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At this rate
Where the numbers come from
Jeffrey Hall, a communications researcher at the University of Kansas, tried to put a number on something everyone senses and nobody measures. Across two studies, one following 355 adults who had recently moved somewhere new and another tracking 112 first-year students over nine weeks, he estimated that it takes roughly 50 hours together to move from acquaintance to casual friend, about 90 hours to become friends, and upwards of 200 hours before someone counts as a best friend.
Hall, J. A., Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 2018. University of Kansas summary. The round 50, 90 and 200 above are the figures in that summary. The bands Hall states in the paper itself are wider: 40 to 60 hours to reach casual friend, 80 to 100 to become a friend, and 200 or more to become a good or best friend, tied to roughly the first three to six weeks after meeting. We use the midpoints so the arithmetic has a single number to work with. Hall also cautions that his own estimates are imprecise, and that only friendships which survived were available to study. For where those numbers came from and how a viral version of them gets it wrong, see the 11-3-6 rule.
The finding everyone skips
The headline numbers travel well and the important part gets left behind. The hours that moved friendships forward were leisure hours: hanging out, joking around, playing something, talking about nothing. Time spent merely sitting near someone at work or in a lecture did not do the same work.
Worth being exact, because it is easy to garble. Hall's thresholds count all the hours you spend together, not leisure hours alone. The activity finding is a separate result: the larger the share of your time together that was work or class, the less close the friendship tended to be. So 50 hours is 50 hours of each other's company, and what the leisure finding tells you is which of those hours are pulling their weight.
That single detail explains a situation most people have lived through. You can share an office with someone for two years, accumulate well over 200 hours in their company, and still not be able to text them on a Sunday. The clock was running the whole time. It was just running on the wrong kind of hour.
What we are guessing at, so you can discount it. Hall established that leisure hours count and that work hours largely do not. He did not publish a conversion rate between them, so the weightings behind the dropdown are our estimate rather than his finding.
The work setting is the weakest part of the model, and it is worth saying why. We first tried a gentler discount and the calculator then claimed that a full-time colleague becomes a best friend inside four months, which is the exact outcome the research says does not happen. Pure work proximity looks less like a slow rate and more like a ceiling: some pairs never cross it however many years they sit together. A single multiplier cannot express a ceiling, so we set the number low and are telling you the model is thin there. Treat the shape of the answer as useful and the exact date as decoration.
Why this got harder in adulthood
The hours have not changed. The supply has. School and university quietly handed you dozens of unplanned leisure hours a week with the same faces, which is why friendships formed then without anyone deciding to make them. Adult life gives you almost none of that by default. The same 200 hours that once accumulated over a single term can now take four years, or never arrive, because nothing in a working week puts the same people in a room repeatedly with nothing to do.
This is also why the advice to "put yourself out there" so often fails. A different crowd every week means your hours are divided across dozens of people rather than accumulating toward anyone. Forty people met once each is not the same as one person met forty times, even though the diary looks equally full.
The two levers you actually have
You cannot shorten the hours. You can change how fast they add up, and there are only really two ways to do it.
- See the same people. Repetition is what turns hours into a friendship rather than into a series of pleasant afternoons.
- Make the time leisure. An hour of doing nothing much together is worth more than an hour of logistics, and the calculator above is mostly just that fact with arithmetic attached.
Why we built Circles this way
NexSpark Friends puts you in a Circle of four to six compatible people in Atlanta who meet again, and then again. Not a different room of strangers each month. The whole design is aimed at the one variable above that you can move, which is how quickly the same people accumulate hours with each other. It is free while we are building out Atlanta.
Find your CircleFrequently asked questions
How many hours does it take to make a friend?
Roughly 50 hours together to move from acquaintance to casual friend, about 90 to become friends, and more than 200 before someone becomes a best friend. Those are averages from two studies, not a rule that holds for any specific pair of people.
Does time spent at work count?
Much less than you would hope. The hours that moved friendships forward in Hall's research were leisure hours rather than time logged beside someone at work or in class. It is the main reason you can sit near a colleague for a year and stay acquaintances.
Why does making friends as an adult take so long?
The hours are unchanged. The supply is not. School gave you unplanned leisure hours with the same people every week and adult life gives you almost none, so the same total can take years instead of a term.
Is anything I enter here saved or sent anywhere?
No. The calculation runs in your browser. There is no account, no email, and nothing is transmitted to us. You can open your network tab and check while you use it.
Can you speed the hours up?
You cannot shrink them, but you can accumulate them faster: see the same people rather than new ones, so the hours all count toward one friendship, and make the time leisure rather than errands.
Keep reading
The state of friendship, by the numbers sets out what has actually happened to adult friendship, with sources. How to make friends as an adult is the practical version. And the Friendship Audit looks at the friendships you already have rather than the ones you are building.