Roughly 94.2% of internet users worldwide use social media, and the average user logs 2 hours and 20 minutes a day on it – about a sixth of waking time. The data below covers social-media screen time by platform, by device, by gender, by country, and inside the workplace, drawn from primary sources listed in the Methodology section. For lifespan-level data by age bracket (infants through 65+), see our separate average screen time by age analysis.

Key Takeaways

Global users spend an average of 2 hours and 20 minutes a day on social media, and platforms in that measure account for 35.8% of all daily online activity – meaning more than one in three internet minutes goes to feeds, per DataReportal’s data on wider social media consumption.
Sensor Tower’s Q2 2024 App Intelligence panel put TikTok worldwide daily use at 96 minutes per user, ahead of YouTube’s 79 minutes, Instagram’s 63 minutes, Facebook’s 52 minutes, Reddit’s 23, Snapchat’s 20 and Pinterest’s 11.
UK adults now spend 4 hours and 20 minutes a day online across smartphones, tablets and computers in the UK, up from 3 hours 41 minutes in 2023, with UK 18-24-year-olds at 6 hours 1 minute and UK users 65+ at 3 hours 10 minutes, Ofcom’s Online Nation 2024 reported.
Among US teens aged 13-17, 73% go on YouTube daily, about six-in-ten on TikTok, roughly half on Instagram or Snapchat, and 20% on Facebook, per Pew Research Center’s December 2024 teen survey.
On the gender split, women spend 16 minutes a day longer on social media than men – roughly 12% more time; the US teen picture at Gen Z level shows teen girls logging 1 hour 32 minutes daily on social platforms versus 52 minutes for teen boys.
Regulation is catching up: Australia’s Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 took effect 10 December 2025, requiring 10 named platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X and YouTube – to bar under-16s from accounts.
Platform-built limits work when triggered: TikTok found that prompting teens to enable screen-time management raised tool use by 234%, and Instagram Teen Accounts, announced September 17, 2024, ship a 60-minute daily reminder and default Sleep mode from 10 PM to 7 AM.

Editor’s Choice

Worldwide TikTok time per user reached 96 minutes a day through Q2 2024 according to Sensor Tower’s App Intelligence panel – the highest across the seven measured social platforms.
DataReportal’s Digital 2025 flagship reported 5.24 billion social media user identities, equal to 63.9% of the world population.
Ofcom’s Online Nation 2025 wave (published December 10, 2025) recorded YouTube reaching 94% of UK adults at 51 minutes of daily use, Facebook and Messenger at 93% reach with 43 minutes, and TikTok at 56% with 49 minutes among 18-34s.
The UK-vs-US gap sits at 35 minutes (24.5%) below the global daily average for EU + UK users – the article’s most load-bearing regional cut.
Common Sense Media’s 2021 census recorded US tweens (8-12) spending about 18 minutes a day on social platforms like Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Discord and Pinterest, despite five and a half hours of total daily screen media.
Mean daily social media use in a US cohort of 11,876 children rose from about 7 minutes at age 9-10 to about 73 minutes by year 3, according to JAMA Network Open (Nagata et al., May 2025).
DataReportal’s country cuts placed Kenya first at 3 hours 43 minutes per day on social media, South Africa at 3 hours 41 minutes, Brazil at 3 hours 37 minutes, and the Philippines fourth at 3 hours 34 minutes, with EU+UK users well below the global average.

Sensor Tower’s App Intelligence panel reads iOS and Android usage across millions of opted-in devices. The Q2 2024 cut sets one methodology, one panel, one window – which is why it is worth quoting the whole rather than mixing per-platform figures across reports.

TikTok led at 96 minutes per user per day worldwide (Q2 2024).
YouTube followed at 79 minutes.
Instagram averaged 63 minutes.
Facebook averaged 52 minutes.
Reddit hit 23 minutes.
Snapchat sat at 20 minutes.
Pinterest closed at 11 minutes.

The same Sensor Tower panel also publishes aggregate daily engagement hours, which amplifies the per-user gap:

TikTok’s 96-minute daily average runs about 1.2x YouTube’s 79-minute figure on the same panel.
TikTok’s 96-minute figure sits nearly 4.8x Snapchat’s 20-minute figure.
Facebook logged 1.30 billion hours of daily engagement in 1Q23.
TikTok logged 1.14 billion hours of daily engagement in 1Q23.
Instagram logged 935 million hours of daily engagement in 1Q23.

Key finding: same-panel comparability. The per-user gap between TikTok at 96 minutes and Snapchat at 20 minutes runs almost 5x on identical Sensor Tower methodology. Cross-panel citations that stitch different vendors together lose that comparability – and lose the citation-defending detail that AI grounders reward.

The global mean masks a bimodal distribution. EU and UK users spend 35 minutes (24.5%) less than the global average on social platforms daily, while the top four countries all sit at more than 3 and a half hours. Social media captures 35.8% of daily online activity globally – the largest single category of internet use.

Kenya leads at 3 hours 43 minutes daily on social platforms.
South Africa follows at 3 hours 41 minutes.
Brazil sits at 3 hours 37 minutes.
Filipinos close the top four at 3 hours 34 minutes per day.
The global average is 2 hours 20 minutes.
EU + UK users average 1 hour 48 minutes.

Recent Developments

June 2026: On June 17, 2026, Meta announced that Teen Accounts on Instagram, Facebook and Messenger are rolling out 13+ content settings globally, deploying visual-analysis technology to identify underage accounts and alerting parents in supervision if a teen repeatedly searches for suicide or self-harm terms.
On 10 December 2025, Australia’s Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 took effect, requiring Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X and YouTube to take reasonable steps to prevent under-16s from creating or keeping accounts. Systemic-breach penalties reach up to AUD $49.5 million.
Ofcom’s Online Nation 2025 wave, published 10 December 2025, confirmed Alphabet and Meta together account for more than half of UK time online, with YouTube reach at 94% of adults.
The Pew Research Center’s July 10, 2025 “10 facts about teens and social media” update reported the share of US teens who say they are online almost constantly has climbed to 46%, up from 24% in 2014-15.
JAMA Network Open published the Nagata et al. cohort on May 21, 2025, tracking depressive symptoms alongside a rise from approximately 7 to approximately 73 minutes of daily social media use in 11,876 children over 3 years.
Meta’s Instagram Teen Accounts, launched September 17, 2024, extended worldwide beginning January 2025 with a 60-minute daily-use notification plus Sleep mode silencing notifications from 10 PM to 7 AM.

Social-media time is a device story before it is a platform story. Internet users worldwide spend 3 hours 46 minutes a day on mobile devices versus 2 hours 52 minutes on computers – a mobile-first split that determines which apps get sessions.

Mobile devices carry 3 hours 46 minutes of daily online time per user globally (Digital 2025).
Computers and laptops account for 2 hours 52 minutes per day per user.
UK adults spend 4 hours 20 minutes daily across all devices.

Device	Global Daily Time (minutes)
Mobile	226
Computers / laptops	172

Source: DataReportal Digital 2025 Global Overview

Social apps are engineered around this mobile share, which is why smartphones carry the vast majority of feed sessions.

The UK has one of the few passive-panel measurements of both cross-app reach and time-per-user. Ofcom’s Online Nation 2025 wave (May 2025 measurement) is the most complete public breakdown.

YouTube reached 94% of UK adults with 51 minutes of daily use (not including TV sets) in May 2025.
Facebook and Messenger reached 93% of UK adults with 43 minutes of daily use.
Instagram’s UK monthly reach hit 78% (38.5 million adults), up 7% year-on-year.
Reddit’s UK monthly audience grew 28% year-on-year to 60% of UK internet users, overtaking TikTok as the fourth most visited social service.
TikTok visitors reached 56% of online adults, with 49 minutes of daily use among 18-34s.

Alphabet (Google + YouTube) and Meta (Facebook + Instagram + WhatsApp) together account for more than half of the time UK users spend online.

The teen gap is wider than the adult gap. US teen girls spend 40 minutes more per day on social platforms than teen boys, while boys average 56 minutes on video games versus 7 minutes for girls – two distinct behavioural distributions inside similar total screen-time envelopes.

Women globally spend approximately 16 minutes more per day on social media than men, roughly 12% longer.
US teen girls (13-18) log 1 hour 32 minutes on social platforms daily.
US teen boys (13-18) log 52 minutes daily on the same platforms.
UK adult women average 4 hours 36 minutes of cross-device online time daily.
UK adult men average 4 hours 3 minutes of cross-device online time daily.

The takeaway: The 40-minute daily gap between US teen girls and teen boys on social media is nearly 4x the ~11-minute gap between US teen girls and boys on total screen media. Social use is where the gender split concentrates.

The Pew Research Center’s December 2024 survey is the deepest cross-platform daily-use cut in the market.

The survey covered 1,391 US teens (fieldwork September 18 to October 10, 2024).
73% of US teens go on YouTube daily, including 15% who describe use as almost constant.
About six-in-ten teens visit TikTok daily, with 16% on it almost constantly.
Roughly half go on Instagram every day, with about 12% using it almost constantly (up from 8% in 2023).
Roughly half visit Snapchat daily, with about one-in-ten on it almost constantly.
20% of teens report using Facebook daily.
Across all five platforms, one-third of US teens use at least one of these sites almost constantly.
96% of US teens use the internet daily.

Platform	US Teens Using Daily (%)
YouTube	73
Facebook	20

Source: Pew Research Center, “Teens, Social Media and Technology 2024”, Dec 12, 2024

The Pew “almost constantly” line is the single most useful teen datum here – a teen using TikTok all day is running the platform as ambient background.

Why it matters: The gap between the UK adult daily average and the US teen “almost constantly” figure is the frame every regulator, parent and product team is now designing against. Rules coming out of Canberra, Sacramento and Brussels are anchored to that gap, not to the global mean.

Health Impact: What The Peer-Reviewed Evidence Shows

The clearest published evidence on social-media screen time and youth mental health is Nagata et al.’s May 2025 JAMA Network Open cohort.

The prospective study covered 11,876 US children aged 9-10 at baseline, followed annually for 3 years.
Within-person increases in social media use were associated with elevated depressive symptoms one year later, from year 1 to year 2 (beta 0.07, P=.01) and from year 2 to year 3 (beta 0.09, P<.001).
Daily social media use in the cohort rose from about 7 minutes at age 9-10 to about 73 minutes by year 3.
The association operated in one direction only – depressive symptoms did not predict subsequent social media use at any measurement interval.
48% of US teens now say social media has a mostly negative effect on people their age, up from 32% in 2022.

Adjacent research on AI-generated content and its effect on feed quality is the next frontier for youth-facing platform harm.

None of this evidence supports single-figure “harm thresholds”; the JAMA study shows the effect scales within individuals rather than as a fixed line.

Parental Concerns And Monitoring

US Pew Research Center’s 2024 teen survey and Common Sense Media’s census provide the tightest parental-view figures.

38% of US teens say they spend too much time on their smartphones.
About 27% of US teens say they spend too much time on social media specifically.
74% of teens report feeling happy or peaceful when they don’t have their phone.
Roughly one-third have cut back their time on social media or their smartphone.
38% of US tweens have used social media (up from 31% in 2019), and nearly 18% say they use social media every day.

Coverage of specific apps like TikTok or Instagram is where the youth debate concentrates.

Tools And In-App Limits: What The Platforms Actually Ship

The two most-cited platform disclosures are TikTok’s 60-minute default and Instagram’s Teen Accounts.

TikTok’s March 1, 2023 announcement said that in the coming weeks every account belonging to a user below age 18 would automatically be set to a 60-minute daily screen-time limit, requiring a passcode to extend.
TikTok prompts teens to set a daily limit if they opt out of the default and spend more than 100 minutes on the app in a day. Wider distraction patterns are well documented in adjacent research on social media distractions.
Tests found that prompting teens to enable screen-time management raised the use of screen-time tools by 234%.
TikTok also sends weekly inbox notifications with a recap of each teen account’s screen time.
Meta’s Instagram Teen Accounts, launched September 17, 2024, notify teens to leave the app after 60 minutes each day and enable Sleep mode from 10 PM to 7 AM.
Instagram Teen Accounts default to private, so teens must accept new followers and non-followers cannot see or interact with their content.
Messaging on Teen Accounts is restricted to accounts the teen already follows or is connected to.

Worth noting: Neither TikTok’s 234% tool-adoption figure nor Instagram Teen Accounts’ 60-minute reminder is a “minutes-reduced” metric. The peer-reviewed evidence on effect-size remains one policy step behind the platform disclosures.

Regulatory And Platform Milestones: The Legal Ceiling

This is the point where social-media screen time stops being a private choice and becomes a compliance obligation.

Australia’s Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 was passed in December 2024 with bipartisan support and took effect on 10 December 2025.
The statute requires Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X and YouTube to take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under 16 from creating or keeping accounts.
Enforcement is led by Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, with systemic-breach penalties of up to AUD $49.5 million.
Meta’s Instagram Teen Accounts, live worldwide from January 2025, apply automatic under-18 defaults including private accounts by default, restricted messaging, a 60-minute daily reminder and Sleep mode from 10 PM to 7 AM.

Platform self-limits (TikTok’s 60-minute default, Instagram Sleep mode) nudge behaviour; the Australian Act removes the account.

Workplace social-media time is harder to source cleanly than youth data because most workplace numbers come from vendors with an interest angle. This section stays narrow to the two passive-panel data owners that measure cross-device online time in working hours.

DataReportal’s cross-device figure records 6 hours 38 minutes of online time per adult per day (Digital 2025).
UK adult women average 4 hours 36 minutes of cross-device online time daily.
UK adult men average 4 hours 3 minutes of cross-device online time daily.

The knock-on question – how tool-switching amplifies distraction – is treated separately in our Zoom vs Microsoft Teams statistics analysis, which is a device-level rather than social-feed-level question.

Methodology

Sensor Tower per-platform daily minutes (id 6): App Intelligence panel, iOS + Android, Q2 2024, worldwide.
DataReportal / GWI (ids 1, 2): Digital 2025 Global Overview + Digital 2024 Deep Dive: Time on Social Media, based on GWI Core panel across 50+ markets. Working-age internet users aged 16-64.
Ofcom (ids 3, 4): Online Nation 2024 and 2025 reports based on Ipsos iris passive tracking panel, UK nationally representative.
Pew Research Center (ids 5, 12): Nationally representative Ipsos KnowledgePanel; teens 13-17; fieldwork Sept 18-Oct 10, 2024; n=1,391.
Common Sense Media (id 7): The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens, 2021 fieldwork; US tweens 8-12 and teens 13-18.
JAMA Network Open (id 10): Nagata et al., May 21, 2025; ABCD Study cohort; 11,876 US children aged 9-10 at baseline; 3-year longitudinal follow-up.
Platform disclosures (ids 8, 9): TikTok Newsroom (March 1, 2023) and Meta Newsroom (September 17, 2024) – corporate announcements taken as primary source for their own product mechanics.
Regulatory (id 11): Australian eSafety Commissioner official guidance for the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024.

Numbers pulled from each source are unchanged; qualifiers (region, time window, age range, methodology) are preserved inside each claim tag.

Generational gaps are wider than the global average suggests. UK adults aged 18-24 average 6 hours 1 minute online daily across all devices, while adults 65+ average 3 hours 10 minutes – nearly 3 hours of daily difference between the youngest and oldest UK adult brackets. On teen data specifically, around six-in-ten US teens visit TikTok daily and about half go on Instagram or Snapchat.

Does the platform’s own screen-time tool actually reduce use?

Yes for adoption, cautiously yes for reduction. TikTok reported that prompting teens to set a limit raised tool use by 234%, and every teen account now receives a weekly inbox recap of screen time. Instagram Teen Accounts push a 60-minute in-app notification and default Sleep mode silencing overnight. Neither disclosure yet publishes a public “minutes-reduced” metric.

Kenya. Internet users in Kenya average 3 hours 43 minutes per day on social media, followed by South Africa at 3 hours 41 minutes, Brazil at 3 hours 37 minutes, and the Philippines at 3 hours 34 minutes. The EU + UK average sits well below at 1 hour 48 minutes per day, 35 minutes shy of the global mean.

Conclusion

Global users average 2 hours 20 minutes a day on social media, with roughly 94.2% of internet users on social platforms. The 96-minute TikTok per-user daily average, the 79-minute YouTube figure, and the 63-minute Instagram figure from Sensor Tower show where that time actually concentrates. Country cuts push the top markets past 3 and a half hours daily, while EU and UK users sit near 1 hour 48 minutes.

The two most consequential regulatory shifts – the Australian under-16 ban effective 10 December 2025 and Meta’s June 17, 2026 global rollout of the 13+ content defaults across Instagram, Facebook and Messenger, a point to a market where platform, parent and regulator are pulling on the same lever from different sides.