Do Redditors lie about their age? We checked 2.3 million who said it twice

Every number about who uses Reddit, including ours, rests on what people say about themselves: "I'm 34", "(29F)", "as a dad of two". The fair objection is that nobody checks. People joke, round, troll and lie, and the people who say anything at all may be a small, odd slice. So before we publish a share of women or a median age for a subreddit, we test the statements against each other. This page is those tests, with the raw numbers, and the places where the data is weaker than we'd like.

The logic is simple. Noise has no memory. If ages and genders on Reddit were made up at random, the same person would contradict themselves as often as two strangers do, different groups of people would disagree about the same subreddit, and the stated ages wouldn't line up with what people talk about. Each check below compares what people actually said with what random pairs of people would produce.

Check 1: people age on schedule

We took everyone who stated their age in at least two posts or comments written a year or more apart: 2,300,680 people. If someone said they were 27 in March 2020 and 31 in May 2024, four years passed and their stated age went up by four. That is what happened for the typical person at every gap. The median change in stated age was exactly 1 year for people writing a year apart (985,538 of them) and exactly 8 years for people writing 8 years apart.

Pair each first statement with a random other person's second one and the tall bar disappears: only 3.5% land on schedule and 6.9% within a year, against 48.6% and 67.9% for real people. Birthdays alone push some honest people to -1 or +1: write two weeks before your birthday and again two weeks after it a year later, and your stated age goes up by two.

Not everyone is consistent. 7.5% of people are off by more than ten years: a 15-year-old who claims to be 40 for one post, someone quoting a friend, a typo, a joke. That is why no single statement decides anything. A person's age in our data comes from the middle of everything they've said about it, so one joke doesn't move them.

Check 2: gender doesn't flip

5,355,038 people stated their gender in at least two different posts or comments. 96.0% said the same thing both times. Two strangers drawn at random would agree 50.0% of the time. When the two statements were a year or more apart (1,315,579 people), it was still 93.7%, and some of the rest may be real changes rather than errors.

A stronger test is when the same person says it in two different ways. Someone who writes "as a woman" in a comment and also tags a post "[34F]" is using two habits that have nothing to do with each other. They agree 97.5% of the time across 2,042,727 people.

The weakest of these is the last one. "My husband" usually means the writer is a woman, but not always, and we count it only for people who never state their gender directly. More on that under where it's weaker.

Check 3: strangers agree

The checks so far compare a person with themselves. This one compares different people. In each subreddit we split the people who stated their gender into two groups that share nobody: those who said it in a sentence ("I'm a woman", "I (34F)") and those who only tagged a post title ("[34F]"). If gender data were noise, the two groups would give unrelated answers. Across 886 subreddits with at least 200 people in each group, the two shares of women track each other with a correlation of 0.89, and the typical gap is 7.8 percentage points.

Some dots sit well off the line, and they tend to be places where the two groups are doing different things. In r/hingeapp, 15% of people who tag their post titles are women against 44% of people who state their gender in text: the people posting tagged threads there are a different crowd from the people commenting, not the same people described two ways.

• Age, the same way. Median age per subreddit from people who write "I'm 34" against other people who tag "[34F]": correlation 0.79 across 1,582 subreddits, typical gap 2 years.
• Random halves. Split each subreddit's people into two random halves: the share of women correlates at 0.99 across 19,866 subreddits (typical gap 1.3 points), median age at 0.99 (typical gap 0 years).
• Years apart. People who wrote in a subreddit in 2019 to 2021 against different people who wrote there in 2023 to 2025: the share of women correlates at 0.95 across 5,683 subreddits, typical gap 3.8 points, and some of that gap is real change.

Check 4: the ages match the words people use

Here is a check that uses nothing people said about their age at all. We took 4.0 million people with a known age who commented in September 2025 and looked for phrases that belong to a stage of life. People we know as 65 or older wrote "my grandkids" or "my granddaughter" 72 times as often as 18 to 24 year olds, and "since I retired" or "my pension" 83 times as often. "My mortgage" peaks in the middle years and is rare among the young.

Gender works the same way. Women in our data wrote about "my makeup", "my mascara" or "my eyeliner" 18 times as often as men; men wrote "my beard" 3.7 times as often as women. Phrases with no reason to lean either way, like "my mortgage", come out close to even, which is what you'd expect if the labels are right rather than skewed in general.

Put the other way round: of the people with a known gender who wrote "my makeup" and the like, 91% were women; of those who wrote "my beard", 88% were men. None of these phrases are used to work out anyone's age or gender, so they are an outside check, not a circle.

Check 5: subreddits where we already know the answer

Some communities announce who they're for. If the data were off, it would show here first. r/PCOS comes out 95% women and r/nba 9%. r/highschool has a median age of 18 and r/over60 61. Ages are at the time of writing.

One result looks wrong at first: r/GenZ has a median age of 29, older than most of Gen Z (born 1997 to 2012). It is a subreddit about a generation, and plenty of older people write there too.

Is it a thin sliver?

In 2025, 75.0 million accounts that aren't known bots posted or commented on Reddit. 16.4 million of them (21.9%) have stated their age or gender at some point. By head count that is a minority. By activity it isn't: those accounts wrote 70.2% of all posts and comments that year. Among accounts that wrote at least ten times, 43% have a known age or gender.

That cuts both ways. If you want to know who is talking in a subreddit, people with a known age or gender cover most of the talking. If you want to know who reads it, they don't: the people who state their age or gender wrote a median of 24 posts and comments in 2025, everyone else 3. We describe the people who write, not lurkers.

Check 6: reading the posts

Consistency is not accuracy: a person could be wrongly labelled the same way twice. So we also drew a sample of 600 people with a gender and 800 with an age (spread across every kind of statement, then weighted back to how common each kind is), pulled the posts their label came from, and had each label checked against the person's own words by two independent AI reviewers, with a third settling disagreements. 91.7% of gender labels were right (95% confidence interval 88.8% to 94.5%) and 91.1% of age labels (87.9% to 94.3%). The reviewers are not humans, and we say so.

Where it's weaker

• "My husband" and "my wife". Read from someone's mention of a partner, gender is right most of the time but far from always. By subreddit, shares of women from these mentions correlate with direct statements at only 0.50, against 0.89 between the two direct methods. We use partner mentions only for people who never state their gender themselves.
• More men than surveys find. Among US adults whose location and gender we can tell from their own posts (1,086,231 people), 59.0% are men. Pew Research Center found that 27% of US men and 23% of US women use Reddit, which would make men a smaller majority of users. Surveys count everyone who uses Reddit; we count the people who write.
• Writers, not readers. People with a known age or gender are much more active than the rest (24 posts and comments a year against 3). They describe the conversation, not the audience.
• Teenagers come out older. r/teenagers has a median age of 19, so half of the people writing there with a known age are 19 or older. Plenty of people past their teens still write in it.
• Not every phrase works. "My homework" is three times as common among 13 to 17 year olds (139 per 100,000) as among 18 to 24 year olds (42), but parents use it too, so it rises again from the mid-30s. We show the phrases that test something and say which ones didn't.
• Nobody checked passports. Everything here is consistency and review against people's own words. It can't catch someone who lies the same way every time, for years.

What this means for our other numbers

Every age and gender figure in KissMyPost research, like how old Redditors are and where each age posts, and every age and gender breakdown in the product, comes from these same self-statements. This page is the evidence behind them. Subreddits where too few people state their age or gender get a "limited data" label or no number at all. If you cite our demographics, link here for the method.

Method

We read public Reddit posts and comments for statements people make about themselves: their age ("I'm 34", "34F", "a 40-year-old dad") and gender ("as a woman", "[29M]", "my husband and I"). Statements about other people, quotes, game levels and product codes that look like ages are left out. Known bots are excluded throughout. A random pair means the same comparison made after shuffling: each person's first statement is paired with the second statement of a random other person with the same gap in time.

• Age stated twice: the first and last statement of age by each person, written at least 12 months apart, from July 2018 onward. "Within a year" means the change in stated age is at most one year from the exact time between them; "on schedule" rounds the difference to the nearest year.
• Gender stated twice: the first and last direct statement of gender by each person in two different texts.
• Two groups per subreddit: gender statements written in that subreddit. Each person counts in one group only. The chart shows safe-for-work, English-language subreddits; with all 2,189 subreddits that meet the 200-person bar, the correlation is 0.91.
• Phrases: comments from September 2025 by people with a known age or gender; a person counts once per phrase however often they used it.
• Measured on 2026-10-26 on posts and comments through September 2026.

Use the data

Charts and CSV files are free to use under CC BY 4.0 with a link to this page. If you spot a mistake, tell us and we'll fix it here with a dated note.

• CSVAll consistency checksEach check, how many people it covers, the measured agreement and the random-pairs baseline.
• CSVAge stated twice, by years apartPeople, median change in stated age and share within a year, for gaps of 1 to 8 years.
• CSVAge stated twice: error distributionChange in stated age minus the time that passed, real people vs random pairs.
• CSVShare of women by subreddit, two separate groups886 safe-for-work subreddits: women among people who state their gender in text vs people who tag it in titles.
• CSVLife-stage phrases by age and genderPeople per 100,000 using grandkids, retirement, mortgage, homework, beard and makeup phrases, September 2025.
• PNGChart: do Redditors lie about their age?1600 × 1000 PNG of the age-error histogram.

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