Do Redditors lie about their age? I checked 2.3M who said it twice

People who state their age years apart age right on schedule, gender holds up when it's restated, and strangers in the same subreddit agree. Every check we run before publishing who's on Reddit, and where it falls short.

By KissMyPost Research·Published October 26, 2026·Data through September 2026·13 min read

Mostly, no. Of 2.3 million Reddit users who stated their age in two posts or comments one to eight years apart, the typical person's age went up by exactly the number of years that had passed, at every gap from one year to eight. 68% landed within a year of the truth; if the ages had been noise, 7% would have. People who stated their gender twice gave the same answer 96% of the time, against 50% by chance. That is why we treat self-reported age and gender on Reddit as data, with the limits listed below.

See when your subreddit is most active, what gets posts removed and what its readers talk about.

Every number about who uses Reddit, including ours, rests on what people say about themselves: "I'm 34", "(29F)", "as a dad of two". The fair objection is that nobody checks. People joke, round, troll and lie, and the people who say anything at all may be a small, odd slice. So before we publish a share of women or a median age for a subreddit, we test the statements against each other. This page is those tests, with the raw numbers, and the places where the data is weaker than we'd like.

The logic is simple. Noise has no memory. If ages and genders on Reddit were made up at random, the same person would contradict themselves as often as two strangers do, different groups of people would disagree about the same subreddit, and the stated ages wouldn't line up with what people talk about. Each check below compares what people actually said with what random pairs of people would produce.

Source: KissMyPost analysis of public Reddit posts and comments; known bots excluded.

We took everyone who stated their age in at least two posts or comments written a year or more apart: 2,300,680 people. If someone said they were 27 in March 2020 and 31 in May 2024, four years passed and their stated age went up by four. That is what happened for the typical person at every gap. The median change in stated age was exactly 1 year for people writing a year apart (985,538 of them) and exactly 8 years for people writing 8 years apart.

Source: KissMyPost analysis of public Reddit posts and comments; known bots excluded.

Pair each first statement with a random other person's second one and the tall bar disappears: only 3.5% land on schedule and 6.9% within a year, against 48.6% and 67.9% for real people. Birthdays alone push some honest people to -1 or +1: write two weeks before your birthday and again two weeks after it a year later, and your stated age goes up by two.

Age stated twice: the median change matches the years that passed at every gap

"Within a year" means the change in stated age is at most one year away from the exact time between the two posts. Download: CSV.

Not everyone is consistent. 7.5% of people are off by more than ten years: a 15-year-old who claims to be 40 for one post, someone quoting a friend, a typo, a joke. That is why no single statement decides anything. A person's age in our data comes from the middle of everything they've said about it, so one joke doesn't move them.

5,355,038 people stated their gender in at least two different posts or comments. 96.0% said the same thing both times. Two strangers drawn at random would agree 50.0% of the time. When the two statements were a year or more apart (1,315,579 people), it was still 93.7%, and some of the rest may be real changes rather than errors.

A stronger test is when the same person says it in two different ways. Someone who writes "as a woman" in a comment and also tags a post "[34F]" is using two habits that have nothing to do with each other. They agree 97.5% of the time across 2,042,727 people.

Source: KissMyPost analysis of public Reddit posts and comments; known bots excluded.

The weakest of these is the last one. "My husband" usually means the writer is a woman, but not always, and we count it only for people who never state their gender directly. More on that under where it's weaker.

The checks so far compare a person with themselves. This one compares different people. In each subreddit we split the people who stated their gender into two groups that share nobody: those who said it in a sentence ("I'm a woman", "I (34F)") and those who only tagged a post title ("[34F]"). If gender data were noise, the two groups would give unrelated answers. Across 886 subreddits with at least 200 people in each group, the two shares of women track each other with a correlation of 0.89, and the typical gap is 7.8 percentage points.

Source: KissMyPost analysis of public Reddit posts and comments; known bots excluded.

Some dots sit well off the line, and they tend to be places where the two groups are doing different things. In r/hingeapp, 15% of people who tag their post titles are women against 44% of people who state their gender in text: the people posting tagged threads there are a different crowd from the people commenting, not the same people described two ways.

Here is a check that uses nothing people said about their age at all. We took 4.0 million people with a known age who commented in September 2025 and looked for phrases that belong to a stage of life. People we know as 65 or older wrote "my grandkids" or "my granddaughter" 72 times as often as 18 to 24 year olds, and "since I retired" or "my pension" 83 times as often. "My mortgage" peaks in the middle years and is rare among the young.

13-17: 36 per 100,00018-24: 21 per 100,00025-34: 30 per 100,00035-44: 66 per 100,00045-54: 265 per 100,00055-64: 995 per 100,00065+: 1,507 per 100,00013-17: 16 per 100,00018-24: 13 per 100,00025-34: 27 per 100,00035-44: 80 per 100,00045-54: 175 per 100,00055-64: 642 per 100,00065+: 1,085 per 100,00013-17: 29 per 100,00018-24: 18 per 100,00025-34: 89 per 100,00035-44: 230 per 100,00045-54: 274 per 100,00055-64: 272 per 100,00065+: 166 per 100,000grandkidsretiredmortgage

Life-stage phrases in Reddit comments by the writer's self-reported age"My grandkids": 21 per 100,000 at 18-24, 1,507 at 65+. "Since I retired": 13 and 1,085. "My mortgage": 18 at 18-24, 230 at 35-44.2505007501,0001,2501,5001,75013-1725-3445-5465+13-17: 36 per 100,00018-24: 21 per 100,00025-34: 30 per 100,00035-44: 66 per 100,00045-54: 265 per 100,00055-64: 995 per 100,00065+: 1,507 per 100,00013-17: 16 per 100,00018-24: 13 per 100,00025-34: 27 per 100,00035-44: 80 per 100,00045-54: 175 per 100,00055-64: 642 per 100,00065+: 1,085 per 100,00013-17: 29 per 100,00018-24: 18 per 100,00025-34: 89 per 100,00035-44: 230 per 100,00045-54: 274 per 100,00055-64: 272 per 100,00065+: 166 per 100,000grandkidsretiredmortgage

Source: KissMyPost analysis of public Reddit posts and comments; known bots excluded.

Gender works the same way. Women in our data wrote about "my makeup", "my mascara" or "my eyeliner" 18 times as often as men; men wrote "my beard" 3.7 times as often as women. Phrases with no reason to lean either way, like "my mortgage", come out close to even, which is what you'd expect if the labels are right rather than skewed in general.

my makeup1791018Women 29, men 108 per 100,000my beard291083.7No reason to leanWomen 92, men 99 per 100,000my mortgage9299Women 63, men 75 per 100,000retired6375

Gendered and neutral phrases in Reddit comments by the writer's self-reported genderMy makeup: women 179, men 10 per 100,000. My beard: women 29, men 108. My mortgage: 92 and 99.WomenMenShould lean one waytimes as oftenWomen 179, men 10 per 100,000my makeup1791018Women 29, men 108 per 100,000my beard291083.7No reason to leanWomen 92, men 99 per 100,000my mortgage9299Women 63, men 75 per 100,000retired6375

Source: KissMyPost analysis of public Reddit posts and comments; known bots excluded.

Put the other way round: of the people with a known gender who wrote "my makeup" and the like, 91% were women; of those who wrote "my beard", 88% were men. None of these phrases are used to work out anyone's age or gender, so they are an outside check, not a circle.

Some communities announce who they're for. If the data were off, it would show here first. r/PCOS comes out 95% women and r/nba 9%. r/highschool has a median age of 18 and r/over60 61. Ages are at the time of writing.

Source: KissMyPost analysis of public Reddit posts and comments; known bots excluded.

Source: KissMyPost analysis of public Reddit posts and comments; known bots excluded.

One result looks wrong at first: r/GenZ has a median age of 29, older than most of Gen Z (born 1997 to 2012). It is a subreddit about a generation, and plenty of older people write there too.

In 2025, 75.0 million accounts that aren't known bots posted or commented on Reddit. 16.4 million of them (21.9%) have stated their age or gender at some point. By head count that is a minority. By activity it isn't: those accounts wrote 70.2% of all posts and comments that year. Among accounts that wrote at least ten times, 43% have a known age or gender.

Source: KissMyPost analysis of public Reddit posts and comments; known bots excluded.

That cuts both ways. If you want to know who is talking in a subreddit, people with a known age or gender cover most of the talking. If you want to know who reads it, they don't: the people who state their age or gender wrote a median of 24 posts and comments in 2025, everyone else 3. We describe the people who write, not lurkers.

Consistency is not accuracy: a person could be wrongly labelled the same way twice. So we also drew a sample of 600 people with a gender and 800 with an age (spread across every kind of statement, then weighted back to how common each kind is), pulled the posts their label came from, and had each label checked against the person's own words by two independent AI reviewers, with a third settling disagreements. 91.7% of gender labels were right (95% confidence interval 88.8% to 94.5%) and 91.1% of age labels (87.9% to 94.3%). The reviewers are not humans, and we say so.

Every age and gender figure in KissMyPost research, like how old Redditors are and where each age posts, and every age and gender breakdown in the product, comes from these same self-statements. This page is the evidence behind them. Subreddits where too few people state their age or gender get a "limited data" label or no number at all. If you cite our demographics, link here for the method.

We read public Reddit posts and comments for statements people make about themselves: their age ("I'm 34", "34F", "a 40-year-old dad") and gender ("as a woman", "[29M]", "my husband and I"). Statements about other people, quotes, game levels and product codes that look like ages are left out. Known bots are excluded throughout. A random pair means the same comparison made after shuffling: each person's first statement is paired with the second statement of a random other person with the same gap in time.

Charts and CSV files are free to use under CC BY 4.0 with a link to this page. If you spot a mistake, tell us and we'll fix it here with a dated note.

Some do, most don't. Among 2.3 million people who stated their age twice, one to eight years apart, the median change matched the time that passed exactly and 68% were within a year. 7.5% were off by more than ten years, which is where the jokes and trolls are.

People who state their gender twice agree with themselves 96% of the time, and 98% when one statement is in text and the other a "[34F]"-style title tag. A review of 600 randomly drawn people against their own posts found 91.7% of gender labels correct.

Noise would make people contradict themselves as often as strangers do. Instead the same person's gender matches 96