Friday night in America has stopped being a night out. In the early 2000s, Americans spent about 9 percent of their Friday evenings with friends; by 2022 to 2024 that share had fallen to 4 percent, barely above a typical Thursday. Over the same period, the time adults spend with friends across a whole week fell by more than half.
The study, “The End of Friday Nights with Friends,” is by Neal Caren, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It was published open access on 20 August 2026 in the journal Socius.
Plenty of research has shown that Americans see their friends less than they used to. Caren asks a different question: not how much social time has disappeared, but when in the week it vanished.
A weekly heartbeat that stopped
Caren used the American Time Use Survey from 2003 to 2024, collected each year by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Each respondent keeps a diary of a single 24-hour day, recording every activity and who was present. Using those “who” records for 243,095 adults aged 18 and over, he mapped the share of time spent with friends hour by hour across the week.
He compared three eras: 2003 to 2005, the prepandemic years of 2017 to 2019, and 2022 to 2024. In the earliest period, social life had what he calls a weekly “heartbeat.” Each weekday evening produced a small pulse of friend time peaking at around 6 to 7 percent of person-minutes, building to a surge of 9 percent on Friday and 12 percent on Saturday.
That weekend surge ran late. At midnight on Saturday, 4 percent of person-minutes still involved friends.
Friday collapsed, Saturday slid
The rhythm began breaking in the mid-2010s, well before the pandemic, and has shown no recovery since. Friday fell fastest, from a 9 percent peak to 7 percent in 2017 to 2019 and then 4 percent, the level of an ordinary weeknight.
Saturday held up better but still dropped, from 12 to 10 to 7 percent. It remains nearly double the weekday level, but now sits where Friday used to be. The after-midnight hours, once a hallmark of weekend social life, fell below 1 percent.
Across a full week, expected friend time dropped from roughly 350 minutes to 170. Looking only at evenings, from 5 p.m. to 4 a.m., friend time fell from about 24 minutes per adult per day in 2003 to about 9 minutes in 2024, a decline of roughly 60 percent. Those yearly figures stayed nearly flat until about 2014, shrank in the mid-2010s, collapsed in 2020 and did not bounce back.
Every kind of night out shrank together
One finding stood out: the mix of activities barely changed in 22 years. Socializing and social events, relaxing and watching TV with friends, arts, sports and everything else all shrank in roughly the same proportions. Americans did not swap bars for dinner parties; as Caren puts it, the “whole evening social repertoire” thinned in place.
Caren is careful about what the data cannot show. The survey counts only people physically present, so phone calls, video chats and group texts are invisible to it. The decline is consistent with a broader retreat into the home, and with the rise of screen-based alternatives, but the analysis cannot prove either caused it. Whether the drop hit some groups harder, such as younger or never-married adults, is left for future work.
He does flag who may feel it most: unpartnered adults, who are less likely to have a companion at home when the Friday evening with friends no longer happens.
Study Details:
- Title: The End of Friday Nights with Friends
- Authors: Neal Caren
- Journal: Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World (Volume 12)
- Publication Date: August 20, 2026
- DOI: 10.1177/23780231261478215