Evidence base
Gallup
Almost a Quarter of the World Feels Lonely
What it found
Gallup's 2023 survey of 142 countries found that 24% of people worldwide feel very or fairly lonely, with the highest rate among 19-29 year-olds (27%) and the lowest among adults 65 and older (17%). Nearly half of respondents (49%) reported not feeling lonely at all.
Why it matters for practice
This is a cross-national baseline, not a trend line: it establishes scale and the age gradient but says nothing about causes or change over time. Programme designers and funders should treat the youth-loneliness figure as a prompt to check local data before assuming it generalises to their population.