How many hours does it take to make a friend? The 50/90/200 study, with a calculator

How many hours does it take to make a friend? Research by Jeffrey Hall at the University of Kansas suggests it takes roughly 50 hours together to go from acquaintance to casual friend, about 90 hours to become friends and more than 200 hours to become close friends. The hours are a running total from the day you meet.

Think of it as a coffee loyalty card with about 200 squares, except the free thing at the end is a person who’ll help you move a couch. Hanging out, meals and games earn stamps fastest. Hours spent working side by side earn fewer, which is how you can sit next to someone for three years and still only know them as “Chris from Accounts”.

Calculator: when will you be close friends?

Slide it to roughly how many hours a week you spend with someone new, counting time actually together or talking.

The slider stops at 20 hours a week. Past that you’re not so much making a friend as sharing a bathroom.

Three worked examples:

• A coffee every fortnight. An hour every two weeks is the slider’s lowest setting, and it gets you to casual friend in about two years and close friend in nearly eight, by which time the café will have changed owners twice and started doing sourdough.
• Weekly social sport. Two and a half hours every Wednesday, counting the chips after: casual friends in about 20 weeks and close friends in about 80, or a year and a half of relitigating the same bad call from the first game.
• Hall’s first-year students. They reported about 19 hours in a typical week with each new person, on average, which puts 200 hours at around week 11.

The calculator does the arithmetic, but real friendships don’t bank hours at a steady rate. Hall found that after about three months, acquaintances might keep clocking up hours, “but this time does not appear to increase the chance of becoming casual friends”. If your answer comes back in years, take it as a sign to book the next coffee sooner.

How many hours to make a friend? Jeffrey Hall’s study in plain English

Combining two studies, Hall estimated 40 to 60 hours for a casual friendship, 80 to 100 to become friends and more than 200 to become good friends, which is where the famous 50, 90 and 200 come from.

• Study one: 355 adults who had just moved. Americans who had moved at least 50 miles (about 80 km) in the past six months each looked back on one new person they’d met. They were paid 65 US cents apiece.
• Study two: 112 first-year students. Students who had just moved to the University of Kansas answered questions about two new people in weeks three, six and nine of semester.

The detail many write-ups miss: the hours are cumulative, counted from the day people met (Hall’s table notes that the “mean hours reported are cumulative across wave”). So a close friendship is about 200 hours in all, not 50 plus 90 plus 200. That’s 140 hours back, the best part of a month of full-time work, refunded by the small print.

How many hours to make a close friend, or a best friend?

Hall’s top category was a single “good/best friend” bucket, which is why careful summaries say “close friend” rather than “best friend”. In his adult data, best friendships didn’t show up until after about 300 hours together, so a best friend is a close friend who kept turning up.

Why 200 hours feels like so much

School and uni handed out hours for free, five days a week. Adult life makes you book them, then move them, then book them again, which is a big part of why it’s so hard to make friends as an adult.

In Australia, on the day they filled in their 2024 time-use diary, about a quarter of men and three in ten women (aged 15 and over) listed talking or socialising in person among their free-time activities.

Meanwhile, the American survey found people watched 2.6 hours of TV a day. At that rate the telly crosses the 200-hour close-friend line around mid-March, every year, and it has yet to ask how you are.

What counts as time together (and does work count?)

Time you choose to spend together counts most. In Hall’s adult study, a bigger share of time spent hanging out, watching TV and films or gaming together went with closer friendships, while a bigger share at work or school went with less closeness.

How long you’ve known someone isn’t the measure either. As Hall puts it, “it is possible to know someone for years, but not develop a friendship”. Hence the neighbour you’ve waved to every morning since 2019, whose name it is now far too late to ask.

Does time at work count towards making friends?

It counts, just for less. Hall’s survey asked for the hours people were “actually in their company or communicating with them”, adding: “(So, not just you were working the same shift.)” That bracket is the whole work-friend problem in nine words.

Nothing in the study says work hours count half, either. Hall’s fix, from the university’s release: “If you work together, go to lunch or out for a drink.” Chris from Accounts may well say yes, and graduate to just “Chris”.

Which conversations move a friendship along?

The kind of talk mattered more than the amount. In the student study, catching up and joking around predicted friendships getting closer “above and beyond the number of hours together”, while small talk (pets, sports, TV) predicted them getting less close between weeks six and nine.

So “Watched or read anything good lately?” is a fine way in and a thin diet. Howdy Mate! has it in its light set of questions, so yes, we put small talk behind a shuffle button. “What’s something you’ve changed your mind about lately?”, from the deeper set, is much better value.

Texting is a grey area: Hall counted time “communicating with them” without measuring texts separately. So the long thread arguing about the best laksa in town probably counts for something. The laksa itself definitely does.

Four claims about the hours, checked against the research:

50, 100 or 200 hours to make a friend? Why the numbers differ

Because the paper has three sets of numbers, and every headline picked its favourite:

• 94, 164 and 219 hours. From the adults who had moved: the points where the next level became more likely than not, from people looking back on friendships about three months old.
• 43, 57 and 119 hours. From the students, about three weeks after meeting. Nearly half had met in the dorms, where the architecture did most of the work.
• 50, 90 and 200-plus hours. The university’s rounding of Hall’s combined estimates, which the paper gives as ranges of 40 to 60, 80 to 100 and more than 200.

Hall thinks the adult figures run high (“likely conservative”, in his words), partly because people kept adding hours after a friendship had already moved up a level. He also wonders, without claiming it, whether older adults simply need more hours.

The “100 hours to make a friend” you’ll also see is most likely the top of the 80 to 100 range. So if three websites gave you three different numbers, nobody was fibbing. They were quoting different tables, the most academic way possible to have an argument.

The hours you’ve already banked with old friends

Every close friend you already have is 200-odd hours already spent. Hall calls time together, especially leisure time, “an investment toward future returns”, and estimates that 13 to 15 close friends, if none were family, represent 2,000 to 3,000 hours “to merely achieve that status”.

That’s a year to a year and a half of full-time work, paid entirely in pub lunches, airport lifts and one long night assembling a wardrobe that came with the wrong screws.

Try the calculator backwards on an old friend: pick “chosen time together only”, set the slider to what you used to share each week and see how early you crossed the close-friend line. Our own back-of-envelope maths, not Hall’s: a Friday night every week for three years, holidays included, at three hours a time, is about 470 hours, more than double that line.

The catch is that old stamps fade. In an 18-month study of 25 students, friendships were “more sensitive to decreases in contact frequency” than family ties. It’s a small study, but it fits the wider research on why friendships drift apart.

An old friend is two hundred hours you’ll never have to repeat.

If you like a tally, the app lets you note how long each catch-up ran. It won’t add them up, which is probably for the best: nobody needs to know their oldest mate to the nearest hour.

So the job with an old friend isn’t finding another 200 hours. It’s a stamp every few weeks, which is most of what staying in touch with friends comes down to. If a card has sat in the drawer for years, here’s how to reconnect with an old friend.

How to make friends faster (without being weird)

You can’t skip the hours, but you can stack them. In Hall’s student study, friendships that moved up a level more than doubled their time together between surveys about three weeks apart, and earlier research he cites found most friendships form within three to nine weeks of meeting.

Students who became close friends really did cram: some spent a third of their waking hours in a month with one person, and Hall puts close friendship at 200-plus hours over about six weeks. The fastest method in the paper isn’t one we recommend: in a 1965 study Hall cites, strangers shut in pairs in a small room for ten days were confiding at close to best-friend levels after 160 hours. Gentler ways to stack hours, doors unlocked:

• Invite, then invite again. Hall’s advice is plain: “You can’t make people spend time with you, but you can invite them.” If the asking is the hard bit, here’s how to ask a friend to hang out.
• Join something that repeats. A weekly thing (a book club, footy training, a Saturday run club and the coffee after) stacks hours without anyone organising it. New in town? Here’s how to make friends in a new city.
• Follow up while it’s warm. Suggest the next thing within a week or two. “We should catch up sometime” is lovely to hear and earns exactly zero stamps.
• Remember it takes two. Hall notes that spending more time together isn’t a decision one person can make alone. If they’re flat out this month, that’s their calendar talking, not their opinion of you.

The short version

• The numbers: about 50 hours to casual friend, 90 to friend and 200-plus to close friend.
• They’re cumulative: about 200 in all, not 340.
• Chosen time counts most: hanging out, catching up and joking around beat hours at the next desk.
• Speed comes from repetition: invite, join something weekly and follow up while it’s warm.
• Old friends are banked hours: small, regular catch-ups keep them close.

A new card takes a while to fill, so start one this week if you can. And somewhere out there is an old friend holding a card with your name on it, most of the squares already stamped. Send the text that stamps the next one.