How Long Does It Take to Make a Friend? The 50-Hour Rule, Explained Properly

Somebody at work mentions it, or you see it in a reel: "It takes 50 hours to make a friend." It sounds like the kind of fact that gets invented for a slide. It isn't. It comes from a real study, run by a real researcher, and the full version is more useful than the number that escaped into the wild.

Here is the study, what it actually found, and the part most people leave out.

Where the 50-hour rule comes from

In 2018, Jeffrey Hall, a communication studies professor at the University of Kansas, published a paper in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships asking a question nobody had put a number on: how many hours does it take for two people to become friends?

He ran two studies. In the first, he surveyed 355 adults who had moved to a new city in the previous six months and asked them about someone they'd met since arriving: how many hours they'd spent together, what they'd done, and how they'd describe the relationship now. In the second, he followed 112 first-year university students over their first nine weeks, asking about two new people they'd met, at three points in the term.

The figures that came out were these:

• Around 50 hours of time together to move from acquaintance to casual friend.
• Around 90 hours to become what people called simply a friend.
• More than 200 hours to become close friends.

So the headline number is right, sort of. Fifty hours gets you to casual friend, the person you'd happily grab lunch with. The friend you'd call in a crisis is a 200-hour project.

The finding everyone skips

Here is the part the reels leave out, and it's the most practical thing in the paper. Not all hours count the same.

Hall found that hours spent together at work or in class did far less to build friendship than hours spent hanging out, joking around, or catching up. Time together was necessary but not sufficient. What moved people up the friendship ladder was time spent in ways that let them talk about things unrelated to the task in front of them.

This explains something almost everyone has experienced. You've spent 400 hours next to a colleague and you are not friends. You spent one weekend on a trip with someone and you are. The colleague hours were task hours. The trip hours were the other kind.

It also explains why the same person can be your acquaintance for three years and your friend three weeks after you both leave the job. The hours finally started counting.

What we see: the hours that convert

We run a friendship platform, so we get to watch this play out in a compressed form. Two strangers match, talk, and either become friends or don't. What we notice lines up with Hall almost exactly.

Total chat time is a weak predictor of whether two people are still in touch a month later. What predicts it is the kind of time. Conversations that stay on "so what do you do" and "where are you from" can go on for hours without producing anything. Conversations where the two people end up doing something together, a game, a shared question, a voice call, an actual plan, convert at a rate that has nothing to do with how long the initial chat was.

If we translated it into Hall's terms: the interview hours don't count. The hanging-out hours do. And people who understand that get to 50 real hours much faster than people who don't.

How to get to 50 hours faster

If 50 hours sounds like a lot, it's because you're picturing 50 one-hour coffees, which nobody has time for. The people who make friends quickly as adults are not spending more time. They're spending it in a shape that counts. Four ways to do that.

1. Pick something recurring, not something one-off. A weekly activity with the same people accrues two or three hours a week automatically. That's 50 hours in four or five months without ever arranging a coffee. Our post on hobbies that actually help you make friends is built entirely around this principle.

2. Convert task hours into hanging-out hours. The colleague you like: the 400 task hours you've shared are worth almost nothing on their own, but they've done one useful thing, which is make the first non-work hour feel safe. Lunch off-site. A walk after work. One hour of the other kind is worth a month of the first kind. How to turn acquaintances into real friends walks through the exact transition.

3. Stack hours into blocks. Hall's students made friends fast because university stacks time: a whole evening, a whole weekend. A single Saturday spent doing something together can be six of the good hours. One trip can be twenty. If you're time-poor, one block beats ten scattered coffees, and we wrote about that trade-off in how to make friends when you have no time.

4. Change the conversation before you change the venue. You don't have to leave the office or the class to start earning the right kind of hour. Ask about something unrelated to the task. Talk about the thing you'd talk about if you weren't here. Hall's finding is about what the time contains, not where it happens.

What the rule doesn't mean

A few cautions, because a number this clean gets misused.

It's an average, not a threshold. Nobody becomes your friend at hour 50 and not at hour 49. Some pairs click in ten hours; some never do. The number describes the typical path, not a rule you can game.

It's from two American samples. Movers and first-years, both in the US. The shape of the finding, that hours matter and their kind matters more, almost certainly holds elsewhere. The exact counts might not.

Hours are correlational. People who like each other spend more time together, so some of the "hours cause friendship" story runs the other way. Hall's design with the first-years, tracked over time, helps, but this is a survey study, not an experiment.

Close friends are a long project and that's fine. If 200 hours sounds discouraging, remember that a good weekly activity plus the occasional weekend gets you there in about a year. That is not slow. That is how long it has always taken. It just used to happen without you noticing, because school and university did the scheduling for you.

The one-line version

If you only remember one thing: the count matters, but the kind of hour matters more. Fifty hours of hanging out makes a friend. Five hundred hours of sitting nearby makes a colleague. Pick a recurring thing, change the conversation, and the hours start counting.

People also ask

How many hours does it take to make a friend? A 2018 University of Kansas study estimated around 50 hours together to become casual friends, about 90 to become friends, and over 200 to become close friends. The figures come from surveys of adults who had recently moved and of first-year students.

Does time at work count towards making friends? Much less than other time. The same study found hours spent at work or in class did far less to build friendship than hours spent hanging out, joking, or catching up. The kind of hour matters as much as the number.

How long does it take to make a close friend as an adult? Around 200 hours of the right kind of shared time. With a weekly recurring activity and an occasional longer block like a day trip, most people reach that in roughly a year.

How can I make friends faster? Choose recurring activities so hours accrue automatically, convert task-based time with people you like into off-task time, stack hours into whole afternoons or weekends, and shift conversations away from the task at hand even when you can't change the venue.

Is the 50-hour rule real? Yes. It comes from Jeffrey Hall's 2018 paper in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. It's an average from two American samples rather than a fixed threshold, but the pattern that both quantity and quality of time matter is well supported.