Do Americans Still Know Their Neighbors? What the Research Says

Ask the major national surveys how many Americans know their neighbors and you get four different numbers — 26 percent, 40 percent, 51 percent, 52 percent — and every one of them is correct. The spread is not measurement error. Each survey is asking a different question, and almost nobody publishes them side by side. Here they are, side by side.

There is no single number, and that is the finding

Two large national surveys measured American neighborliness in 2025, and between them they produced answers ranging from 26 percent to 52 percent. Coverage usually picks one figure and headlines it. The honest version is that these are not competing estimates of one thing — they are estimates of four different things: acquaintance, frequency, episodic contact, and reciprocity. Sort the results by question type and the contradiction disappears, leaving a far more specific picture of what Americans do on their own streets and where a first introduction would land.

Pew Research Center: 26 percent know all or most of their neighbors

Pew Research Center surveyed 9,482 U.S. adults from March 10 to 16, 2025, and published the results on May 8, 2025. Twenty-six percent said they know all or most of their neighbors, 62 percent said they know only some of them, and 12 percent said they know none. Pew reports the demographic pattern directionally rather than numerically: rural and suburban residents, adults 50 and older, White adults, upper-income adults, and monthly religious-service attendees were all likelier to know their neighbors.

The American Neighbor Survey: 40 percent talk to a neighbor weekly

The Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute fielded its 2025 American Neighbor Survey among 5,357 U.S. adults from October 10 to 17, 2025, through the Ipsos KnowledgePanel, with a margin of error of plus or minus 1.55 points. Forty percent said they talk to their neighbors at least a few times a week; 41 percent said no more than a few times a month; 17 percent said they do not talk to their neighbors at all. Daniel A. Cox, Jae Grace and Avery Shields published the findings as Strangers Next Door on May 5, 2026.

Why the estimates differ: four questions, not one

• Acquaintance. Asking whether you know all or most of your neighbors is the strictest test in the field, because it demands a majority of them at once. Pew Research Center's March 2025 answer was 26 percent, and any survey using this framing returns the lowest of the four numbers.
• Frequency. Asking how often you talk to your neighbors measures behavior in a time window rather than a relationship, so the threshold sets the number. At a threshold of at least a few times a week, the Survey Center on American Life's October 2025 answer was 40 percent — fourteen points above the acquaintance figure, from an overlapping population.
• Episodic contact. Asking whether you have spent a social evening with someone in your neighborhood in the past year requires a single event in twelve months. Fifty-one percent said yes in that same October 2025 survey. One summer barbecue clears this bar and clears none of the others.
• Reciprocity. Asking whether your neighbors would bring in your mail while you are away measures expectation, not contact. Fifty-two percent of Pew's March 2025 respondents said theirs probably would, against the 26 percent who know all or most of them. Americans trust neighbors they cannot name.

The decline is real, but the trend lines are weaker than the snapshots

Both documented declines point the same direction, and one is far better documented than the other. Pew Research Center compares its own 2025 figure against its own 2018 figure: 26 percent now, 31 percent then, a five-point drop measured by one organization asking one way. The larger drop reported by the Survey Center on American Life, from 59 percent to 40 percent for weekly contact, sets its 2025 survey against Pew Research Center's 2012 Methodology Survey — a different house, a different instrument, and a study whose primary purpose was methodological. That second comparison deserves a wider error bar than it usually receives.

Young adults drove almost all of the change

The generational gap is the largest finding in the 2025 American Neighbor Survey. Among adults aged 18 to 29, regular contact with neighbors fell from 51 percent in 2012 to 25 percent in 2025 — cut in half in just over a decade. Among seniors the same measure moved seven points, from 63 percent to 56 percent. Pew Research Center's March 2025 survey points the same way without publishing the split: it names adults 50 and older among the groups likelier to know their neighbors. If you are under 30 and assume everyone else knows their neighbors, our guide to meeting your neighbors and our roundup of apps people use to find them both start from the opposite premise.

Where the evidence is thin

Not every widely quoted neighbor statistic is built the same way. An April 7, 2026 Rocket Companies press release reported that only 30 percent of Americans know their neighbors beyond a casual level, alongside a claim that 41 percent find knocking on a neighbor's door too bold. Neither the sample size, the field dates, nor the survey vendor appears in that release, and beyond a casual level is not a defined threshold — so the 30 percent cannot sit on the same scale as Pew's 26 percent or the American Neighbor Survey's 40 percent. Commercial surveys are not automatically wrong. They are frequently unauditable, which is a worse problem for anyone comparing years.

What the health research does and does not say

The U.S. Surgeon General's advisory Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, released in May 2023, is the document most often stapled to neighbor statistics, and it measures something broader. Its headline figures — social disconnection associated with a 29 percent higher risk of heart disease and a 32 percent higher risk of stroke, roughly a 50 percent higher risk of dementia among older adults, and a mortality impact the advisory compares to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day — describe social connection overall, not neighbor relationships specifically. The Surgeon General's advisory measures social connection overall rather than neighbor ties specifically, though separate research on perceived neighborhood social cohesion does exist. Read it as context for why these numbers matter, not as evidence about neighbors.

Reading a decade of this research back to back

Out of practice rather than unfriendly is the pattern that survives every caveat above — and that's what we're building MetroMeet for: a throwback social app scoped to your actual area, with a wall for your street, real verified profiles, and games you can play with people nearby. Adults-only (18+), zero rage-bait by design, and it works at any postal code where it ships — your feed is scoped by the distance you set, not by city lines. The radius ladder runs 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500 and 1000 miles, because a 26 percent answer and a 40 percent answer describe different-sized worlds.

Published August 25, 2026 · MetroMeet