Romance Reader Demographics: Age, Gender & 2025 Survey Data

Romance reader demographics: the 2025 U.S. survey table

This is the newest national U.S. reading survey we verified for this page. Each row shows how many people in that group said they read or listened to a romance in 2025. The people counted include non-readers, so a row tells you how common romance is inside a group, not how big that group is among romance readers.

Source: YouGov, "2025 Reading and Books" survey results, question 9 ("Which of the following types of books have you read or listened to in 2025?"). 2,203 U.S. adult citizens; 2,201 answered this question. Online panel, weighted to match the adult-citizen population. Reported margin of error about ±2.8 points for the whole sample; this is not a margin for each subgroup. Percentages are weighted; the stated numbers of respondents are unweighted. Label: Survey.

How to read one row. The 24% beside ages 18–29 means about 24 in every 100 people that age said they read or listened to a romance in 2025. It does not mean 24% of romance readers are 18 to 29.

A few things to keep with this table:

• Don't add the rows. The groups overlap: one person can appear in an age group, a gender group and a region. The income groups cover 1,948 of the 2,201 respondents; the table doesn't explain the omitted income answers.
• Small gaps need care. Groups like Black (298 people answered) and Hispanic (312) are small, so a few points of difference may be noise.
• No mixing groups. The survey reports age and gender separately. It doesn't give a number for "women under 30."
• "Other" is YouGov's label. It isn't a stand-in for any one group, and the survey published no separate figure for nonbinary readers.
• It's self-report, taken before the year ended. People said what they'd read so far. It isn't a sales count or a log of finished books.
• "Romance" was the survey's word. The published question gives no definition, so some people may have counted books that a romance reader wouldn't.

Two more numbers from the same survey help set the scene. About 6 in 10 U.S. adult citizens read or listened to at least one book in 2025. Among those readers, 23% read a romance, which put romance level with thrillers and fantasy, behind mystery and crime (35%), history (30%) and biography (27%), according to YouGov's write-up.

The full tables are free on YouGov's site. Open the original survey tables.

The older numbers you've seen, and where they came from

The famous profile of the romance reader comes from surveys taken between 2011 and 2017. These describe the romance-reading crowd itself: out of the romance readers or buyers they asked, how many were women, how old they were, and so on. That's a different measure from the 2025 table, so the two can't be lined up as a trend.

Sources: RWA summary of "The Romance Book Buyer 2017: A Study by NPD Book" (Survey · Dated); Nielsen, "Literary Liaisons," August 2015 (Dated); 2016 Nielsen figures as reported in O'Mahony and Botha's study of Australian romance readers (Dated · Secondhand); 2011 RWA figures as reported by the PBS POV "Guilty Pleasures" archive (Dated · Secondhand).

The 2017 survey gives the most detailed broad romance-reader profile among the sources we checked. It just isn't current. Romance Writers of America, the group that commissioned it, filed for bankruptcy in May 2024, Publishers Weekly reported, and we found no newer reader survey from them.

How we checked: the romance reader surveys side by side

We read the available reports, summaries and secondhand accounts, wrote down who each study asked, when and how, and kept every number tied to that. When two surveys asked different people or different questions, we kept their answers apart instead of blending them.

Romance Book Guide helps you find romance books that feel like your kind of love story — comparing real books by setting, relationship, content level and ending, with the author or publisher information behind every pick, so you can choose your next read with confidence. For this guide, we turned that same habit on reader surveys: show the source, the date and the limits.

This page recommends no specific books, so the labels in our editorial standards for book evidence don't apply. We use the plain data labels from our statistics guide instead: Survey (people answered questions), Reported (a company stated its own finding), Our estimate (our math, shown), Dated (historical) and Secondhand (we saw the number through another publication).

Download the survey ledger (CSV) — every row above, plus the key numbers we used from each survey, source links and check dates.

A bigger number of answers doesn't make a survey more representative. Who got asked matters more. We explain why in why the surveys disagree.

Who reads romance, by gender

Women are much more likely to read romance, and plenty of men do too. In YouGov's December 2025 survey of U.S. adult citizens, 20% of women and 7% of men read or listened to a romance that year, so the reported rate for women was nearly three times as high.

Look only at people who read at least one book in 2025, and the gap holds: 32% of women readers and 12% of men readers picked up a romance, YouGov reported. Romance was one of the genres where men and women differed most. History ran the other way, with 42% of men readers and 20% of women readers.

What share of romance readers are women?

About three in four, by our math using the 2025 survey's rounded rates and a Census population benchmark. This estimates the share among U.S. adult citizens who reported reading or listening to romance, not readers worldwide. That's lower than the famous 82%, which came from a different kind of survey eight years earlier.

Here's how we got there (label: Our estimate):

1. The 2019 American Community Survey reported women as 51.5% of U.S. citizens age 18 and older, and men as 48.5%. YouGov used the 2019 ACS in its weighting, but did not publish its final weighted gender totals. We use 51.5% as a population benchmark, not a confirmed YouGov sample share.
2. YouGov reported that 20% of women read or listened to a romance. So out of every 100 adult citizens, about 10.3 would be women who read romance (20% × 51.5).
3. 7% of men read or listened to a romance. That's about 3.4 out of every 100 adult citizens (7% × 48.5).
4. Together that's about 13.7 in 100, which rounds to the survey's 14% for everyone.
5. Women's share: 10.3 ÷ 13.7 ≈ 75%.

Allowing half a percentage point either way for YouGov's rounded rates, and a female population share of 51–52%, gives about 73% to 77%. That is a rounding-and-assumptions range, not a confidence interval: it leaves out the survey's sampling and weighting uncertainty. Use "roughly three in four" only as our estimate with those limits, not as a gender split YouGov published.

Why the gap from 82%? The 2017 survey talked only to romance readers and set its gender and age mix using book buyers who said they were likely to read romance. YouGov asked a cross-section of all adult citizens and weighted the answers to match the population. Neither is wrong. They're different tools, and only one is recent.

Do men read romance?

Yes. About 7% of U.S. male adult citizens read or listened to a romance in 2025, roughly one in fourteen, in YouGov's survey. Back in 2017, the RWA survey already described its younger readers as more likely to be men than its older ones.

You may have seen the headline that men are bigger romance fans than women. It came from a January 2025 survey by Talker Research for ThriftBooks. Among 2,000 adults who already read at least three or four romances a year, 63% of the men and 60% of the women called themselves die-hard fans, and men reported more hours reading romance (364 a year vs 312). That tells you many of the men in this survey were enthusiastic. It can't tell you how many men read romance, because the survey only asked people who already did. A bookseller paid for it, and the published results don't say how many of the 2,000 were men.

If you're a man who reads romance and has felt like the only one, you aren't.

How old are romance readers?

Younger adults reported the highest rate of romance reading in YouGov's December 2025 survey. Among U.S. adult citizens, 24% of people 18 to 29 read or listened to a romance, compared with 14% of people 30 to 44, 9% of those 45 to 64, and 10% of those 65 and older.

That puts the reported rate for people 18 to 29 at more than twice the rate for people 45 to 64. Young adult novels showed the same tilt in the same survey (20% of 18–29s). One caution: "most likely to read romance" isn't the same as "reads the most." In YouGov's data, people 65 and older read the most books on average (about 12 in 2025), so a lower romance-reading rate doesn't mean older adults read fewer books overall.

Why every article gives a different "average age"

Because each number comes from a different survey, year and group, and none is a current average for all romance readers.

• 35–39 is the age range the 2017 RWA/NPD survey reported as the "average age." It isn't a single average, so don't turn it into "37."
• 42 comes from Nielsen's survey of romance buyers, mostly done in 2014 and published in 2015. The same research said the average had been 44 in 2013.
• The 2025 survey doesn't publish an average. It gives rates by age group, which is more useful if you want to know who's reading now.
• Other figures you may see, like an average of 44.6, didn't trace back to any survey we could find.

Are younger readers changing romance?

Circana describes an influx of younger readers, while YouGov shows higher romance-reading rates among younger adults in 2025. Those are different measures. In July 2023, Circana said new, younger readers drove romance's sales boom, and named BookTok and streaming shows like Bridgerton as the leading ways they found books. Circana didn't publish an age breakdown with that statement, so treat it as an industry observation, not a measurement.

A few other signals:

• In a June 2025 release, Circana reported that 26% of romance book buyers said they were reading "much more" than a year earlier. Circana didn't publish the sample size or field dates.
• In the UK, 66% of romantasy books bought in 2024 went to readers aged 13 to 34, according to NielsenIQ BookData. Romantasy (a story that's both a fantasy and a romance) isn't all of romance, and this measures UK purchases, not U.S. readers or change over time.
• In the 2025 ThriftBooks survey, Gen Z respondents favored plot-based book recommendations (58%), while baby boomers favored author-based recommendations (50%).

If you're older and wondering whether you'll "grow out of" romance, the numbers have a plain answer. Plenty of readers 45 and older read it, and the most devoted readers in some surveys are older than average. A reader's age isn't a reading list. You don't have to outgrow a love story you still enjoy.

Race, ethnicity and sexual orientation

Romance readers are more varied than the stereotype. In the 2025 survey of U.S. adult citizens, 18% of Black adults, 15% of Hispanic adults and 13% of white adults reported reading or listening to a romance.

Remember the rate-or-share question here. A group can make up a smaller slice of romance readers and still be just as likely to read romance. The 2017 RWA survey described its romance readers as 73% White/Caucasian, 12% Black/African American, 7% Latino/Hispanic and 4% Asian/Asian American. That's a picture of who answered that survey in 2017, not a rate, and not a measurement of today. The 2025 estimates do not establish a firm ranking between the groups; small gaps may reflect sampling uncertainty.

For a broad romance-reader profile by sexual orientation, the figures we verified come from the 2017 survey: 86% of its romance readers said they were heterosexual, 9% bisexual, pansexual or another bi+ identity, and 2% gay or lesbian. The published 2025 tables give no sexual-orientation breakdown. We found no current national figure, and we won't build one by adding up old categories.

Niche communities can look very different from the overall picture. In a 2022 survey of 5,715 MM romance readers (love stories between two men), shared by MM authors through their newsletters and social media, 75% of those answering the relevant question said they had a Kindle Unlimited subscription and 64% an Audible subscription. Every question was optional. Those figures describe respondents to those questions in this self-selected survey. It doesn't describe all romance readers.

Who reads romance and who writes it are separate questions. For research on authors of color in romance publishing, see our romance novel statistics.

Income, education, family and where readers live

In the 2025 survey, reported romance-reading rates ranged from 11% to 15% across income groups and from 10% to 17% across regions. The Midwest had the highest reported regional rate; those gaps alone don't establish population differences.

• Family income. 11% of people in families earning under $50,000 read a romance in 2025, 14% between $50,000 and $100,000, and 15% at $100,000 or more. Those are rates within each income band. They can't tell you a romance reader's average income.
• Education. YouGov found romance was read by similar shares of book readers with and without college degrees, unlike literary fiction and science fiction, which leaned toward graduates. The "45% of romance readers have a college degree" line you may see didn't trace to any survey we could check.
• Region. 17% in the Midwest, 14% in the South, 12% in the West and 10% in the Northeast. Older studies measured something different: Nielsen's 2014 buyers were more likely to live in the South and Midwest, and RWA's 2011 buyers were 38% Southern and 26% Midwestern. Those are profiles of buyers, not the share of people in each region who read romance.
• Marriage and partners. We found no current national figure. RWA's 2011 survey, as reported by PBS, said more than half of buyers lived with a spouse or partner. The "59% are married" line didn't trace to a survey we could find, and a sample full of partnered people doesn't show that partnered people read more.

Why does education keep getting asked about? Andrea Martucci, who researches romance readers at Shelf Love, points out that the old stereotype paints romance readers as less smart, so surveys keep measuring degrees. Without comparing to all readers, she argues, that number doesn't mean much. And a degree was never a measure of anyone's taste.

How romance readers read: print, ebooks, audio and subscriptions

Print led in the 2017 survey, and readers used more than one format. In that survey, 92% of romance readers read print, 64% read ebooks and 35% listened to audiobooks, and 15% used a subscription service.

The published 2025 tables don't break formats down by genre. Across U.S. adult citizens in 2025, 46% read a physical book, 24% a digital book and 23% an audiobook.

Romance was ahead on ebooks in Nielsen's early-2014 sales data: ebooks were 39% of romance sales, compared with 31% for adult fiction overall. The two fan surveys also show substantial digital use: in Australia's romance readers' association survey, 77% of 2023 respondents said they usually had an ebook with them, and the MM survey above found three in four respondents to that question had Kindle Unlimited.

If you borrow rather than buy, our Kindle Unlimited romance books guide explains why a Kindle ebook isn't automatically part of Kindle Unlimited. For audiobook and library numbers, see the romance audiobook and Kindle Unlimited numbers in our statistics guide.

Why the surveys disagree

They disagree mostly because they asked different people. A survey of all adults, a survey of book buyers, a survey of romance readers and a survey of a fan club will each give a different picture, and all four can be accurate.

A real example of why "who answered" matters. The Australian Romance Readers Association has surveyed its readers every year since 2009. In 2009, 65% of the people who answered were 21 to 45. By 2023, only 30% were, and 69% were 46 or older, according to Lauren O'Mahony and Yolandi Botha's study of the results (200 to 423 answers a year). Meanwhile, Circana reported younger readers entering the U.S. market. Both can be true. The people answering the club survey were older in 2023. This does not tell us whether the same people answered each year or why younger readers were less represented.

A made-up example of the same trap. Say a romance author posts a poll to her newsletter, and 1,000 people answer. Her readers chose her newsletter, so the poll tells you a lot about her fans. Readers who never heard of her never saw the poll. Getting 10,000 answers wouldn't fix that.

Romance reader statistics to stop citing

A handful of romance reader numbers keep getting repeated without a date or a source. Here's where each one came from, what goes wrong, and what to say instead.

How to quote a romance reader number

Keep the group, the date and the source in the same sentence as the number. Leave out who was counted, and a true percentage can turn into a false claim.

Here are sentences you can lift. They're our paraphrases, not quotations from the original researchers. Cite the study with the number, and credit Romance Book Guide if you quote our wording.

1. In YouGov's December 2025 survey of 2,203 U.S. adult citizens, the genre question had 2,201 respondents; 14% said they had read or listened to a romance that year, including 20% of women and 7% of men. (source, checked October 24, 2026)
2. In the same survey, 24% of U.S. adult citizens ages 18 to 29 said they had read or listened to a romance in 2025, compared with 9% of those 45 to 64. (source, checked October 24, 2026)
3. A December 2017 survey of 2,000 romance readers, conducted by NPD for Romance Writers of America, found that 82% were women and 73% were White/Caucasian. (source, checked October 24, 2026)
4. Nielsen's research on romance buyers, mostly conducted in 2014, reported an average buyer age of 42. (source, checked October 24, 2026)
5. Combining YouGov's rounded 2025 reading rates with a 2019 Census population benchmark, Romance Book Guide estimates that roughly three in four U.S. adult citizens who read or listened to romance that year were women; this is not a gender split YouGov published. (rates, population benchmark, our math and limits, checked October 24, 2026)

Before you reuse any number, check six things: who was asked, where, when, what question, out of which group, and where the original lives.

To credit this page: Romance Book Guide Editorial, "Romance Reader Demographics: Age, Gender & 2025 Survey Data," Romance Book Guide, last checked October 2026, romancebookguide.com/romance-reader-demographics/. Please keep the original source's name with the number, too. YouGov, NPD, Nielsen and the others did the measuring. Our part is the comparison.

Outside the U.S.: the UK and Australia

UK romantasy purchase data shows a large share bought by younger readers. Australia's readers' association has a long-running survey, so its results describe the club's respondents rather than everyone.

• UK. NielsenIQ BookData reported that 66% of romantasy books bought in 2024 went to readers aged 13 to 34, and that nearly 15% of romantasy purchases in 2024 were discovered on video-sharing sites, up from 5% in 2021. Across all genres, women made up 59% of the book purchases recorded in NielsenIQ's UK buyer survey from January 2012 to August 2024. That's context, not a romance figure.
• Australia. See the readers' association example in why the surveys disagree: a dedicated group whose 2023 respondents were older than its 2009 respondents.
• Sales in the UK and Canada are covered in our romance novel statistics.

What this means for your next read

There's no "typical" romance reader to measure yourself against. The surveys show readers who are young and older, women and men, from many backgrounds. What you want from a love story tells you far more about your next book than which group you belong to.

Crowd favorites aren't always your favorites, either. In the 2025 ThriftBooks survey, avid readers' top tropes were forbidden romance (45%), friends-to-lovers (44%) and enemies-to-lovers (42%). A trope is a familiar story pattern, like two rivals who fall for each other. Say love triangles make you want to throw the book across the room, but you'd happily read three marriages of convenience in a row. A survey can't know that about you. You can.

Start with what you want on the page:

• If you'd rather skip explicit scenes, browse clean romance books, where each pick has no explicit sexual scenes on the page, based on its author's or publisher's own description.
• If you want to know how much heat a book has before you start, see how book spice ratings compare.
• If you like a story where the wedding comes first and the love comes later, try marriage of convenience romance books.
• For history and ballrooms at different heat levels, there's Regency romance books. For alpha, beta and omega love stories, from cozy to dark, there's omegaverse romance books.

Numbers describe a crowd. Your next book is personal. The Next Chapter, Romance Book Guide's email letter, sends romance recommendations, new guides and occasional news about books Romance Book Guide publishes, with your tastes in mind. You can unsubscribe any time.

Send me The Next Chapter

Know the feeling you want but not how to ask for it? Answer four quick questions and get a short summary of your tastes to take anywhere you look for books. It describes your preferences; it doesn't pick books for you.

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Research note

We checked the linked reports, summaries and tables on October 24, 2026, with the source limits below. Each finding keeps its own survey date. Romance Book Guide did not run a survey for this page.

• What we checked: YouGov's December 2025 reading survey and its full results tables; Romance Writers of America's published summary of the 2017 NPD survey; Nielsen's 2015 and 2016 articles; Talker Research's January 2025 release for ThriftBooks and its method statement; Circana's 2023 and 2025 romance releases; NielsenIQ BookData's 2025 release and articles; O'Mahony and Botha's study of the Australian Romance Readers Association surveys; the author's Goodreads mirror of the 2022 MM Romance Reader Survey post; the r/fantasyromance community's 2026 census results; the Census Bureau's 2019 ACS national population table hosted by Maryland's State Data Center; Andrea Martucci's essay on romance reader data at Shelf Love.
• Source types: survey reports and results tables, company press releases, trade reporting and a community-run online survey.
• Secondhand: Nielsen's 2016 figures (through O'Mahony and Botha) and RWA's 2011 figures (through the PBS POV archive).
• Our math: the "about three in four" estimate combines YouGov's rounded rates with the 2019 ACS benchmark of 51.5% women among adult citizens. The 73–77% range tests rounding and a 51–52% population assumption only; it is not a confidence interval and excludes sampling and weighting uncertainty.
• What we did not verify: any RWA reader survey after 2017; the full paid NielsenIQ UK romantasy report; private publisher reader profiles; the original source of the figures in "stats to stop citing"; the original MM survey page, which timed out (we read the author's Goodreads mirror); the MM survey's demographic charts and the r/fantasyromance gender/orientation charts, which we did not transcribe; YouGov's final weighted gender totals.
• Tools: we may use software, including AI tools, to help organize research and drafting. Romance Book Guide remains responsible for what we publish.

Romance Book Guide is operated by Kozi Publishing LLC. Read how we check and describe evidence and how we make money. Spotted a number that's wrong or out of date? Send a correction with a source.

Questions people still ask

How many people in the U.S. read romance? About 1 in 7 U.S. adult citizens (14%) read or listened to a romance in 2025, according to YouGov's December survey. We don't turn that into a headcount, because the survey's margin of error and its adult-citizen base both affect the answer.

Is romance the most-read genre? Not in YouGov's 2025 survey. Among U.S. adult citizens who read or listened to at least one book, 23% read a romance, level with thrillers and fantasy and behind mystery and crime (35%), history (30%) and biography (27%), according to YouGov. Sales are a different measure; see our romance novel statistics.

Is there a 2026 romance reader survey? Yes, community surveys exist. The r/fantasyromance community published a 2026 census with 1,021 respondents, but that self-selected sample doesn't represent all romance readers or all U.S. adults. As of October 24, 2026, we found no comparable 2026 national U.S. update to YouGov's 2025 reading survey in the sources we checked.

Sources

All checked October 24, 2026; source limits are noted below.

• YouGov. "2025 Reading and Books" survey results, question 9 (physical PDF pages 20–22) and methodology. Fieldwork December 15–19, 2025. Supports the main table.

• David Montgomery, YouGov. "Most Americans didn't read many books in 2025." December 31, 2025. Supports reader-only gender rates, genre ranking and the education comparison.

• Romance Writers of America. "About the Romance Genre," summary of "The Romance Book Buyer 2017: A Study by NPD Book." Supports the 2017 profile.

• Nielsen. "Literary Liaisons: Who's Reading Romance Books?" August 2015. Supports the 2014 buyer figures.

• Nielsen. "Romance Readers by the Numbers." May 2016. Figures read through O'Mahony and Botha.

• Lauren O'Mahony and Yolandi Botha. "Reading the romance in Australia: The preferences and practices of romance readers from ARRA survey data." TEXT 29 (Special 75), 2025. Supports the Australian example and the 2016 Nielsen figures.

• PBS POV, "Guilty Pleasures." "In Context." Archive page published January 19, 2012, summarizing RWA's 2011 survey.

• Talker Research for ThriftBooks. "Study reveals men bigger fans of romance than women." January 30, 2025; fieldwork January 2–8, 2025.

• Circana. "Another Year of Romance, with a Dark Twist." June 4, 2025 in the release body; page dated June 5. Survey field dates not published.

• Circana. "From Laggard to Leader: Record Sales of Romance Books Reflect Next Generation of Contemporary Readers." July 10, 2023.

• NielsenIQ BookData, via The London Book Fair. "Sci-Fi and fantasy are star performers in book sales trends in 2024." March 10, 2025.

• NielsenIQ BookData. "Dragons and magic and fae, oh my." 2025.

• NielsenIQ BookData. "One in a million: how Books & Consumers data shapes up." 2025.

• Nora Phoenix. "MM Romance Reader Survey 2022 Results." October 10, 2022.

• Andrea Martucci, Shelf Love. "Not Like Other Girls." February 13, 2023.

• Publishers Weekly. "Romance Writers of America Files for Bankruptcy." May 30, 2024.

• U.S. Census Bureau. 2019 ACS national demographic profile, hosted by Maryland's State Data Center, DP05, citizen voting-age population. Supports the 51.5% female population benchmark used in our estimate; this is not a 2025 reader survey.

• NielsenIQ BookData. "The global book market in 2024 was buoyed by strong fiction sales… But who was buying?" May 1, 2025. Explicitly identifies the 66% romantasy purchase figure as UK data.

• The Booker Prize Foundation. "Young, urban and male: who is reading translated fiction in the UK now?" May 4, 2026. Its methodology note describes the UK Books & Consumers survey's monthly sample; its translated-fiction findings are not used as romance data.

• r/fantasyromance moderation team. "Census results: 2026 edition!" 2026. Supports the existence and 1,021-response size of the community survey; self-selected, with varying question bases.