Australians seeing friends weekly fell from 68 to 53 per cent, ABS 2025 survey finds

Australians are seeing each other in person far less often than they did before the pandemic, and the gap has not closed. The Australian Bureau of Statistics released the 2025 General Social Survey on 6 May 2026. It found that 53 per cent of people aged 15 and over had in person contact with family or friends living outside their household at least once a week. In the 2019 survey the figure was 67.8 per cent. The survey was collected from 1 May to 28 June 2025 from 13,302 fully responding households.

The intervening reading makes the shape of the fall clearer. In 2020, when the survey ran during the pandemic, weekly in person contact had collapsed to 42 per cent. So 2025 is a recovery on 2020 and a substantial loss against 2019. The ABS warns explicitly that comparisons between 2025 and 2020 should be interpreted with the pandemic context in mind, which makes 2019 the more useful benchmark.

Not everything moved. Most people, 88 per cent, still had family or friends outside the household to confide in, against 89.3 per cent in 2019 and 86 per cent in 2020. Men were less likely than women to have a confidant, 87 per cent against 92 per cent. Some 83 per cent agreed they could get help when needed, down from 85 per cent in 2020, and 93 per cent could get support from someone outside the household in a crisis. On those measures the social fabric looks close to intact even as the frequency of contact has thinned.

Here is the awkward part. The General Social Survey does not carry a standalone loneliness question. The closest the 2025 release comes is a subgroup finding: among people who rated their overall life satisfaction at 4 or below out of 10, 47 per cent often felt very lonely. Average life satisfaction was 7.1 out of 10, similar to 7.2 in 2020 but below 7.5 in 2019 and 7.6 in 2014. So Australia's flagship social survey documents a large drop in social contact without directly measuring whether people feel lonelier as a result.

The dataset that does measure it disagrees with the intuitive reading. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, on a page last updated on 12 May 2026, draws on the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, which has tracked more than 17,000 people annually since 2001. It puts loneliness at 15 per cent of Australians aged 15 and over in 2024, and social isolation at 15 per cent, with the 35 to 44 group highest for loneliness at 17 per cent. Among people aged 65 and over, loneliness has fallen from 20 per cent in 2001 to 15 per cent in 2024. On that evidence, contact frequency has dropped sharply while the share of people who report feeling lonely has not risen to match.

Other 2025 findings from the ABS point in a bleaker direction. Nine per cent of Australians reported very high psychological distress, and among women aged 15 to 24 the rate was 16.7 per cent against 6 per cent for men the same age. Agreement that most people can be trusted fell to 50 per cent from 61 per cent in 2020 and 55.3 per cent in 2019. Trust in the health system fell to 61 per cent from 76 per cent, and in the justice system to 52 per cent from 63 per cent. Volunteering through an organisation fell to almost 23 per cent from 30 per cent in 2019, worth an estimated 618 million hours. Agreement that cultural diversity is good for society dropped to 75 per cent from 85 per cent in 2020.

The ABS Time Use Survey for 2024, collected from August to October 2024, records that among those who socialised in person on their diary day, 24 per cent of men and 30 per cent of women, the average was 2 hours 19 minutes. A quarter of people checked social media or browsed online, averaging 1 hour 23 minutes. The ABS cautions that survey improvements have reduced comparability with the 2020 to 2021 survey, so this cannot yet be read as a trend.

Internationally the framing is firmer than the Australian numbers. The World Health Organization puts loneliness at about one in six people worldwide and attributes roughly 870,000 deaths a year to it, in the report of its Commission on Social Connection published on 30 June 2025. In Britain the Office for National Statistics collects loneliness alongside personal wellbeing in the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey, with the most recent fieldwork running from 1 to 26 July 2026 among 3,490 respondents and published on 14 August 2026, although that bulletin led on cost of living rather than loneliness figures.

What is not known is whether the 2019 level of weekly contact is ever coming back, or whether 53 per cent is the new resting state. Nor is it clear why measured loneliness has stayed flat while contact has fallen by 15 percentage points, whether because people have substituted other forms of connection, because the two surveys ask different populations different questions in different years, or because the effect has not yet shown up. The ABS next release on the General Social Survey is scheduled for 10 December 2026.