How Often Do People Masturbate: Stats by Age & Gender

Masturbation is one of the most common sexual behaviors, yet how often people actually do it varies widely by gender and shifts across the lifespan. A nationally representative U.S. survey found that roughly 60% of men reported masturbating in the prior month compared with about 36.5% of women, and about a quarter of women said they had never masturbated at all versus around 10% of men.¹ Those headline numbers, though, flatten a much more layered picture once you account for age, relationship status, and what people are actually seeking from solo sex.

The Gender Gap in Frequency

Across nearly every measure researchers have used, men report masturbating more often than women. That holds for lifetime experience, recent activity, and weekly or monthly frequency. The same nationally representative survey that captured the month-by-month numbers found that significantly more men than women reported lifetime masturbation, past-month masturbation, and higher overall frequency.² This gap is not subtle. Men are roughly twice as likely as women to have masturbated in the past month, and about two and a half times less likely to say they have never done it at all.

Why the gap exists is harder to pin down than it looks. Cultural taboos around women’s sexuality almost certainly play a role: women have historically received stronger messaging that solo sexual pleasure is shameful. Reporting bias is another factor. Even in anonymous surveys, people tend to filter their answers through social expectations, and women face more of those expectations around this topic. But the gap persists even in studies designed to minimize stigma, which suggests there is also a genuine difference in frequency rather than just a reporting artifact. Most researchers treat the gap as some combination of both: real behavioral differences amplified by underreporting among women.

How Age Changes the Pattern

The common assumption is that masturbation peaks in the teenage years and declines from there, especially once people settle into long-term relationships. The reality is more interesting and differs sharply between men and women. A population-based longitudinal study tracking people from late adolescence into mid-adulthood found that men’s masturbation frequency remained largely stable across the entire age span studied.³ In other words, how often a man masturbates at 20 is a decent predictor of how often he does at 35.

Women showed a strikingly different trajectory. Their masturbation frequency gradually increased from late adolescence through their early 30s, followed by a slight decline.³ This runs counter to the idea that sexual interest inevitably drops with age. For many women, solo sexual behavior actually becomes more common as they move through their 20s, possibly reflecting growing comfort with their own bodies, reduced stigma with maturity, or simply more knowledge of what works for them. The slight decline after the early 30s may reflect the demands of career, parenthood, or shifting relationship dynamics more than it reflects waning desire.

These trajectories matter because they upend the narrative that masturbation is primarily a young person’s behavior. For men, it is remarkably consistent from youth onward. For women, the peak comes later than most people expect.

Masturbation Among Older Adults

Sexual behavior research has historically ignored people over 60, but a multi-country European study of older adults helps fill that gap. Across four countries, between 41% and 65% of older men and 27% to 40% of older women reported masturbating in the preceding month.⁴ Those numbers are lower than for younger adults, but they are far from negligible. A sizable share of people in their 60s, 70s, and beyond continue to engage in solo sex regularly.

The gender gap persists into older age, with men still reporting higher rates. But notice that the gap narrows slightly compared with younger populations. The range for older men (41–65%) and older women (27–40%) overlaps more than you might expect given the gap seen in younger cohorts. Several factors probably contribute to this narrowing. Partnered sex tends to decline more steeply with age for various health and relationship reasons, and masturbation can fill that void for both genders. For older women who may have lost partners or whose partners have health conditions affecting sexual function, solo sex becomes a more prominent part of their sexual lives. The cultural stigma that might have discouraged younger women from masturbating also tends to carry less weight as people get older and care less about external expectations.

The country-to-country variation in that study is worth noting. The spread from 41% to 65% among men and 27% to 40% among women across different European nations suggests that cultural context still shapes these behaviors even late in life. This is a reminder that the numbers are not purely biological; social norms around sexuality and aging filter how people behave and how they report it.

Relationship Status and the “Compensation” Myth

One of the most persistent misconceptions is that masturbation is a substitute for partnered sex. The logic seems obvious: people masturbate because they are not getting enough sex with a partner, so those in satisfying relationships should masturbate less. The data tells a more complicated story.

People in relationships do masturbate, and many do so regularly. What is revealing is the link between desire for more partnered sex and solo sex frequency. Among women, after controlling for demographics and relationship status, those who wanted partnered sex much more often than they were currently having were nearly four times as likely to report higher masturbation frequency compared with women who were content with their current partnered sex frequency. Women who wanted a little more partnered sex were about twice as likely to masturbate more often.⁵

This finding supports the idea that unmet desire does drive some masturbation, at least among women. But calling it “compensation” misses the point. These same studies consistently find that people with active, satisfying sex lives also masturbate. Solo sex and partnered sex are not on opposite ends of a seesaw. For many people, they coexist, serving different needs. Partnered sex involves intimacy and connection; masturbation can be about stress relief, sleep, self-exploration, or simply a different kind of pleasure. Framing solo sex purely as a stopgap for what is “missing” overlooks its role as a standalone behavior with its own value.

What Drives Frequency Beyond Gender and Age

Gender and age are the two biggest demographic predictors of how often someone masturbates, but they are far from the only ones. A study examining the relationship between masturbation frequency and sexual satisfaction found that younger age, higher pornography consumption, and a preference for sexual variety were the factors most strongly linked to increased masturbation frequency.⁶ None of these will surprise most people, but the specifics are informative. Pornography use and masturbation tend to rise and fall together, which makes intuitive sense since one often accompanies the other. A preference for varied sexual experiences also correlates with more solo sex, suggesting that people who are more sexually curious or exploratory in general are also more likely to masturbate frequently.

What is more interesting is what does not drive frequency. The same research found that sexual distress and a negative body or genital self-image were more clearly linked to sexual dissatisfaction than to masturbation frequency itself.⁶ In other words, feeling bad about your body or your sex life does not necessarily make you masturbate more or less. It makes you less satisfied with your sexual life overall, which is a related but distinct thing. This distinction matters because a common worry is that frequent masturbation is a symptom of something psychologically wrong. The evidence suggests that how often you do it is driven mostly by age, gender, and interest in sexual variety, not by emotional distress.

The Satisfaction Paradox

There is a curious wrinkle in the data that researchers have labeled “seemingly paradoxical.” People who masturbate more frequently do not consistently report higher sexual satisfaction, and in some analyses, the association runs slightly in the other direction. This sounds alarming until you unpack it. The paradox largely dissolves once you separate the drivers. Masturbation frequency tracks with things like youth, curiosity, and pornography use. Sexual dissatisfaction tracks with distress, poor body image, and relationship problems. These are different buckets of influence, and they overlap only partially.

What this means practically is that masturbation frequency, on its own, is a poor barometer of how happy someone is with their sex life. Someone who masturbates daily might be perfectly satisfied; someone who rarely does might be deeply unhappy. The frequency is not the signal. The context around it is. If someone is masturbating frequently because they enjoy it and find it pleasurable, that pattern looks nothing like the pattern of someone who masturbates frequently out of compulsion or as an escape from emotional pain, even though the behavior on paper looks identical.

Why Self-Reported Numbers Are Always a Little Off

Every number in this article comes from self-report surveys. There is no way around that for studying private sexual behavior, but it means every figure carries a margin of error shaped by stigma, memory, and interpretation. Men tend to overreport sexual behavior in general, while women tend to underreport it, a pattern that holds across many areas of sexual health research. The true gender gap in masturbation frequency is probably real but somewhat smaller than surveys suggest.

There is also the question of what counts. Some surveys ask about “masturbation” without defining it, leaving respondents to decide whether touching that lasted only a few seconds counts, whether using a vibrator counts, or whether mutual masturbation with a partner counts. Others define it strictly as solo genital stimulation to orgasm, which excludes behaviors that many people would call masturbation. These definitional differences make it difficult to compare numbers across studies with precision. When one survey says 60% and another says 50%, the gap might reflect different populations, different time periods, or just different question wording.

Despite these limitations, the broad patterns are consistent enough across studies, countries, and decades that they can be taken seriously. Men report higher frequency than women. Frequency for men is stable across adulthood while it rises for women into the early 30s. A substantial minority of people, particularly women, report never having masturbated. And solo sex continues well into old age for a large share of both men and women. Those findings show up repeatedly regardless of how the question is asked.

Cultural Variation and Underexplored Populations

Most large-scale masturbation research has been conducted in Western, relatively high-income countries. The European study of older adults showed meaningful variation even within Europe, with prevalence rates differing by as much as 24 percentage points for men across the four countries studied.⁴ If that much variation exists within culturally similar European nations, the global picture is almost certainly far more diverse. In countries where religious or legal prohibitions against masturbation are strong, reported rates drop dramatically, though it is unclear how much of the drop reflects actual behavior versus willingness to disclose it on a survey.

Non-binary and gender-diverse individuals are another population where the data is thin. Most of the major surveys use binary gender categories, which means their masturbation patterns are either excluded entirely or lumped in with one of two groups. The limited data available suggests that gender-diverse people masturbate at rates comparable to or slightly higher than cisgender peers, but the sample sizes in most studies are too small to draw firm conclusions. As researchers begin to collect gender data in more inclusive ways, clearer patterns for these groups should emerge. For now, stating confident statistics about non-binary masturbation frequency would be getting ahead of what the evidence supports.

Disability and chronic illness are similarly underexplored. Physical limitations, medication side effects, and pain can all affect sexual behavior including masturbation, yet these populations rarely appear in major sexual behavior surveys in sufficient numbers to produce reliable estimates. What small studies exist suggest that people with disabilities continue to masturbate at meaningful rates, but the barriers and adaptations they face deserve more research attention than they have received.