The best time to make friends? The weekend, by a lot

If you are trying to make friends as an adult, timing may matter almost as much as where you go.

The 2024 American Time Use Survey gives us a surprisingly clean natural comparison. On weekdays, people age 15 and over spent 26 minutes a day socializing and communicating. On weekends and holidays, they spent 56 minutes.

Weekend social time is 115% higher

Fifty-six divided by 26 is 2.15. Put differently, the average person gets 115% more socializing time on a weekend day.

Watching TV also rises on weekends, from 2.36 to 3.16 hours. But the relative jump in socializing is much bigger. Social time more than doubles.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2024 American Time Use Survey.

Why this matters for making friends

Friendship usually needs repetition. You see the same person a few times, remember something they said, talk again, then eventually one of you proposes doing something outside the original setting.

Weekdays are bad at this because most social contact is squeezed between fixed obligations. The weekend gives interactions room to run longer. It also makes a second step easier. Coffee can turn into lunch. A meetup can turn into another bar. Nobody has a 9:30 meeting in twenty minutes.

The evening is not the only window

BLS time-of-day data shows socializing spread across the day rather than appearing only at night. That suggests a practical approach: recurring daytime activities can be just as useful as nightlife if they put you around the same people repeatedly.

That can be a run club, language exchange, volunteering shift, chess meetup, climbing gym, coworking event, book group or anything else with enough repetition that strangers stop being strangers.

The bigger trend is going the wrong way

In 2014, 38% of Americans socialized or communicated on an average day. By 2024 it was 30%. Average daily time fell from 43 to 35 minutes.

So the weekend gap sits inside a broader decline. We have fewer social encounters overall, which makes each high-opportunity window more valuable.

A simple way to use this

If making friends is a goal, reserve part of one weekend day for something repeatable rather than waiting for plans to appear. The data does not tell us which activity will work for you. It does tell us that the average social opportunity is much larger on those days.

And if you are using an app to meet people, optimize for getting to an actual conversation quickly. The scarce resource is not another list of profiles. It is time spent together.