The American Time Use Survey: What It Reveals About How We Live
Every year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics asks thousands of Americans a simple question: how did you spend your day? The result is one of the most detailed portraits of daily life ever assembled.
The American Time Use Survey (ATUS) has been running since 2003, and the data it produces is quietly extraordinary. It tracks not just what we do, but who we do it with—minute by minute, activity by activity.
What the Survey Actually Measures
The American Time Use Survey uses a diary method. Randomly selected participants walk through their previous day, reporting:
- What they were doing (working, eating, sleeping, socializing)
- How long each activity took
- Who they were with (alone, spouse, children, friends, coworkers)
- Where they were (home, work, transit, elsewhere)
This granularity is what makes ATUS invaluable for understanding patterns that other surveys miss entirely.
The Big Picture: How Americans Spend Their Time
On an average day, Americans spend:
- 8.8 hours sleeping
- 5.4 hours in leisure activities
- 3.6 hours working (averaged across all adults, including non-workers)
- 1.2 hours eating and drinking
- 1.1 hours on household activities
- 0.5 hours caring for household members
But the averages hide the real story. The American Time Use Survey shines when you slice the data by age, gender, employment status, and—most revealingly—by who people spend time with.
Who We Spend Time With (And How It Changes)
This is where the data gets interesting. The American Time Use Survey tracks “who else was present” for each activity, which reveals the arc of social connection across a lifetime:
- Teenagers spend the most time with friends—more than any other age group
- 20-somethings see friend time plummet as work takes over
- 30-40 year olds spend the most time with children
- Retirees spend dramatically more time alone than any working-age adult
The pattern is consistent year after year: as we age, the composition of our social time shifts from friends to coworkers to family to solitude.
Visualizing Time Use Data
We used the American Time Use Survey to create a visualization of how social connection changes across a lifetime. The result shows something the raw numbers can’t quite convey—the shape of a life measured in who we spend it with:
Why This Data Matters
The American Time Use Survey isn’t just academic. It informs policy on everything from childcare to retirement planning to workplace flexibility. When we understand how people actually spend their time—not how they think they do, or how they wish they did—we can design systems that match reality.
For researchers studying loneliness, social isolation, or work-life balance, ATUS is often the first stop. It’s the closest thing we have to a time-lapse of American daily life.
Explore the Data Yourself
The American Time Use Survey data is publicly available through the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If you want to dig into the numbers yourself:
Data source: American Time Use Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics. Visualization by Significant Figures.