How Long Does It Take to Make a Friend?

It takes about 50 hours together to become casual friends, about 90 to become friends, and more than 200 to become close friends, according to a 2018 study by Jeffrey Hall of the University of Kansas. So how long does it take to make a friend on a real calendar? At one two-hour meeting a week, about six months for a casual friend, ten months for a friend and nearly two years for a close one.

Those numbers get quoted like a law of nature. They're rounded estimates from two American samples, and the way the hours were spent mattered as much as the total. This guide explains what the study measured, what it didn't, and what the hours look like in a normal life.

What Hall's study actually did

Hall ran two studies, published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships (Hall, 2018). The abstract says he looked at friendship status as a function of hours together, shared activities and everyday talk.

• Study 1: adults who had moved. 355 people on Amazon's MTurk panel, all recently relocated, estimated the time they had spent with a new acquaintance. The University of Kansas says they had moved in the previous six months, were looking for new friends, and rated the relationship as acquaintance, casual friend, friend or close friend (University of Kansas, 2018).
• Study 2: first-year students. 112 students reported the hours they had spent with two new acquaintances, three times over nine weeks. That let Hall watch closeness change as the hours built up.

In both studies, more hours went with closer friendships. In the first, time spent on leisure activities also predicted closeness. In the second, two types of everyday talk predicted changes in closeness.

How many hours to become friends? Why the numbers differ

The figures you'll see quoted don't all match, because different write-ups report different cuts of the data. We've worked from the paper's abstract, the University of Kansas release and two published summaries, so read this table as a guide.

The student and adult columns come from Greater Good Magazine and Simply Psychology. Students reached each stage in about half the adults' hours, or fewer. Greater Good reports Hall's speculation that campus life may speed friendship up, and that students may overrate how deep their friendships are. Simply Psychology adds that adults' hours may be inflated, because some of those hours could have built up after the friendship had already moved on.

So "50 hours to make a friend" is a useful rule of thumb and no more than that. The 200 hours friendship figure is better read as a floor. If you're an adult with a job, plan on the higher numbers.

What the study didn't measure

• Cause and effect. More hours went with closer friendships, but people who like each other also choose to spend more time together. The study can't fully separate the two.
• Exact hours. Nobody had a stopwatch. People worked from memory, and those estimates get less accurate as time passes.
• The other person's view. The abstract and summaries describe one person reporting on someone else. A friendship takes two opinions.
• Friendships that failed. Simply Psychology notes that both studies covered relationships that lasted. They can't tell you how many hours people spend on someone who never becomes a friend.
• People in general. Both samples were in the US, and everyone had recently moved or started university. Those are people with a strong reason to find friends. A settled person with a full life might take longer, and the study can't say.
• Online friendship. The abstract and summaries don't separate texting, calls or online time from time in person. Nobody should quote this study as proof that 50 hours of messages makes a friend.

What kind of hour counts

The most useful part of this research is how the hours were spent. The University of Kansas says time spent "hanging out, joking around, playing video games and the like" counted, and hours spent working together counted for less. Greater Good's summary goes further. Time at work or school didn't measurably increase closeness, and neither did shared activities such as travel, exercise, partying, shopping, team activities or church. What showed up in closer friendships was relaxing and hanging out, plus watching movies and playing video games for adults.

Among the students, the kind of talk mattered too. Catching up, playful talk, serious conversations and showing affection went with growing closer. Small talk about current events, pets, sports, movies or music went with growing apart, and talking more overall made no difference.

Don't conclude that clubs are pointless. These are small samples, and a club is how you meet someone in the first place. Our reading is that the activity gets you into the room and the loose time around it does the work: the walk to the station, the food afterwards, the 20 minutes when nobody has a job to do.

There's also a trade-off. Students who moved a friendship up a level about doubled their hours with that person and spent about half as much time with other friends, and those other friendships didn't progress. Hours are finite, so friendship is partly a decision about who gets them.

How long does it take to make a friend on a real calendar?

This table does the arithmetic for some common patterns, using the rounded 50, 90 and 200.

Three warnings before you plan your year around this.

Real life has gaps. The table assumes you never miss a week. If you make three meetings out of four, add a third to every figure, so 25 weeks becomes about 33.

The daily rows are the optimistic case. Nobody has shown that a quarter of an hour of texting counts the same as a quarter of an hour on a sofa. Voice may do better than typing: in work by Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley, people felt more connected talking than typing (reported 2020).

Groups dilute the hours. Two hours in a group of eight is different from two hours with one person, though the study doesn't tell us by how much.

Short daily contact has its uses, just not as a shortcut. Rimeso, a free Android app, has you spend about four minutes a day with the same small circle, in English or Hindi. That comes to about two hours a month, so on its own it would take around two years to reach 50 hours, even if every minute counted. What it offers is different: the same people each day, a reason to talk, and private chat with anyone in your circle you click with. Think of it as something that keeps conversation going between longer stretches of time with people, and not as a way to skip them.

How to shorten the calendar

1. Extend what already exists. Stay 30 minutes after the class. A one-hour weekly session becomes 90 minutes with no new appointment, and the extra half hour is the loose kind.
2. Concentrate the hours. A weekend away holds about 30 waking hours, the same as 15 weeks of two-hour coffees. A single day trip holds about eight. That's arithmetic and not a research finding, but it may be why people bond so fast on trips.
3. Share something dull. Helping someone move flat, painting a room, a long drive to the airport. These are long, cheap, low-pressure hours.
4. Reduce the number of people. With four spare hours a week, you can give two people two hours each. Spread across eight, each gets 30 minutes, and reaching 50 hours takes almost two years.
5. Keep the gaps short. Early on, try not to let more than a couple of weeks pass. A friendship in progress needs some momentum.
6. Move the talk along. Catching up, joking and serious conversation were the kinds of talk that went with getting closer. Our deep questions to ask friends can help with the last one.

The same arithmetic explains why close friends are scarce. Even with four spare hours a week, two friendships at 200 hours each would use all of them for nearly two years. There aren't enough hours for many people, so struggling to build a big circle is a maths problem more than a personal failing.

If you've done the hours and nothing has happened

Say you've been in the same running group for a year. That's about 100 hours in the same park as someone whose surname you don't know. Shared activity on its own seems to be a weak ingredient, so change the setting and the kind of talk:

We've been running together for a year and I know nothing about you except your pace. Breakfast after this?

If that goes nowhere twice, you have your answer, and it says little about you. A lot of attempts fizzle, including some with plenty of hours behind them. Move your hours to someone else.

If you're starting from scratch, we have practical guides on making friends after moving, making friends as an adult and making friends as an introvert. Once you've put in the hours, how to keep friendships alive covers the much cheaper job of keeping them.

Frequently asked questions

How many hours does it take to become friends?

Research by Jeffrey Hall (2018) estimated about 50 hours together to become casual friends, about 90 to become friends and more than 200 to become close friends. Figures vary between write-ups, and his adult sample took longer than his student sample.

Does texting count towards the 50 hours?

Nobody can say for sure. The study's abstract and public summaries do not separate texting or calls from time in person. Treat messages as a way to keep a friendship going between meetings, and do not count them hour for hour.

Do hours at work or in class count?

They seem to count for much less. The University of Kansas said hours spent working together counted for less than hanging out, and Greater Good Magazine reported no measurable gain in closeness from time at work or school. Time away from the task is what helps.

Why did adults need more hours than students?

The study could not settle that. Campus life may speed friendship up, students may overrate how close they have become, and adults were estimating their hours from memory, which may have inflated the totals.

Will 200 hours make someone my close friend?

No. Hours help, but they are not enough on their own. Time at a desk may add little, and both people have to want the friendship. Use the number as a rough planning guide and nothing firmer.

Sources

• Jeffrey A. Hall, How many hours does it take to make a friend?, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 2018
• University of Kansas, How to make friends? Study reveals how many hours it takes, 2018
• Kira M. Newman, How long does it take to make a friend?, Greater Good Magazine, 2018
• Simply Psychology, How many hours does it take to make a friend?
• EurekAlert news release on Kumar and Epley, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2020