The Best Days and Times to Swipe on Hinge - NYC Edition

+ How fast NYC men respond to my likes, why you should swipe on Jan 5 2025, and bar charts galore

Sending out likes on Hinge can feel like hurling a message in a bottle out to sea. You aren’t sure if the recipient sees it since the only confirmation comes if they match.

While this allows you to maintain the self-protective fiction that maybe, just maybe, they hadn’t seen it yet … as a data masochist/realist, I prefer the short-term pain of knowing over the eternal confusion of not-knowing.

Also, if you like tracking macros, writing down your top priorities, waking at 5AM to meditate, or taking 54 supplements, you’ll probably enjoy figuring out the best days and times to swipe.

The Dataset

I cover my Hinge data more in-depth in another article, but this data covers fairly continual use from 2015-2024 with occasional lulls in activity.

This data covers 5,633 likes I sent out first and 1,324 matches resulting from those “outbound” likes.

I excluded matches without like data (a.k.a. they liked me first).

Best Days to Swipe

In summary: if you want to be all Tim Ferriss/hyperoptimized tech bro about your dating life, focus your swiping on Sunday evenings around 8-9pm, followed by Monday evenings. This gives you the best chance of being online at the same time and striking up a convo.

This is backed up by general data from Tinder and Bumble. Sunday and Monday evenings are the most active times on apps.

According to Tinder, the most active day of the entire year is the first Sunday of the year, which falls on January 5 in 2025. (Their “year in swipe” PDF report is mildly interesting but not terribly actionable, more of a cultural survey of what’s trending in interests/majors/first names.)

My Personal Swipe Frequency by Day of Week

I was curious if I, as a single female data point, followed the same pattern. I graphed my outbound likes by day, regardless of whether they resulted in a match. Verdict: mostly, except I’m way more bullish about Saturdays.

Days with Fastest Time to Match

Unsurprisingly, likes sent out Sundays receive matches the most quickly.

I imagine time to match for men takes longer because women receive more likes and may not empty out their like queue as frequently.

If 5-10 men with a lot of data want to send me their datasets, it would be fascinating to aggregate them and see how it trends for men.

The Best Time to Boost Your Profile

If you’re going to pay for a one-hour boost, assuming female behavior isn’t vastly different than the men in my dataset, the best time to do it is 9pm on Sunday.

The dataset isn’t that big (237 matches on Sundays) and I noticed the wee hours of Monday morning were oddly active, so I extended the graph out to Monday, grouped by 2-hour intervals.

Basically, Sunday night 9pm-2am are the prime hours for men swiping on Hinge in NYC.

While I don’t have data for women, I graphed my own likes data to see if it looked similar:

Basically, you can see that I overall follow a similar pattern, but go a bit nuts between midnight and 1am on Sunday night. I conk out a bit earlier than the average man (the average man who matches with me, that is) who stays up surprisingly late.

If we ignore that night owl spike, the best time to target Lana specifically with a boost would be NYC 8pm on a Sunday night.

Yearly Trend in Time to Match

I was curious what the trend over the years looked like. Are people getting more overwhelmed with volume as online dating has gotten more popular?

The bar for each year is labeled with the total # of matches to give some context.

There is a very curious increase in time to match up until 2021 - likely pandemic-related, since the big jump is in 2020, decreasing in subsequent years, but still higher than pre-pandemic.

The Female Experience

While using a free account on Hinge, my likes queue would never get higher than 20 before being cleaned out.

However, I’ve paid for other apps in the past to get access to everyone that liked me and then spent an absurd number of hours sorting through as many people as I could stand. I think it took me about a week to sort through 2,000 likes on Feeld, then I took a trip to Chicago and the number jumped up by 1k in a week.

I’m not complaining nor am I bragging (these are ho-hum numbers for many women in NYC), but this is just to convey that it’s physically not possible to process that many people.

It is counterproductive, as a woman, to process too many likes. In the aforementioned scenario, I ended up with an inbox in meltdown mode with dozens of conversations. I would give out my phone number to do FaceTime screens and men would get understandably upset when they had to remind me who they were.

As a side note: There are a lot of bitter men on the r/Feeld subreddit saying that Pings (a paid feature) are worthless, but I accept a decent percentage of my pings. Not to mention, I’ve given up entirely on swiping since I’ve reached dating saturation.

The Male Experience

I shared the graphs above with some male friends.

One NYC man who dated for many years before getting married commented, “Just an observation, the most desirable women I’ve ever managed to date from apps (i.e. the prettiest / hottest), I managed to link with them VERY early in their online dating experiences. I think the very desirable ones just get snapped up very quickly once they begin swiping. ([My wife] is included in that)”

He then charitably added, “Although in your case I feel like you attract a lot of crazy weirdo guys so this has slowed down your ability to get to a ‘final match’ lol.”

He sees all the nutty screenshots I post, so I just told him it was law of large numbers.

Anecdotally, I’ve heard from many men that they have the most luck on Hinge.

One desirable NYC man - the 6’5” man in finance type - described Hinge as having the most attractive women and while on the date and looking at each other’s app profiles, saw that his likes queue was at 50+ (the point at which Hinge stops giving you an exact number). I had met him on a different app since Hinge had paywalled him for me. It was probably the only time I’ve been jealous of a dude’s dating app experience.

Most Matches (with Men, at Least) Happen within 1 Day

25% of all my matches happen in under 1 hour.

71% of all my matches happen in under 1 day.

By the end of 1 week, we hit 89%.

By the time a month is over, there is a 95% chance that if he were to match, it would have happened by then.

Ok, so he didn’t match within a week. He’s part of the 11% of men that are slow-moving laggards in the online dating world. What does this slowpoke distribution look like?

If He Wanted to, He Would

So if you see someone you like - there is a fairly decent chance you will have your answer within a day. After 1 week, there’s only roughly a 10% chance he just hasn’t responded yet. (I have no idea if my data is representative of all men, much less women - but it is real data nonetheless!)

But you never, ever know: the longest time to match for me was 13.6 months.