See where you rank among Americans your age — based on real survey data from the CDC's National Survey of Family Growth.
100% anonymous — nothing is stored or shared. Privacy Policy
It's one of those questions everyone wonders about but few discuss openly. According to the CDC's National Survey of Family Growth, the number of lifetime sexual partners for American adults varies by age and gender. This calculator uses that federal survey data to show you exactly where you fall — for both opposite-sex and same-sex partners.
The NSFG is conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The 2022–2023 cycle collected responses from 5,586 females and 4,371 males aged 15–49 across the United States. Responses are weighted to produce nationally representative estimates. Opposite-sex partner count (LIFPRTNR) is top-coded at 50 and same-sex partner count (SAMLIFENUM) is top-coded at 10 — meaning anyone who reported at or above that number is grouped together. This calculator covers ages 18–49.
This tool compares you to other people who share your sexual orientation, age, and gender. The NSFG asks respondents to identify as gay/lesbian, straight, bisexual, something else, or don't know. For simplicity and to have enough data to calculate meaningful percentiles, we grouped bisexual, something else, and don't know into a single "other" category — essentially anyone who didn't clearly identify as straight or gay/lesbian. We dropped respondents who refused to answer the orientation question entirely (31 men and 59 women), as there were too few to form a useful group.
Age Grouping by Orientation: Due to different sample sizes across orientations, we use different age groupings. Both gay/lesbian and other orientations (bisexual, something else, don't know) are grouped into 8-year age ranges (18–25, 26–33, 34–41, 42–49) to ensure stable percentile estimates. Straight orientation has the largest sample and uses single-year ages. When data is limited for your specific demographic, we'll let you know so you have full context for interpreting your result.
Your result tells you what percentage of people in your demographic reported fewer lifetime partners than you. If your result says 75th percentile, that means you've had more partners than 75 out of every 100 people your age and gender in the United States. If you report zero partners, it's obviously impossible for anyone to have fewer, so we show you the percentage of people your age who also report zero — you may be surprised how common it is. Because we round to whole numbers, the percentages shown may not always add up to exactly 100%, and very small shares are displayed as "less than 1%" rather than 0%. There's no "right" number — this is purely informational, built on federally collected data to satisfy a very human curiosity.