How the odds are calculated

The calculator answers one question: of all the adults you could be looking for, what share meets every standard you set? This page explains exactly how it gets there, where each number comes from, and where it’s likely to be off.

The short version

1. Each standard you pick — an age range, a minimum height, a minimum income and so on — keeps some share of people and rules out the rest.
2. Those shares are multiplied together.
3. The answer is shown two ways: as a percentage of people in your chosen age range, and as an estimated number of real people.

A worked example

Say you’re looking for a man aged 25 to 35 who is at least 6 feet tall, earns at least $100,000 a year, and isn’t married.

Within that age range, 16% × 21% × 49% leaves about 1.65% of men. Across the roughly 127 million adult men in the U.S., that works out to around 384,000 people.

That’s roughly 1 man in 60 in that age range. Every standard you add multiplies the pool down again, which is why results can fall so quickly.

Where every number comes from

All figures are for U.S. adults unless you switch to another country. They’re rounded public statistics — nothing is invented to fill a gap.

A note on “build”

The quiz lets you pick a build — normal, athletic or obese — but only obesity (a BMI of 30 or more) is actually measured nationally. “Athletic” isn’t a BMI category at all: a weightlifter and someone who never exercises can have the same BMI. So the calculator starts from the real obesity figure and then estimates that roughly a third of non-obese men and a quarter of non-obese women are athletic, based on the share of adults who meet federal guidelines for both cardio and strength exercise. That split is an assumption rather than a measurement, and it’s the least certain number on this page.

Other countries

The Global Dream Partner Report runs the same calculation for 198 countries. For 177 of them it uses that country’s own figures, drawn from national statistics offices, UN population data, the World Health Organization, UN marriage data and World Bank and IMF income data. For the other 21, where reliable national figures aren’t published, it combines the country’s real population with its region’s typical profile — and the report labels those as regional estimates rather than national statistics.

Most countries don’t collect race or ethnicity data at all — France and much of Europe are barred from doing so by law — so that filter only appears where a country actually publishes it.

Where the estimates can go wrong

This is a real calculation from real data, but it is an estimate. Worth keeping in mind:

• It treats your standards as independent. Multiplying shares assumes one trait tells you nothing about another. In reality they’re linked — taller men earn a little more on average, and younger people are less likely to be married. When your standards tend to go together, the true figure is usually somewhat higher than the calculator’s.
• Some figures cover all ages. Income is modelled across all adults, so a search for 25-to-35-year-olds gets the all-ages income curve. Younger people earn less on average, so in that case the calculator is generous on income. The errors don’t all point the same way.
• Height and income are smooth curves, not raw tables. They’re accurate around the average and less precise at the extremes — very tall heights and very high incomes especially.
• A few figures are shared between the sexes. The published sources don’t split sexual orientation or race by sex, so the same shares apply to men and women. Gallup reports that women are more likely than men to identify as LGBTQ+, so this slightly understates that diversity among women and overstates it among men.
• It counts people, not availability. “Not married” isn’t the same as single, and nothing here knows who’s looking, who’s nearby or who’d be interested.

What happens to your answers

The calculation runs entirely in your browser — your answers aren’t sent anywhere to work out the result. We do record which filters get used, anonymously, to see what people are actually looking for. The privacy policy has the details.