How common is swinging?

There is no trustworthy number for what percentage of married couples swing, and anyone quoting one — 2%, 4%, 15% — is either repeating a figure from one unrepresentative sample or inventing it. The research that exists measures consensual non-monogamy as a whole, by self-report, in particular populations; swinging is one strand inside that umbrella, alongside open relationships, polyamory and hotwife dynamics, and no large survey has cleanly separated them.

The strongest peer-reviewed anchor is a 2017 study in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy. It used two US Census-based quota samples of single American adults (3,905 and 4,813 people) and found that more than one in five reported engaging in consensual non-monogamy at some point in their lifetime — 21.9% in the first sample and 21.2% in the second. The proportion held steady across age, education, income, religion, region, political affiliation and race, and varied with gender and sexual orientation. Read the sample carefully: these were single adults, the question was lifetime experience, and the category is consensual non-monogamy, not swinging alone.

The closest published figure to the question people actually ask comes from YouGov, which polled 1,000 US adult citizens in February 2023. One in eight (12%) said they had engaged in sexual activity with someone other than their primary partner with that partner's permission. A further 20% said they had done so without permission — and that number is infidelity, not non-monogamy. Conflating the two is the single most common error in this subject: the defining feature of consensual non-monogamy is the agreement, not the number of partners. The same poll found 55% of Americans describing their ideal relationship as completely monogamous and 67% saying they would not be comfortable with a partner having sex with someone else.

Every figure here is probably an undercount, for two reasons. Self-report surveys on sexual behaviour are affected by stigma — some people decline to answer and some answer untruthfully — and definitions vary, since one person's 'swinging' is another's 'open relationship'. Nor would a precise number settle anything about your own life: how many people do something is not an argument for doing it, and being in a minority has never been a reason not to. The honest position is that this is a private behaviour that national statistics were never built to measure.

If you want a sense of what is actually happening near you, look at what is listed rather than at estimates: real clubs, real events and real venues in your area, bearing in mind that a directory measures supply, not population. JoinTheSwing publishes no member counts and avoids unsupported statistics for exactly this reason, and the club directory is a factual list of venues with a verify-with-the-venue note rather than a popularity claim.