How to make friends in a new city: what research says works

You moved for the job, the course, the flat, or just a fresh start. The city is great. You’ve found a decent coffee place and you know which bus not to take. The problem is that everyone here already seems to have their people, and you’re not sure how to join them.

If that’s you, you’re in good company. In a 2023 survey across 142 countries, Meta and Gallup found that 24% of people, nearly 1 in 4, felt very or fairly lonely. Making friends as an adult really is harder than it was at school. Not because something is wrong with you, but because the conditions that made it easy have quietly disappeared. The good news is that you can rebuild them on purpose.

Why is it so hard to make friends in a new city?

In a widely shared 2012 New York Times article by Alex Williams, Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology and gerontology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, described three conditions that sociologists since the 1950s have considered crucial to close friendship:

• Proximity: you’re physically near each other.
• Repeated, unplanned interactions: you keep bumping into each other without having to arrange it.
• A setting that lets you open up: somewhere people let their guard down and confide in each other.

School and uni handed you all three. Same corridors, same faces, plenty of evenings with nothing to do but talk. A new city as an adult gives you almost none. You commute, you work, you go home. Your neighbours are a nod in the stairwell. Nobody runs into you twice by accident.

How many hours does it take to make a friend?

More than one good night out. Jeffrey Hall, a communication researcher at the University of Kansas, studied exactly the people this article is for: 355 adults who had moved somewhere new in the previous six months, plus 112 first-year students who had just arrived at university. In a paper published in 2018, he estimated that it takes roughly 50 hours together to go from acquaintance to casual friend, around 90 hours to become friends, and more than 200 hours to become close friends.

Two details matter. First, the kind of time counts: hanging out, joking around and doing things for fun mattered more than hours spent working side by side. Second, these are rough estimates built on people’s own reports, and the adults in his first study needed more hours than the students. Treat the numbers as a sense of scale, not a stopwatch.

Still, the maths is sobering. At one three-hour meet-up a month, you’d reach 50 hours in about a year and a half.

What actually helps: six things to try

1. Pick repetition over novelty

A different event every week feels productive, but you meet each face once. A weekly class, a five-a-side team, a choir, a running club or a regular volunteering shift brings back the “bump into each other again” part. Choose one thing and keep turning up for a couple of months. Somewhere around week three, you stop being the new person and start being the one who always comes.

2. Choose places where people actually talk

Adams’s third condition is a setting where you can let your guard down. A film club where you sit silently in the dark won’t give you much of that. A pottery class with chatty tables, a sports team that goes for food afterwards, or a volunteering shift with plenty of downtime will.

3. Be the one who suggests the second time

Plenty of promising first chats go nowhere simply because nobody suggests a next time. Be the person who says “same time next week?” or “I’m going to that market on Saturday, want to come?”. It can feel forward. But a specific plan is far easier to say yes to than a vague “we should hang out sometime”.

4. Go deeper sooner than feels normal

We tend to assume other people want to keep things light. Across 12 experiments with more than 1,800 participants, published in 2022, psychologists Michael Kardas, Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley found that people underestimated how interested their conversation partners would be in a deeper chat. Those conversations turned out less awkward and more connecting than people predicted. So swap “what do you do?” for something you actually want to know: “what made you move here?” or “what’s surprised you most about this city?”

5. Talk to people even when you’re not sure it’ll go well

In a 2014 study, Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder asked Chicago train and bus commuters either to talk to the person next to them, to keep to themselves, or to commute as normal. When a separate group imagined those options, they predicted chatting would be the least pleasant. In reality, the people who talked reported the most positive commute, and people underestimated how open others would be to a conversation.

The catch: these were one-off chats, not friendships. Think of it as evidence that the first move is usually less scary than your brain says, which is exactly the muscle a new city needs.

6. Count hours, not events

If Hall is even roughly right, friendship is mostly time. So spend it where it compounds. Fewer, longer, repeated conversations with the same few people will do more than a calendar full of first meetings. When someone feels promising, protect that time the way you’d protect a class you’ve already paid for.

What if you’re shy, or just tired?

Fair. Moving is exhausting, and nobody has endless energy for socialising after work. A few low-effort ways in:

• Become a regular. Same café, same gym class, same climbing wall, same time each week. Familiar faces are where repeated, unplanned contact starts.
• Bring a reason to talk. A dog, a board game, a question about the area. Having something to do takes the pressure off.
• Say yes once a week. The work lunch, the after-work drink, the neighbour’s barbecue. You can leave early.
• Reply in the group chat. For your club, your building, your course. Small, regular contact counts.
• Tell people you’re new. “I’ve just moved here, any tips?” gives them an easy, generous way in.

One way to put this into practice

If you’d like to try this with someone new, Everconnected matches you with people who share your values and interests, for one-to-one conversations by voice. It’s free to join: create an account at app.everconnected.com, or get the app from the App Store or Google Play.

Questions people ask

Sources

1. Williams, A. (2012). Friends of a certain age: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? The New York Times. (Quoting Rebecca G. Adams, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.) www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/fashion/the-challenge-of-making-f
2. Hall, J. A. (2019). How many hours does it take to make a friend? Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 36(4), 1278-1296. (Published online 2018.) doi.org/10.1177/0265407518761225
3. Kardas, M., Kumar, A., & Epley, N. (2022). Overly shallow?: Miscalibrated expectations create a barrier to deeper conversation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 122(3), 367-398. doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000281
4. Epley, N., & Schroeder, J. (2014). Mistakenly seeking solitude. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(5), 1980-1999. doi.org/10.1037/a0037323
5. Meta & Gallup (2023). The Global State of Social Connections. Gallup. www.gallup.com/analytics/509675/state-of-social-connections.