by a mile.
13. Only 35% of US singles would tell someone face-to-face that they weren't interested, and 37% would do it by text.
From the 15th Singles in America study, about 5,000 US singles surveyed in March and April 2026. Rejection is getting quieter rather than kinder: splitting the check, ending with "it was nice to meet you," a hug instead of a kiss. Fading away or ghosting "held steady over time," the study says. And yet 60% said they would prefer some form of direct communication face-to-face. Most people want the honest no. Far fewer give it.
14. 40% of women have agreed to another date they had no intention of going on.
Over a third of men admit the same. The yes-then-vanish move is pre-ghosting: the confrontation gets dodged in person, then finished by silence.
15. 85% of Americans avoided at least one difficult conversation in a single month.
A 2026 dialogue study that puts ghosting in its real context: we're not just ghosting dates, we're ghosting conversations generally. Avoidance ran highest among Gen Z and, notably, heavy AI users. Ghosting is the dating-shaped tip of a much bigger avoidance iceberg.
Ghosting friends and family
The behavior escaped dating a while ago.
16. 1 in 2 Americans have been ghosted by a close friend.
Not an acquaintance, a close friend. Half of us have watched a real friendship end in silence, which makes friend-ghosting roughly as common as date-ghosting.
17. About 27% of Americans are estranged from a close family member.
Cornell's national estrangement research (Karl Pillemer's team) found more than a quarter of adults in a cutoff with a relative. Family estrangement isn't always ghosting in the vanish-without-a-word sense, but the overlap is large and largely silent.
18. 30% of singles said they were fed up with dating altogether.
Ghost fatigue is real enough to push almost a third of singles toward the exit. Keep this number in mind for my own survey further down, because it complicates a story I hear a lot about where those singles go next.
Workplace ghosting
Hiring turned into the newest ghosting arena, and it runs in both directions.
19. 53% of job seekers were ghosted by a potential employer in the past year.
Up from 48% in 2025 and 38% in 2024, according to pre-employment testing company Criteria's annual Candidate Experience Report. The full report is gated, so these figures come from Fortune's March 2026 coverage of it.
20. 63% of US job candidates were ghosted after a job interview, and 78% of Gen Z candidates have been ghosted.
Nearly two in three, from Greenhouse's survey of more than 2,200 workers and job seekers in the US, UK and Ireland. That is after an interview, not after a cold application: the candidate showed up, and the employer went silent. Gen Z got it worst, against 65% of millennials, 58% of Gen X and 55% of boomers.
21. 80% of hiring managers admit to ghosting candidates.
Only 20% said they never do it. The most-cited reason was uncertainty about whether the candidate was the best option, which is 'lost interest' wearing a lanyard.
22. 81% of recruiters admit their employers have posted "ghost jobs".
Openings that don't exist or were already filled, posted to look healthy or to stockpile resumes. Some ghosting starts before there's even a person on the other end.
23. 50% of US candidates have ghosted an employer during hiring, up 14 points since October 2023.
The return fire. Among US Gen Z candidates, 73% have ghosted an employer. The most common trigger was poor communication or long delays from the employer (24%), so a lot of candidate ghosting is ghosting, answered.
24. 4.1% of accepted job offers at one large company were ghosted, costing it over $6.9 million a year.
New hire ghosting means accepting the offer, then never showing up on day one. Researchers studied 157,154 hires at a large telecommunications company and found the risk rose with a longer gap between offer and start date, and in customer-facing roles. A second study of 434 US adults linked it to weaker pre-start communication, among other factors.
25. 70% of US job seekers say ghosting an employer feels fair.
The revenge arc, from Indeed's 4,500-person ghosting study. People who were ignored at the application stage return the silence at the interview or offer stage, and 89% of employers now call candidate ghosting a problem. The loop feeds itself.
26. New York lawmakers passed a bill requiring job ads to state whether the role is a real, current vacancy.
The ghost-jobs bill passed the Senate in April 2026 and the Assembly in June. It covers employers with at least 100 employees and requires one of three statements in bold capitals, from "THIS POSTING IS FOR A CURRENT VACANCY" to "THIS POSTING IS NOT FOR A CURRENT VACANCY BUT THE EMPLOYER IS SEEKING RESUMES," with fines starting at $2,500. As of October 5, 2026, the Senate's own record shows it as passed by both houses, not signed into law.
What being ghosted does to people
The silence is efficient for the ghost and expensive for everyone else.
27. Over half of ghosted daters felt upset; 39% felt inadequate; 22% felt angry.
The inadequate number is the one worth sitting with: no explanation means the ghosted person writes their own, and people rarely write themselves a kind one.
28. 48% of ghosted job seekers won't give that employer a second chance, and 37% tell others.
Ghosting has a reputation price. Nearly half the candidates you ghost are gone for good, and over a third are talking about it, on Glassdoor, on Reddit, in group chats.
29. 57% of employers said candidate ghosting had never happened to them before the past 12 months.
The behavior jumped categories fast. What was a dating-app phenomenon became a standard hiring risk within roughly a year, which is the clearest evidence that ghosting is a communication norm now, not a dating quirk.
30. Ghosted people felt as bad as people who were rejected outright, but they kept checking the other person's social media and dating app status.
Two experiments simulated the early days of an online relationship, then ended it by ghosting, by explicit rejection, or not at all. The ghosted group reported ongoing emotional attachment, and intended to monitor and text the person about as much as the people who had been accepted. That is the cost of no explanation: the pain of rejection without the closure.
31. People who are ghosted underestimate how bad the ghoster feels about it.
Three studies (195 recalled experiences, 601 imagined scenarios and 350 people in a live interaction) found ghosting hurts the ghoster too, more than the person left waiting assumes. The gap shrank when the ghoster sent a short reply such as "sorry, can't talk" instead of nothing. One line of text did a lot of work.
32. In a randomized trial, being ghosted by a new match did not measurably affect sleep.
A useful counterweight. 112 young adults were told they were joining a dating pool, then ghosted, let down politely, or not contacted, while Oura rings tracked their sleep. The researchers "did not observe any influence of acute experimental ghosting" on objective or subjective sleep. A short, low-investment ghosting stings without necessarily keeping you up. The harm in the earlier stats comes from longer relationships and repeated silence.
Ghosting, dating apps and AI: what our own survey says
There's a popular story that ghost fatigue is pushing people from dating apps to AI companions. It's the story I'd most like to be true, given what this site covers, so I checked it against data instead of repeating it.
33. 39% of US singles have already used AI in their dating lives, including 67% of Gen Z.
Mostly as a helper, not a replacement: AI is already writing profiles and messages. Use falls steeply with age, to 46% of millennials, 24% of Gen X and 5% of boomers. And 30% objected to someone using AI for all their conversations.
I asked the companion half of that question in my own survey: 2,150 U.S. adults, fielded August 26 to 27, 2026, with 1,709 responses after quality screening. There's no ghosting question in it, but three answers speak directly to the ghost-fatigue story.
34. If they were single and looking for companionship, 52.2% would rather use dating apps, and only 7.8% would pick an AI girlfriend or boyfriend.
Another 13.2% would use both, and 26.8% weren't sure. Dating apps beat AI by nearly 7 to 1. Among actual singles (313 respondents) the split barely moves: 52.7% dating apps, 6.1% AI. People are tired of being ghosted. They are not, mostly, leaving.
35. Gen Z, the generation that grew up with ghosting, is the most committed to dating apps: 69.6% would choose them, and only 10.3% would include AI at all.
Of 184 respondents aged 18 to 29, just 2.7% would pick an AI partner alone. Set that beside the 84% of young adults who have been ghosted and the 67% of Gen Z singles already using AI as a dating tool. The generation that gets ghosted most still wants a person on the other end, and uses AI to help reach one.
36. 56.6% say their main reason for using an AI companion would be having someone to talk to or feeling less lonely.
Only 10.3% chose affection or romantic or sexual interaction. That fits the one thing an AI companion really does differently from a match who went quiet: it always answers. Whether that's a comfort or a problem depends on what it's standing in for.
Ghost fatigue is real. The exodus mostly isn't.
A third of singles say they're fed up with dating and 84% of young adults have been ghosted, yet my own survey finds dating apps beating AI partners by nearly 7 to 1. AI companions are a real and growing market, one I research in depth, but for most people they sit beside dating, not in place of it. Whatever else you make of them, one thing an AI companion never does is leave you on read. The numbers are in my AI girlfriend statistics, and the apps themselves are tested one by one in my living reviews.
Read the AI girlfriend statistics →Conclusion
So, what percentage of Americans ghost? Among people who date: 45% admit to doing it, 60% have received it, and 76% have lived one side or the other. Zoom out and the picture is bigger than dating: half of Americans have been ghosted by a close friend, over a quarter are estranged from a family member, a majority of job seekers got ghosted by an employer this year, and 85% of us dodged at least one hard conversation last month.
My honest read of the data: ghosting isn't really a dating statistic. It's a communication statistic, the measurable preference for silence over one uncomfortable sentence. The surveys just catch it most easily where it hurts most.
The newest research adds a twist: ghosting hurts the ghost too, more than the ghosted person assumes, and a reply as short as "sorry, can't talk" takes some of the sting out for both. And for all the ghost fatigue, most people, Gen Z above all, are still choosing dating apps over an AI that would never go quiet.
FAQs
What percentage of Americans ghost?
45% of US adults who have dated in the past five years admit to ghosting someone they were dating, according to a Forbes Health / OnePoll survey of 5,000 daters. Among singles in large metros, 50% admit to ghosting. Outside dating, 80% of hiring managers admit to ghosting job candidates.
What percentage of Americans have been ghosted?
60% of US daters say they've been ghosted, and 76% have either ghosted or been ghosted. Among Gen Z and millennials, 84% report having been ghosted, and 1 in 2 Americans have been ghosted by a close friend.
Why do people ghost?
The most common reason is simple loss of interest, cited by 54% of people who ghosted a date. The deeper driver is conflict avoidance: 85% of Americans avoided at least one difficult conversation in a single month. Ghosting is usually the easy exit from a conversation someone didn't want to have.
Is ghosting more common among Gen Z?
Yes. 84% of Gen Z and millennials have been ghosted, versus 60% of daters overall, and younger cohorts show the highest rates of conversation avoidance generally. Gen Z also ghosts employers the most: 73% of US Gen Z job candidates have ghosted an employer during hiring, according to Greenhouse.
Do people ghost outside of dating?
Constantly. 1 in 2 Americans have been ghosted by a close friend, about 27% are estranged from a close family member, 53% of job seekers were ghosted by an employer in the past year, and 70% of job seekers say ghosting an employer back feels fair.
Are people leaving dating apps for AI companions because of ghosting?
Mostly not. In the AI Girlfriend Coach survey of 1,709 U.S. adults (August 2026), 52.2% would rather use dating apps if single, versus 7.8% who would choose an AI girlfriend or boyfriend. Adults aged 18 to 29 are the most committed to dating apps, at 69.6%. AI is more often a dating helper: 39% of US singles have used AI in their dating lives, according to Singles in America 2026.
Sources
- Forbes Health / OnePoll: Ghosting & modern dating survey (n=5,000). forbes.com
- NumberBarn: Cities Where Ghosting Is Most Common (Jan 2025, n=1,510). numberbarn.com
- Thriving Center of Psychology: Gen Z & Millennial Ghosting Survey. thrivingcenterofpsych.com
- BankMyCell: Millennial Ghosting & Dating App Study. bankmycell.com
- Pew Research Center: Online dating experiences in the US. pewresearch.org
- Criteria: Candidate Experience Report 2026, as reported by Fortune (Mar 20, 2026). fortune.com
- Greenhouse: 2025 Workforce & Hiring Report (Jul 2025, 2,200+ workers and job seekers in the US, UK and Ireland). greenhouse.com (PDF)
- Indeed: Ghosting in Hiring report (n=9,000+ job seekers and employers). indeed.com
- Resume Genius: Hiring manager ghosting survey. resumegenius.com
- LiveCareer / MyPerfectResume: Employer ghosting and ghost jobs surveys. hr-brew.com
- Quantum Connections: Global Dialogue Initiative: Difficult conversations study (2026). wftv.com
- Match / Kinsey Institute at Indiana University: Singles in America 2026 (Sep 14, 2026, about 5,000 US singles). eurekalert.org
- Speer et al.: "Now You See Them, Now You Don't: Understanding New Hire Ghosting and Its Antecedents," Human Resource Management Journal (Jun 2026). doi.org
- New York State Senate: Bill S8877 (ghost job postings). nysenate.gov
- Szczesniak, Pierce & Spielmann: "Give Up the Ghost," Personal Relationships (Jul 2025). doi.org
- Li, Zheng & Schroeder: "The Pain of Ghosting?", Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (Aug 2026). doi.org
- Langlais et al.: ghosting and sleep randomized trial, Frontiers in Psychology (Jan 2026). doi.org
- AI Girlfriend Coach: AI Romance and Modern Relationships survey, 2,150 U.S. adults, SurveyMonkey Audience, August 26 to 27, 2026; figures use the 1,709 quality-screened responses. aigirlfriend.coach
- Cornell University (Karl Pillemer): Family estrangement research. news.cornell.edu