A YouGov survey of how British couples meet has been circulating since 20 August under the line that dating apps now account for one in five relationships. That is not quite what it found, and the gap between the headline and the table is worth closing before the loose version sets.
The numbers as reported
Per Global Dating Insights, YouGov’s Big Survey on Relationships polled 1,882 Britons, with fieldwork on 9 and 10 July 2026. Apps account for roughly 11% of all current relationships in that sample. A further 5% began on the older browser-based dating sites, which are worth keeping in a separate column rather than folding in.
The one-in-five number is real, but narrower than the headline suggests: it is the peak, among respondents in their thirties, and it recedes again in the 40-49 band, where non-app routes dominate. About two-thirds of those surveyed were in a relationship at the time. Work and mutual friends still lead overall.
The finding we would put next to the app number is a different one: meeting someone simply in passing has dropped sharply overall, and the trade report notes that younger age groups now look far more likely to have met a partner on an app instead. That describes the same shift from the other side, and it is the more interesting sentence in the write-up.
We have not reviewed YouGov’s own tables. The figures above are as reported by the trade press on 20 August, and should be read as that.
What a sample of 1,882 can carry
Nationally, 1,882 is a serviceable sample. Cut by decade of life, it is thin, and the one-in-five figure is a subgroup reading rather than a headline one. That is a reason to quote it carefully, not a reason to dismiss it.
The missing column
There is no regional split published, and that is the part that should bother anyone using this figure practically. The most-quoted UK dating statistic of the year is a national average, and a national average is the one thing that tells a reader in Carlisle, Swansea or Grimsby nothing at all about their own market.
We are not going to fill that column in. Estimating a regional figure from a national sample of this size would be arithmetic dressed as reporting, and the gap it would paper over is the same one we ran into reviewing Hinge: the operators do not publish regional numbers either.
Eleven per cent is a fact about Britain. It is not a fact about a town of ninety thousand, and until somebody publishes the breakdown, nobody can say what is.
One housekeeping note that sits underneath every figure above: the apps in question are adults-only services, and every one of them requires its users to be 18 or over.