Cheating Statistics 2026: How Many People Cheat?

It's well past midnight and you typed the question into your phone, because knowing whether the thing you're afraid of is common felt better than lying there. The first page gave you one number. The second gave you a much bigger one. Neither said who had been asked, or what.

They can both be real, and the reason they differ is the most useful thing you'll read tonight.

Short answer: between 13% and 33% of people say they have cheated, and the gap comes from the question. About 13% to 20% of ever-married Americans report sex outside their marriage. About 33% of Americans say they have cheated "physically, emotionally, or both" in any monogamous relationship. Neither number tells you anything about one specific person.

This page goes from the broad numbers to the narrow ones: marriage, emotional affairs, men and women, age, dating apps, jobs, divorce, and what people believe. Then come two tables most pages skip: the figures we looked for and couldn't trace, and every source with its date and sample.

Three numbers, three different questions

The first row comes from an analysis published in 2018, with a sample not stated in the article. The two YouGov rows come from one survey of 2,000 adults in September 2022.

Most pages stack these numbers as if they measured the same thing. They don't. The first counts sex outside marriage only. The second includes emotional affairs and every kind of relationship, from a marriage of thirty years to a few months of dating at nineteen. If two pages gave you two different answers tonight, this is almost certainly why.

How many married people cheat

The General Social Survey has asked the same question for decades, which makes it the reference for trends.

Source: General Social Survey, analysed by Wendy Wang for the Institute for Family Studies, August 2025.

In plain words: among people in this age range who have been married, the large majority report no sex outside their marriage, in every period measured. Three things to hold next to that.

• The trend is flat to slightly down, not up. Whatever the headlines say about apps and temptation, this survey doesn't show a rise.

• One caution from the author herself: the survey moved from in-person interviews to online and mixed modes in 2021 and 2022, "which may complicate the interpretation of trends".

• These are self-reports. People under-report, so the real figures are probably higher. Nobody knows by how much.

How many people cheat, counting emotional affairs

Ask a wider question and you get a bigger number. YouGov's 2022 survey used a wider definition, feelings included.

Source: YouGov, fieldwork 15 to 22 September 2022, 2,000 US adults.

This is the "one in three" you may have seen. It covers any monogamous relationship a person has had, not only the current one, and it counts an emotional affair with no physical side. Where you two would draw that line is worth asking, and these questions about what counts as cheating can help.

A second YouGov survey, in April 2025 (1,125 adults), asked a narrower question: 25% said they had "engaged in sexual activities with someone else without their partner's consent", 29% of men and 21% of women.

A separate survey of 2,000 adults, run in late 2019 for the Wheatley Institution and analysed by the Institute for Family Studies in 2024, found among ever-married people: 7% an emotional affair only, 5% a sexual affair only, 10% both, and 78% neither.

That last figure deserves a second look if you came here worried. In that survey, most ever-married people reported no affair of either kind.

Who cheats more, men or women?

The answer changed while most articles weren't looking.

What this adds up to:

• Across all ages, men report more. The gap is driven by older generations.

• Among adults aged 25 to 54, the latest data shows no reliable difference. If your partner is in that range, their sex tells you nothing either way.

• The type differs more than the total. In YouGov's 2022 data, men were twice as likely as women to report physical-only cheating (17% against 8%), while women were slightly more likely to report both.

Cheating statistics by age

Source: General Social Survey, Institute for Family Studies, 2018. Ever-married adults reporting sex outside marriage.

How to read this table. It is widely quoted as "men in their seventies cheat the most". That is a misreading, and a very common one:

• The question covers a whole married life, not the current year. Older people have had more years in which to answer yes.

• There is a generation effect. The Institute for Family Studies notes that "Americans born in the 1940s and 1950s reported the highest rates of extramarital sex".

• In the 1990s, the peak was among men aged 50 to 59 (31%). The peak has aged with that generation.

So the table doesn't describe what a seventy-year-old is doing now. It describes what one generation reports when it looks back over a whole married life.

Married, living together, dating: does it matter?

It does, and in the direction you'd expect. YouGov asked people in 2022 whether they had cheated on their current partner:

• Married: 13%

• Living together: 26%

• Casual relationship: 36%

Source: YouGov, 2022. The subgroups are smaller than the full sample, so treat these as orders of magnitude. In this survey, the share falls as the relationship gets more settled.

Cheating and dating apps: what we know and what we don't

This is the section where the loudest numbers are the weakest, so each claim comes with a verdict.

Why the last two do not match the first:

• The 2015 figure is 30% married plus 12% in a relationship, from a global panel, eleven years ago. It is regularly presented as recent and American. It is neither.

• The 2023 figure comes from volunteers recruited by advertising. Tinder objected that participants had no option to describe themselves as single.

• The 2025 figure asks married people whether they use an app, not app users whether they are married. It is the only one of the three built on a representative sample.

A profile is also not proof of an affair. In the 2025 survey, the reason married users gave most often was looking for friends. Whether a dating profile counts as cheating at all is a separate question, and we cover it on its own page.

What statistics cannot do. They describe populations. They say nothing about your partner. A number can tell you that what you fear happens to other people, and that it doesn't happen to most. It can't tell you which side of the percentage your own home is on, and no amount of reading at 1am will change that. What you've noticed at home matters more, and for a boyfriend it's weighed in our six ways to check if he's on dating apps.

If your question is whether one person has an active dating profile, that is a fact that can be checked. CheatEye searches Tinder, and Bumble, Hinge, Happn and OkCupid as an option, from a first name, an age, a gender and a location, with an optional photo, from $17.90. When a profile is found, you see the bio, the photos, when the profile was last active and where it was last used, and the person isn't notified. It does not search by phone number or email, does not read messages and gives no live location. Run a search on CheatEye.

Does a job predict cheating?

Much less than the lists suggest. The only representative data classes jobs by prestige level, not by profession.

Source: General Social Survey, Institute for Family Studies, August 2025. Ever-married adults reporting sex outside marriage. Subgroups are small.

The "top 10 professions" lists that circulate come from a different kind of source: a 2018 survey of members of an affair website. We trace it in what profession cheats the most.

Cheating and divorce

Source: General Social Survey, Institute for Family Studies, 2018 and 2025. The table shows an association. It does not say that the affair caused the divorce. A marriage already in trouble can produce both. If you're past the statistics and living it, here's what to do after catching a spouse cheating.

What people believe

More people believe cheating is very common than the surveys of behaviour support. Some of the fear you came here with comes from how often the big numbers get repeated, not from what was measured. One fact about your own relationship is worth more than all of them, and the free ways to find a hidden dating profile are a place to start.

Numbers we looked for and could not verify

These are the figures you're most likely to have met before landing here. We went looking for each one.

A number with no survey, no year and no sample behind it isn't a statistic. It's a sentence with a percent sign in it.

Methodology and sources

We read the General Social Survey figures in the Institute for Family Studies' analyses, not in the raw data. The 2015 and 2023 Tinder figures were read in press coverage, not in the original reports.

Frequently Asked Questions

What percentage of people cheat? About 13% to 20% of ever-married Americans report sex outside their marriage. About 33% of Americans say they have cheated physically, emotionally or both in a monogamous relationship.

Who statistically cheats the most? By sex, men across all ages: 20% against 13% for sex outside marriage. By age, older generations report more, because the question covers a whole marriage. Among adults aged 25 to 54, the latest data shows no reliable difference between men and women.

What percentage of marriages have infidelity? Surveys count people, not marriages. About 20% of ever-married men and 13% of ever-married women report sex outside their marriage, and 13% of ever-married adults aged 25 to 54 in 2021 to 2022.

Do 1 in 3 men cheat? Only with the widest definition. In YouGov's 2022 survey, 36% of men said they had cheated physically, emotionally or both in a monogamous relationship. For sex outside marriage, the figure is 20% of ever-married men.

Who cheats more, men or women? Across all ages, men report more: 20% against 13% for sex outside marriage. Among adults aged 25 to 54, the most recent data shows no reliable difference.

At what age do people cheat the most? The data doesn't answer that. Surveys ask whether someone has ever cheated during their marriage, so older people score higher. The peak also follows the generation born in the 1940s and 1950s.

Is cheating becoming more common? Not according to the General Social Survey: 17% in the 1990s, 13% in 2021 to 2022, among ever-married adults aged 25 to 54.

How many married people are on dating apps? In a 2025 survey, 11% of married adults under 40 said they currently used a dating app or site: 18% of men and 6% of women. A survey can't speak for one marriage, which is what checking whether your husband is on dating sites is for.

How common is it to be cheated on? In YouGov's 2022 survey, 54% of Americans who had been in a monogamous relationship said a partner had cheated on them, physically, emotionally or both.